Skycop helps inconvenienced travellers claim back mandatory compensation from airlines for delayed or cancelled flights. Operating in a highly competitive market, the site used data-driven attribution and automation to improve Search campaigns — increasing compensation applications by 78% and expanding its reach to more than 40 new markets.
About Skycop
Founded in 2017
Based in Lithuania
Online compensation company for airline passengers
Goals
Increase conversion rate by 2X YoY
Bring down Cost Per Acquisition
Achieve scalability across markets
Approach
Data driven attribution for high-value keywords
Optimised and automated bidding
Results
Claim applications grew by 78% QoQ
CPA fell by 34%
The company expanded into 43 new markets
Following a 2012 EU ruling1, airline passengers who have suffered flight delays or cancellations are entitled to compensation of up to €600. Claims can be retrospective for up to six years. And although the compensation is administered by an EU ruling, it includes all flights leaving from EU airports and flights to the EU by European carriers.
Founded in May 2017, Skycop processes claim applications on behalf of passengers. Typical applications take three minutes to complete on the company’s site and passengers only pay commission if a claim is successful. Within a year of its launch, the company positioned itself as one of the major players in the flight compensation market.
In partnership with its digital performance agency, iProspect LT, Skycop set out to maximise claim applications in a bid to expand its market share in a highly competitive sector.
Improved attribution for better bidding
Skycop had previously used a non-automated last click attribution model. To become more competitive at scale, the brand realised that it would have to use machine learning technology to implement data-driven attribution in its paid search auctions. The brand used Google Marketing Platform to better manage scalability and bidding automation across all search activities.
The data-driven model provides a more complete and actionable view of search campaigns, including which keywords are performing best in real-time.
Data-driven attribution uses Google Analytics data to generate a custom model for assigning conversion credit to marketing touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey. The data-driven model provides a more complete and actionable view of search campaigns, including which keywords are performing best in real-time.
Skycop started by setting up a country-agnostic Cost Per Acquisition and implemented ROAS based automated bidding. Scripts were used to prospect and add high-value keywords, and data-driven attribution gave the team a better understanding of campaign performance.
After implementing data-driven automated bidding, the company’s SEM performance made impressive gains. Compensation applications increased by 78% from the previous quarter. And the data-driven model allowed them to reallocate budget to top performing keywords and bring down Cost per Acquisition by 34%.
The successful automation strategy allowed Skycop to expand from seven to 30 new markets within a month, and then a further 13. Search had previously been used as a complimentary channel for the brand’s marketing efforts but the campaign was considered such a success that the team now consider search as the cornerstone for growth.
“While Google Search was one of the tools we used, it really took off once we concentrated on attribution and implemented automation”
—Danielius Šeibakas, Growth Manager, Skycop
