Skyscanner, a search engine that inspires people to plan and book millions of travel options every single day – their business model is built on quality products and user experiences. Learn how they're driving innovation and delivering effective ad experiences for their consumers and advertising partners.
Advertising is key to Skyscanner’s long term success. With their long-term commitment to serve their consumers with relevant content at the right moment – it's never been more crucial to become more customised and personalised.
“We saw a new opportunity to help airlines customise their advertising with us as much as travellers customise their plans.”
– Colin McLellan, Chief Financial Officer, Skyscanner
Skyscanner wanted to give advertisers the ability to respond by enabling them to dynamically advertise to travellers in real time. Features such as live pricing, automated partner logos, destination images, ad copy and language translation – keeping client requirements to a minimum whilst delivering maximum scalability.
Goals:
Deliver highly relevant messages to their users
Provide world-class products to their advertising partners
Increase commercial revenue and performance
Approach:
Build fully automated, custom formats using Google Ad Manager’s Native Framework, with live pricing, partner logos, destination images, deeplink URLs, tracking and tagging, driving users to the relevant search pages
Utilise Google Ad Manager API to facilitate scalable creation and management of hundreds of campaigns against bespoke targeting criteria, building 100’s of creative and targeting combinations in a matter of minutes
Results:
7x increase in click rates
6x increase in yield over standard display
Initially built to service traditional direct demand, Skyscanner have now made these formats available with Programmatic Guaranteed. The formats are Skyscanner's most in-demand advertising product, far surpassing Skyscanner's initial expectations both commercially, and more importantly, from the user experience point of view.
Prior to this innovation, the on-site media offering only focused on promoting brand messages to their consumers through display creatives, rather than prompting consumers to book.
How native ads can work for you
Native ads were designed to help publishers to cultivate a healthy ads ecosystem.
As user behaviour shifts between platforms, standard banner ads no longer provide relevant, engaging ad experiences. We need to push for the same evolution in ads that we’ve accomplished for content, which is why native advertising is gaining so much momentum; it presents a solution for creating less intrusive, more responsive ad experiences.
“These formats keep pace with the user throughout the buying cycle and serve highly relevant messages at just the right time.”
– Terry Leddy, Global Ad Operations Manager, Skyscanner
Three takeaways for success:
- By moving away from fixed display creatives, it enables publishers to take a set of assets and render them dynamically, in different environments and contexts
- Native lets publishers put the same care into their ads as they do into their content
- The multi-screen world requires flexible, component-based ads
“With the new native formats, advertisers can be just as dynamic as our consumers.”
– Jenny Stephens, Commercial Director Global Advertising, Skyscanner
