Industry: Travel, Hotel, Hospitality
The Client
A Thai hotel brand since 1978 with a single beachfront hotel in Pattaya. Our client’s brand grew immensely over the course of 40 years by building new hotel brands and taking over existing hotel brands and upgrading them with its own incomparable standard. The client’s hotel group now runs over 300 hotels around the world, one of the world’s top 20 biggest hotel chains.
Being one the earliest players in digital marketing and one of our prestigious clients in programmatic marketing where both our teams have learnt and grown together for over 5 years, the client this time round came with an even more intense challenge! Ad campaigns for 31 hotel properties under 4 brand groups located in Middle East and Africa, targeting tourists from GCC, European, CIS countries and India.
The Challenge
We were set with KPIs to commit and achieve, which of course is a very basic culture of how we work together. Apart from extra details and conditions required in this project, it also needed manual effort that our team had to put into studying the terrain and the audiences required by the clients in order to create the best prospecting and retargeting strategies to (as always) exceed the client’s expectations…
Too easy!
A short while after the campaigns started running, we found out what the real challenge was.
Being a giant hotel group as it is, our client has the booking engine for hotels under its management and the one booking engine that we had to work on our ad campaigns covers for over a hundred hotels.
So the complication for us running ads on only specific properties was that, when the prospecting customers came through our ads to the booking site, they would have the liberty to shop around all hotel brands that are visible on the booking engine including those outside of the 31 hotels, 4 brand groups, that we were running ads for.
The question was, how could we identify our budget attribution? How do we know how much money turned into bookings on the targeted properties, and how much turned into bookings on other properties, and which brand group?
The real challenge on our side, a performance marketing agency, lay in the measurement and reporting. Transparency is always one of our core values that we deliver to our clients alongside campaign performance beyond set KPIs. That means we needed to be able to find a way to get the exact numbers of how the client’s money was spent, on which properties it was spent, and how the ad campaigns performed on each terrain.
The Intelligence & The Effort
With our client’s demand for nothing less than excellence, the work had been cut out for us. With the data from the client’s booking engine alone, it was impossible to understand the budget attribution of the campaigns. Thanks to the XPO, our partnering programmatic advertising platform and its intelligent and in-depth measurement mechanism, our team was able to extract the campaign performance in detail on each property allowing us to identify how the budget was being spent over the course of the 3 month campaign period.
An extra manual effort from our campaign expert together with the kind and prompt support from the client’s technical team were the key allowing us to map the detailed data extracted by XPO across different sets to identify booking activities on each property amongst 100+ hotel properties happening on the booking engine.
Satisfying Results
The picture became clear. Towards the end of the campaign period, we were looking at up to overall 19 ROAS from all hotel properties, around 3 quarters of which, 14 ROAS, are spent on the targeted properties. Accepting the fact that the client cannot alter its booking engine, both our The client’s and our teams worked together to get around the obstacle within the system that we needed to use and found the way to make the most out of it.
More importantly, new findings from this campaign gave us more than what we expected which definitely lead to further improvements in a lot of ways.
Beyond Satisfying Results: A Sustainable Improvement
Thanks to XPO’s intelligent and meticulous measurement mechanism, it was possible to identify budget attributions throughout our campaigns. We were able to see exactly how the budget was spent on each hotel property and how each brand performed both in brand group level and individual property level. This information gave us vital information that allowed us to fix the problem, optimise the campaign details, and improve the campaign performance for each brand before the campaign period ended.
Even though both our teams have worked together for many years, it amazed us once again how the platform had the ability to x-ray and thoroughly analyse the data to achieve the most transparent execution and reporting. We both knew that transparent reporting is always crucial to how the client’s team can work further to improve its brands in all aspects.