Travelodge is an independent value hotel brand with more than 500 hotels and 37,000 guest bedrooms in the UK, Ireland and Spain. Spark Foundry runs the brand’s paid search advertising. When Travelodge launched their SuperRoom product, they tasked the agency with increasing awareness of the room features. Spark Foundry developed a YouTube campaign that centred on a video highlighting the key points of the SuperRoom offering.
About Spark Foundry
Media agency
Part of Publicis Media
www.sparkfoundryww.com
Goal
Increase awareness of SuperRoom features
Approach
Launched YouTube campaign using TrueView and bumper ads
Remarketed to TrueView viewers
Mined Google Analytics audience lists for new targeting ideas
Optimised targeting throughout campaign
Results
48% view rate
£0.01 cost per view
8.4% lift in ad recall
7.8% lift in consideration
“When it comes to digital strategy, Travelodge is historically a brand largely focused on meeting direct response objectives by driving hotel bookings”, explains Oscar Romero, Head of Performance at Spark Foundry. “While traditionally the business has frequently run TV activity to drive awareness, they've started to consider digital channels a lot more as part of their branding activity. So when we were presented with the SuperRooms brief, the campaign provided a great opportunity to prove that Travelodge can use digital channels in order to maximise awareness, whilst reaching relevant audiences to drive engagement with the creatives.”
Spark Foundry built the campaign around two YouTube formats, a skippable 30-second TrueView ad and bumper ads. Aiming to achieve both scale and efficiency, the activity ran for a month using a two-phased approach to first generate awareness with skippable ads and then drive consideration through remarketing with bumper ads.
In terms of targeting, the skippable campaigns used a combination of affinity, in-market audiences and topics. Initially, the target audience for the campaign was business consumers. However, early conversion results led the team to open up targeting to include leisure users.
Spark Foundry also used insights provided from Google Analytics audience lists for new targeting ideas. For example, the brand’s business audience list showed users who were in-market for business and productivity software. While this audience wasn’t obvious at first, it went on to show effective engagement results.
Throughout the campaign, Spark Foundry optimised performance to maximise engagement with the creatives. In addition to shifting to a more leisure-focused audience, they also excluded demographic groups with lower level of engagement based on age, gender and parental status, which helped improve performance over time.
“YouTube is an important platform for Travelodge. The channel allows us to reach relevant audiences based on different criteria, whilst maximising engagement with an efficient level of spend.”
– Ondrej Miklas, Senior Digital Acquisition Manager, Travelodge
The success of the campaign was measured according to engagement with the video creatives and consideration for Travelodge’s SuperRoom offering. The view rate of 48% and cost per view of £0.01 indicated exceptionally high levels of engagement and efficiency, while an 8.4% lift in ad recall and 7.8% lift in consideration highlighted how the campaign positively influenced consumer behaviour. And for a campaign primarily set up to drive awareness, the activity actually drove a healthy profit at an efficient cost of sale compared to standard search activity.
“YouTube can be an effective media channel in helping to drive conversions for a brand, as long as the creative is engaging and targeting is relevant”, Oscar affirms. “We expect to use TrueView as an effective platform to continue to support Travelodge’s various business objectives moving forward.”
