July 24, 2015

Travel – BAA

Digital marketing agency iCrossing has worked for airport operator BAA since 2006, providing technical consultancy and natural search marketing. But, in September 2008, they asked iCrossing to manage both paid and natural search marketing for their airport parking business. The objective was simple: increase pre-bookings in the company’s car parks.

By uniting its paid and natural search expertise – and using its unique social media expertise and keyword research techniques to identify how potential users searched – iCrossing was able to produce a search marketing campaign greater than the sum of its parts.

As a result, BAA now dominates the search engines for terms related to car parking at its major airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted. And, even in the recession, which has hit foreign travel hard, iCrossing’s work has delivered 12% more bookings in the first half of 2009 year on year, at lower acquisition costs.

The campaign is testament to the better results advertisers can expect when they combine paid and natural search expertise in one campaign through iCrossing.

Brief

The core objective was to deliver an increase in bookings for BAA’s car parks at airports such as Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted. iCrossing was given monthly targets for the number of bookings needed and at what cost.

Strategy/Execution

Keywords
The first job was to apply iCrossing’s unique methodology for identifying search terms. We used our linguistic profiling model to look at passengers’ online behaviour around airports and parking to identify the language they use when searching for airport-related services.

This exercise prompted iCrossing to broaden the scope of search terms targeted in the paid search campaigns from 355 to more than 20,000 terms, including, for example, terms used by people showing intent to travel such as ‘Heathrow departures’ and ‘weather in Cyprus’. The keyword set also included coverage of foreign language variations which helped to target new audiences.

Lessons for SEO
With an enormous new range of keywords to optimise against, iCrossing was able to revamp BAA’s natural search tactics. We built the new terms into the BAA site content, back-end and link strategy. We also looked to build the airport’s presence in Google local results. This involved a range of submissions and optimisation strategies on the site that resulted in the airport car parks appearing prominently and accurately on Google Map results.

Social insight
Alongside all this, BAA enlisted the help of iCrossing’s social media team and technology to monitor key conversations about – and around – the brand. Among other things, these social insights allow the team to refine copy in paid search ads to improve performance.

Successful Synergy
A key part of the campaign was to exploit the synergies between paid and natural search to drive greater performance. By working together, our paid and natural search terms were able to, for example:

  • use consistent messaging across paid and natural activity, by using the copy from high-performing PPC creatives in site meta descriptions
  • share knowledge about which strategies worked best (around the best-performing terms) to apply to both paid and natural activity
  • create landing pages that worked well for both paid-search conversion AND natural visibility

Results

Despite falling passenger traffic to BAA’s airports (due to recession), the work has grown bookings at BAA owned car parks on a consistent basis.

  • Bookings through paid search peaked at a 32% monthly increase year on year in June 2009
  • From January to June 2009, the number of bookings through paid search increased by 12
  • Over the same period, cost per acquisition dropped 5%
  • Overall, the increase in bookings through paid and natural search compared with 2008 has been clear, despite the fall in passenger numbers

Working Together

Mark Raymond, Senior Account Manager, iCrossing UK, said:
“BAA came to us with a clear brief and a campaign that was already delivering them good results. We took that campaign to the next level through a combination of insight, strategic thinking and powerful execution. The numbers speak for themselves – in the toughest market in living memory our work has continually delivered
significant increases in bookings across all of the sites.”

Nick Adderley, Marketing and Insight Director at BAA, said:
“iCrossing has delivered on every count – they have given us responsive customer service, great strategic insight and execution that has delivered real value to our business. Their ability to deliver synergies between paid and natural search marketing activities mean that they’ve delivered more than the sum of the parts in this campaign, and that’s a real win for us”.

Travel - BAA