Founded in 1997 as Mika Tur, Tatilbudur.com is an online travel agency focused on the Turkish market. The current portfolio includes hotel sales, vacation packages, guided tours and cruises. There are sales offices in various cities around the country, with the headquarters in Istanbul and call centre in Antalya. Tatilbudur.com and its digital agency SEM faced challenging profitability goals. In order to reach their profit targets for sustainable growth, they wanted to optimise bidding within their search campaign investment.
About Tatilbudur.com
Travel agency
Headquarters in Istanbul
THE GOALS
Reach set profit targets for sustainable growth
Optimise bidding within search campaign investment
THE APPROACH
Activated Target ROAS automated bidding in AdWords
Tested Target ROAS against manual bidding in campaign drafts and experiments
THE RESULTS
Increased return on advertising spend by more than 40% while investing 10% more
Increased conversion value by more than 120%
Tatilbudur.com’s AdWords accounts had been structured in a very detailed manner to encompass a very large inventory of hotels and tours of different kinds. As the inventory grew and evolved, it required effort from both the agency and marketing teams to manage and optimise the campaigns.
Tatilbudur.com and SEM decided to test the AdWords Smart Bidding strategy target ROAS (tROAS). They then used the campaign drafts and experiments module in AdWords in order to assess how much incremental value tROAS could generate at the same ROAS target.
"Target ROAS allowed to focus on our core business metrics while managing our campaigns. We saw that focusing on cost per click or action might sometimes be misleading, as this metric doesn’t necessarily capture the value created. We hope to move to a structure where the whole account is run and managed via core business and profitability metrics."
-Ali Deniz Ergun, Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Tatilbudur.com
tROAS uses machine learning technology to automatically tailor bids for each and every auction. It leverages a rich set of contextual performance signals like device, geo, audience and operating system to help advertisers get more revenue at the target return on ad spend they set. The team hypothesised that automated bidding could differentiate between potential customers with high conversion value and auctions that were less likely to bring in revenue. Drafts and experiments provided an ideal testing environment, producing a meaningful comparison between tROAS and manual bidding. After SEM set up the campaign, the experiment ran for a healthy testing period of four weeks, when it became possible to interpret the results.
With Target tROAS bidding, the return on advertising spend increased by more than 40% and conversion value increased by more than 120%. The results clearly showed that Target tROAS created more value and more return because this method was able to target high value auctions efficiently. Thanks to these insights and positive outcomes, Tatilbudur.com and SEM decided to expand tROAS bidding in the account. They’ve already created new tests for other campaigns and are currently growing tROAS bidding in an iterative way.
"Combining Target ROAS with drafts and experiments made us feel very comfortable about deciding to use automated bidding. Having 40% uplift for return on advertising confirmed our decision. Tatilbudur.com clearly saw the value created with Target ROAS, which helped us to efficiently optimise the account further."
-Hanife Avcılar, Senior Account Strategist, SEM
