As the Head of Performance Marketing at Travelstart, I spearheaded a successful experiment project that demonstrated the significance of a test and learn approach, and the importance of experimenting in digital marketing. The case study was published globally on Think With Google and other local publishers like Business Live due to its tremendous results and approach.
Our mission at Travelstart was to simplify the online booking process for our customers, saving them time, money, and stress when booking flights, hotel accommodations, car rentals, vacation packages, and other travel services. While we prioritized conversion performance as a key success factor, we also aimed to increase our market share and brand presence to achieve our growth objectives and to maximize the performance of our non-search efforts.
As a leading online travel agency in Africa with offices across the continent and the Middle East, we were committed to delivering outstanding travel experiences to our customers since our establishment in 1999.
Our main goals were to increase our market share and brand presence, reach our growth targets, and enhance our display performance. To achieve these objectives, we launched a dynamic remarketing campaign on the Google Display Network. Our main goal was to determine whether users would have visited our website and converted regardless of being exposed to a remarketing display ad.
We partnered with Google to conduct a conversion lift experiment to measure the impact of our campaign on conversion and site visit behavior. The experiment involved splitting eligible users into treatment and control groups. Treatment users were shown our ads, while the ad was not displayed to the control group. We wanted to see how users in the control group behaved compared to those in the treatment group, who had seen our display ads.
The results of the dynamic remarketing campaign were impressive, with incremental increases in conversion performance, including a 20.7% increase in site visitors, a 24.9% increase in page views, a 5.4% increase in conversions, and a 10.6% increase in conversion value. These results exceeded our assumptions regarding the significance of non-direct conversion channels in boosting online sales.
As a result of these findings, we extended our dynamic remarketing activity with Google to three key markets – Nigeria, Kenya, and Egypt. Additionally, we adopted customer lifetime value as a metric to help improve the effectiveness of our dynamic remarketing campaigns. We became more confident in increasing our display activity and were excited about the value it could bring to our business.
At Travelstart, we focused our marketing objectives on channels that drove conversions. Validating upper-funnel activity was challenging when we could not prove its contribution to sales. By using conversion lift experiments to affirm the role of display, we became more confident in the impact of non-direct conversion channels in assisting online sales. This experiment demonstrated the significance of a test and learn approach in digital marketing, which enabled us to achieve our growth targets and enhance our display performance.