SEM for Travel Brands

Hel­lo, Trav­el Peak! It’s one of the two most won­der­ful times of the year when those of us in the trav­el indus­try are up to our eye­balls in cam­paign roll-outs, bud­get man­age­ment, ROI max­imi­sa­tion, and prob­a­bly wish­ing we were on hol­i­day, ourselves.

For years, Adobe Media Opti­miz­er has been empow­er­ing some of the biggest trav­el brands to dra­mat­i­cal­ly improve their Search Engine Mar­ket­ing. In the UK, First Choice – part of the TUI group – was able to realise a com­plete account restruc­ture in the sev­en weeks run­ning up to peak sea­son, which enabled them to achieve sig­nif­i­cant uplift quick­ly. Year on year, they increased their num­ber of pas­sen­gers (PAX) by 77% with only a 35% increase in spend. On the Con­ti­nent, GO Voy­ages reduced the time SEM teams spent on opti­mi­sa­tion efforts, increas­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty by 30%. And Monarch Air­lines have been able to shift their SEM efforts to be more strate­gic and less tactical.

So if you’re strug­gling to keep your head above the trop­i­cal PPC waters or are ready to upgrade to first-class when it comes to what you and your team can deliv­er to the busi­ness, here are a few of the ways Adobe Media Opti­miz­er has helped these, and many oth­er brands, achieve five star results.

1. Man­age & Opti­mise Mul­ti­ple Accounts & Mul­ti­ple Search Engines in the Same Place

Most busi­ness­es in the trav­el ver­ti­cal are in a con­stant bat­tle of scale – many accounts across mul­ti­ple search engines, usu­al­ly cov­er­ing a vari­ety of prod­ucts across a range of coun­tries. If only there was an easy way to apply the changes you need across not only your fleet of Google accounts, but also across your activ­i­ty in oth­er search engines. And if only there were some way to man­age the struc­ture – key­words, copy, and the lot – with­out cre­at­ing a mas­sive Bermu­da Tri­an­gle in your SEM accounts.

But wait – there is.

In Adobe Media Opti­miz­er, we know it’s always bet­ter to trav­el togeth­er. That’s why we have all your accounts across the search engines you use liv­ing in one place. You can drill down through them togeth­er. You can export into a bulk­sheet in Excel togeth­er, make changes, and upload again to sched­ule or post imme­di­ate­ly togeth­er. You can even com­bine Google, Yahoo, and Bing in the same port­fo­lios to get algo­rith­mic bid­ding effi­cien­cies, giv­en the very sim­i­lar struc­ture of those three search engines. This means less time, less stress, more cross-account con­sis­ten­cy, and more search engine par­i­ty. Which ulti­mate­ly leads to a bet­ter ROI out of your spend and your team.

2. Build, Scale, & Main­tain Gran­u­lar Accounts with Full Cov­er­age at All Times

Once you’ve got every­thing in one place, the next hur­dle is ensur­ing full cov­er­age is built out and main­tained across your accounts. That’s just to make sure busi­ness as usu­al is han­dled. When we talk about win­ning in a high­ly com­pet­i­tive indus­try, you’ve got to be imple­ment­ing best prac­tices at scale – gran­u­lar account struc­tures, core key­words, and ad copy that lever­ages dynam­ic com­po­nents like stock lev­els and price points. The chal­lenge isn’t know­ing this is what needs to be done – these best prac­tices are noth­ing new in the PPC world. Rather, it’s hav­ing the tools to exe­cute it accu­rate­ly, to scale, and auto­mat­i­cal­ly, so your team can spend their time on devel­op­ing and action­ing strat­e­gy, rather than bang­ing their heads against their desks wish­ing they were on holiday.

