Case Study

Brief

Reval Hotels is the biggest hotel chain in the Baltic countries. Consisting of ten first-class hotels Reval Hotels have three hotels in Tallinn, three hotels in Riga, two hotels in Vilnius –the capital of Lithuania – with another two located in the Lithuanian cities Kaunas and Klaipeda, and one newly opened hotel in St Petersburg, Russia. 

The Challenge:
 

• Low demand to the Baltics region due to the recession
• Weak occupancy, ADR, and RevPAR
• Tough competition and new entrants to all of Reval’s markets.
• High cost of paid search and cost per click (CPC).

Strategy

We studied the region by making several visits to the major Baltic cities and conducted market research drawing on the hotel management, Reval’s competitors and other local resources. We also studied travellers’ profiles looking at changing buying and travelling behaviours sop we understood the core needs of this client and aligned the activities according to their needs and goals for return in mind.

In addition, our team:
 

• Reviewed competitors’ online activities
• Analysed Reval’s target markets and developed a unique strategy for each market
• Created an annual PPC activity plan
• Trained Reval’s e-marketing team, so that they could support the campaigns once implemented

Alongside, this focused PPC effort; we continued supporting Reval’s e-Marketing Management Team with strategic consulting on e-marketing, e-commerce, revenue management and e-business related fields.

Execution
 

• Studied each target market and target audience to make sure each campaign was tailored according to their needs
• Examined the website and optimised it to ensure the contents’ relevancy; engaging visitor for longer
• Made extensive keyword research for each hotel, destination and local amenities (around 7,000 keywords used in the PPC campaigns)
• Implemented unique campaigns and ad groups for each destination and service (around 500 individual ad groups)
• Created new and optimised current landing pages to maximise return on investment
• Tested new campaigns and variations to optimise and keep the campaign up-to-date
• Executed a bidding strategy to reach the goals, increase the conversion and minimise the cost
• Used different combinations of keywords and phrases including exact, phrase and negative keyword variations
• Performed on-going campaign optimization

Results

• Conversion rate increased by 20%
• Cost-per-booking decreased by 300%
• PPC Return on Investment (ROI) and return on ad spend (ROAS) increased by over 400%
• Number of sold packages increased by 35%
• Overall web revenue increased by 16%