Case Study | Travelodge

Travelodge and Mediavest save time and money building campaigns with Dynamic Search Ads

Goals • Collect traffic from search terms based on site content not yet covered in existing campaigns • Improve efficiencies within the account with higher click-through-rates and lower cost-per-clicks

Approach • Setup Dynamic Search Ad campaigns across 18 different cities across 3 Google accounts (London, North and South) • Implemented a strong negative strategy to ensure no duplicate bidding

Results • Captured traffic from terms not previously covered and saved time • Compared to generic exact match campaigns, dynamic search ads drove: °° 123% higher click-through-rate °° -78% decrease on cost-per-acquisition

For Travelodge, the UK’s largest independent hotel chain, giving customers great value for money is paramount. Having grown from a single hotel in 1985, to more than 500 properties today, the brand aspires to be the destination of choice for both business and leisure travelers, providing modern bedrooms with comfortable king size beds, in the right locations and at the right price. The desire to provide great value permeates all aspects of Travelodge’s business, including the activities of the digital marketing team and their agency partner, Mediavest. “Our primary KPI is hotel room bookings, so all activity is planned and optimised against bookings, revenue & cost of sale targets,” explains Jonathan Melton, Paid Search Director of Mediavest. “As an intent-driven channel, paid search is fundamental to achieving our acquisition goals.” Last year, Travelodge and Mediavest began exploring the potential of Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) to increase their search coverage and drive bookings while maintaining a viable cost of sales. Dynamic Search Ads crawl a website’s pages, separating the content into logical categories, and then matching those categories against relevant search queries. Advertisers can choose to crawl their entire site, or focus on specific categories reflecting their campaign and content structure, while visitors are automatically directed to the best landing page for their search. The ads themselves contain a dynamically generated headline which can be longer than a standard search ad headline, potentially leading to improved visibility and clickthrough-rates. Travelodge began their experiment with DSA by selecting a set of small, medium and large cities to test performance. In Travelodge’s case, they found that DSA worked best with large cities, and began structuring their campaigns accordingly. With conversion data being fed into a bid management tool, and audience lists overlaid on each campaign, Mediavest optimised DSA activity against time of day, location and demographic targeting. Explaining DSA’s place in Travelodge’s digital media mix, Jonathan Melton observes: “We’re using DSA as part of the Search mix alongside traditional PPC (based on keywords), Google Hotel Ads, and Organic listing to maximize Travelodge’s presence against their competitors.”

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The Results “We were expecting to see a positive impact from Dynamic Search Ads, but the actual results surpassed expectations,” says Jonathan, reflecting on the outcome of Travelodge’s first year using DSA. After the initial tests were completed and a wider set of campaigns were rolled out, DSA achieved click-through-rate improvements of more than 100% compared to equivalent keyword campaigns and conversion rates up to 150% higher, while cost-per-click was reduced by around 50%, leading to a much improved cost-of-sale. Moreover, the DSA crawling technology enabled Travelodge ads to show against search terms that weren’t included in their generic campaigns, allowing the brand to reach out to customers with unique search behaviour. An additional benefit of the DSA technology manifest in efficiency gains for Jonathan and his team. “In DSA campaigns, the keyword-building process is avoided and therefore the campaign can be optimised much quicker,” he explains, and as a result, “hours of tedious excel buildout are avoided, allowing us to invest more time in actual optimisation.” In fact, Jonathan says he can foresee a time when all paid search activity moves beyond keyword selection, with advertisers and agencies focusing instead on optimising website content, knowing that even subtle changes will be picked up by DSA. “We consider search a key driver of acquisition,” says Tony Barker, Head of Digital Acquisition at Travelodge. “We are always looking to the paid search team at Mediavest to innovate within this competitive space. The introduction of Dynamic Search Ads has not only helped account performance, but has also freed up the team’s time to work on more strategic initiatives and provide additional insight.”

© 2016 Google Inc. All rights reserved. Google and the Google logo are trademarks of Google Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

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