Lever­ag­ing Advanced Cam­paign Man­age­ment with­in AMO, you can achieve just that. Con­nect your prod­uct feeds through an ftp to a cus­tomis­able tem­plate, which can pop­u­late your account struc­ture, core key­words, and up to five pieces of ad copy. This includes dynam­ic com­po­nents like prices and avail­abil­i­ty, which can update as the feed does. It will also auto­mat­i­cal­ly cre­ate new account com­po­nents when a new line enters the feed. And although the entire process is able to be ful­ly auto­mat­ed, you can also choose to have a bit more con­trol and approve the out­put before push­ing it live. This means you can get as gran­u­lar as you want in no time – literally.

3. Auto­mat­i­cal­ly Pause/Restart Activ­i­ty Based on Availability

Whether it’s hotel rooms, seats on a plane, or places on a cruise, avail­abil­i­ty is always in flux. When you’re deal­ing with sig­nif­i­cant scale and vol­ume, man­u­al­ly turn­ing activ­i­ty on and off is just not pos­si­ble. Espe­cial­ly when you’ve got tar­gets to hit and bud­gets to man­age dur­ing peak season.

Adobe Media Opti­miz­er helps you cut the wastage on your ad spend, as well as your team’s hours, giv­ing you mul­ti­ple options to deal with stock. In the set­tings for the Advanced Cam­paign Man­age­ment tem­plates dis­cussed above, you can spec­i­fy a numer­i­cal thresh­old to pause activ­i­ty, as well as react to miss­ing line items in your feed. Activ­i­ty will go live again when the stock thresh­old is super­seded or when the line item comes back in the feed. And it’s all designed to make sure you’re not adver­tis­ing what you can’t sell – automatically.

4. Flight Bud­get by Day of Week to Max­imise Val­ue of Con­sid­er­a­tion Cycle

Aside from busi­ness­es tar­get­ing last-minute trav­ellers, the con­sid­er­a­tion cycle is trav­el tends to show trends over the course of the week. This can make mod­er­at­ing ROI across the week and max­imis­ing your pipeline challenging.

That’s why Adobe Media Opti­miz­er gives you the option to flight your port­fo­lio bud­gets by day of week, instead of set­ting a stan­dard dai­ly bud­get. We’ve also released extra func­tion­al­i­ty in how the cost mod­el is built for each key­word when you’re run­ning with a day of week strat­e­gy to give you the con­trol to do a bit of fine-tun­ing on how the bid opti­mi­sa­tion algo­rithm goes to work for your busi­ness and assess­es per­for­mance to set the next day’s bids. This means greater con­trol over bud­gets, ROI, and pipeline maximisation.

5. Con­trol How Reac­tive You Need the Bid­ding Algo­rithm to Be to Win On & Off Peak

Automa­tion – no mat­ter how scal­able and effi­cient it may be – also needs to be able to be flex­i­ble enough to serve your unique busi­ness needs. And let’s face it, trav­el busi­ness­es usu­al­ly have a much longer con­sid­er­a­tion phase than clas­sic retail. You know that con­ver­sion is like­ly to come in a few weeks after that click. Con­verse­ly, dur­ing peak, that time peri­od between research and pur­chase can be marked­ly shorter.

As a leader in adtech for the trav­el indus­try, Adobe Media Opti­miz­er pro­vides the con­trol to tog­gle how reac­tive the bid mod­els need to be in gaug­ing per­for­mance and opti­mis­ing bids. This means you can have a slow­er lev­el dur­ing busi­ness as usu­al peri­ods and a much more reac­tive mod­el dur­ing peak when peo­ple are buy­ing faster and you need to react quick­er to fluc­tu­a­tions in mar­ket demand to max­imise returns.

These tools, in con­junc­tion with the oth­er capa­bil­i­ties of Adobe Media Opti­miz­er, put your team in the pilot’s seat to dri­ve real busi­ness results that not only hit your peak sea­son tar­gets, but also help you exe­cute strate­gi­cal­ly and efficiently.

So grab your pass­port, because you’re about to take your SEM per­for­mance to its dream des­ti­na­tion! Hap­py travels!