Like many businesses, Eurostar.com has a wide range of landing pages featuring content - for Eurostar specifically, it's to share information and inspiration on services and their destinations. With this in mind, how could Eurostar serve the user with the content they want at the right moment? Find out how they have their search strategy an overhaul and saw an 86% higher click-through rate than generic search campaigns.
The business challenge
Eurostar is the high-speed railway service connecting London with a number of European cities via the Channel Tunnel. Eurostar.com includes a large quantity of landing pages featuring content on the service’s wide range of destinations. The Eurostar team wanted to leverage this content in expanding the reach of their search marketing.
The approach
Partnering with iProspect, Eurostar used Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) – when a user enters a search on Google that’s 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 gave the brand broader exposure without requiring any changes to existing keyword campaigns.
Eurostar and iProspect began by identifying the top content pages to target. To decrease inefficient spend and increase return on investment, they also introduced strong negative coverage for site content that wouldn’t generate revenue (for instance the customer service page). They also added “Eurostar” as a negative keyword, since this was already covered in the brand’s keyword campaigns, to ensure that DSA focused on new, incremental activity.
Alongside refining the URL strategy, the team aligned Eurostar’s business objectives regarding key routes to the DSA campaign structure. They created destination-focused campaigns to be sure of maximising important routes based on availability, offers, and seasonality, resulting in more tailored ad copy and greater relevance for users.
With an eye on performance, the team implemented audience bid adjustments. They used Google Analytics and Remarketing Lists for Search Ads to find in-market audiences across each ad group, then optimised the bidding to a target cost per acquisition. Targets were also set at campaign level based on destination.
The results
These strategies paid off, with the DSA campaigns producing an 86% higher click-through rate than generic search campaigns and a 20% incremental increase in revenue. This has contributed to strong performance year over year from search: overall, Eurostar has seen 20% higher click-through rates, 10% lower costs per click, 26% more transactions, and 37% more revenue.
Key takeaways for your business
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