When Dutch package holiday provider Arke rebranded to become TUI, additional budget was allocated to grow the mobile share of voice for the new brand. This provided a great opportunity to measure the value mobile was contributing to online sales.
THE GOALS
Measure mobile contribution to online sales
Obtain campaign and ad group level bid recommendations
Maintain acceptable cost per sale
THE APPROACH
Established goals in Google Analytics to track micro-conversions
Implemented mobile bid modifiers
Tested approach for two-month period
THE RESULTS
17% increase in conversion rate across devices
10% increase in mobile pages per session
7% increase in return on ad spend
The TUI team was concerned that raising mobile bids might increase the cost of sale beyond an acceptable level. They also wanted to obtain campaign and adgroup level bid recommendations, something that was not previously possible using site level analysis.
Working closely with Google, TUI used Google Analytics to discover that consumers were using mobile as a research and discovery channel, meaning that TUI’s mobile bids should not be optimised based on last-click analysis. Following on from this, TUI saw that optimising for cross-device sales wasn’t sufficient either – to be successful, the brand needed to optimise for intent.
TUI established goals in Google Analytics to track micro-conversions along the customer journey on mobile and desktop, and to identify where users were dropping off the mobile path. This would make it possible to optimise for valuable traffic and give appropriate credit to mobile. In doing this, TUI saw that mobile users were dropping off on mobile once they had seen detailed information about accommodation, dates and prices.
Google and TUI then used insights from Google Analytics and AdWords mobile and desktop reports to derive mobile bid modifier recommendations by adgroup and campaign based on the micro-conversion where mobile users completed their research. TUI implemented these bids and tested the approach for a period of two months. The results showed that 88% of total generic mobile conversions initiated on mobile were cross-device ones. The new strategy produced a 17% increase in conversion rate across devices, a 10% increase in mobile pages per session and a 7% increase in return on ad spend compared to the two-month period before the test.
“The most beneficial aspect of this test was finally being able to quantify the crossdevice uplift,” says Alain Manche, Head of SEA at TUI. “We saw extremely positive uplift on several of our accounts and the overall insights were very useful. All this data allowed us to refine our whole mobile strategy and make better decisions. Over the long term we will continue to use the data from this strategy and refine it to optimise mobile for specific destinations.”
