My Method... How Google's tailored ads helped Eurostar reach potential customers

The competition for eyeballs online is fierce, driving travel companies to get creative with how they target potential consumers and task their advertising and marketing partners with the same.

PhocusWire asked Becky Power, director of travel at Google UK, to talk through how the search giant helped Eurostar deliver relevant ads to customers in direct response to search queries.

Here she details how Google, iProspect and Eurostar put a dynamic search campaign together to reach interested travelers with appropriate offers, as well as some of the results...

Whether they’re avid travelers or just the occasional vacationers, holidaymakers are researching their trips like never before.

Armed with smartphones, they’re grabbing every spare moment to explore their options, whether they are travel deals (up 45% for Spanish consumers), luggage costs (up 55% for German holidaymakers) or early booking (up 115% for Russian travelers).

To make the most of this flurry of search activity, Eurostar looked to Google and performance marketing agency iProspect to find a way of meeting potential customers in their moments of research and discovery.

By matching ads to their detailed search queries, the travel company could use its own extensive content to serve highly relevant and therefore enticing ads to engaged users.

Using dynamic search ads on Google, Eurostar was able to serve ads with a headline based on users’ queries and text from the most relevant landing pages on the site.

This created destination-focused campaigns that made the most of availability, offers and seasonality to show the most relevant products to travelers.

This transition to a more targeted, personalized campaign contributed to Eurostar’s strong performance in search.

Making keyword campaigns work harder

As a high-speed railway service that connects London with a number of European cities via the Channel Tunnel, Eurostar is ideally placed to provide travelers with detailed information on all the destinations it serves.

Eurostar.com has numerous landing pages focused on each of these destinations, each filled with rich information and imagery.

This content was ripe for the plucking when it came to developing a Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) campaign. When a user enters a search on Google that is relevant to Eurostar, DSA generates an ad with a headline based on the query and with text based on the most relevant landing page on Eurostar.com.

This gives the brand broader exposure without needing to change any existing keyword campaigns.

Accentuate the negative

Eurostar’s website contains much more than just destination information, and not all of it is relevant at the top of the marketing funnel in the customer journey.

Some on-site content, such as a customer service page, doesn’t generate revenue from an advertising perspective, for example.

To decrease inefficient spend and increase return on investment, Eurostar introduced strong negative coverage for this sort of site content, as well as adding "Eurostar" as a negative keyword.

This is already covered in the brand’s keyword campaigns and eliminating it helps the Dynamic Search activity focus only on new, incremental activity.

Making customer choice work for Eurostar

Naturally, DSAs serve users ads based on their own destination preferences – mini breaks in Lille, for example. However, by aligning Eurostar’s business objectives around its key routes with the campaign structure, it could be sure of maximizing important routes based on their availability, offers and seasonality.

The ads were even more relevant for potential customers, and Eurostar met its performance goals.

Optimizing to meet the best audiences

To make sure the DSA campaign reached the most appropriate user groups, we implemented audience bid adjustments.

This took data from Google Analytics and Remarketing lists for Search Ads to find the most motivated potential customers (known as "in-market audiences") across each ad group, then optimized the bidding to a target cost per acquisition.

Through a combination of tighter audience targeting, the use of rich brand information to create truly relevant ad content and optimizations to make sure ad spend went only where it was most useful, Eurostar enjoyed results in line with a highly effective campaign.

There was an 86% higher click-through rate than with a generic search campaign, which generated a 20% incremental increase in revenue.

Overall during the campaign period, Eurostar saw a 20% rise in click-through rates, 10% lower costs per click, 26% more transactions and 37% more revenue.

Even though the customer base may have a broad set of travel motivations and the brand a diverse range of offerings, it is entirely possible to reach potential customers on an individual level, simply by applying real thought to a dynamic search strategy.