Industry: Travel, Hotel
The Client
The most rooms active in the hotel industry including super luxury hotel properties and residence in all continents. Simply put, our client is the world’s number one hotel chain today. That of course has set another intimidating stage and challenge for us as a performance marketing service agency. It also means any rules and regulations from the headquarters are absolute and final—indisputable!
Through the years of experience working with the big names of the hotel industry, we understand and have been quite ready for the obstacles in the rules and regulations set by the brands. In some cases if we were lucky, we got help through negotiations while other cases caused extra miles from both sides running our projects.
However, this client in particular gave us learnings so valuable for both our teams that success has spoken for itself.
The Challenge
In performance marketing, we all know too well that one of the basics needed for a digital marketing campaign is pixel installation on the client’s website as the starting point of all activity tracking and optimisation from simple to the most complicated level.
Learn more: What are Pixels and Why Do I Need to Use Them?
And only here already was where we saw one of our biggest obstacles—the hotel chain’s headquarters sets the rules for the global operation to keep things tidy by not allowing pixel installation on any group or brand website under its operation.
In reality, each regional team will support their properties on marketing and online activities to drive the traffic and revenue. But due to a large and growing number of properties under each regional team’s supervision, they cannot handle all the details. Each property with the need for digital marketing campaigns has to survive through the help and service of local marketing agencies. The performance and measurable results, the practical detail part, falls into the agencies’ hands.
For a case like this, how can we measure the campaign performance without the most essential tracking tool—pixel installation?
The Intelligence & The Effort
Taking a step back and considering the situation that both our teams were facing, our mutual goal was to find a way to work around the obstacle and to get the results that the client needed.
For multiple properties we were assigned to run advertising campaigns for our clients, it basically came down to the KPIs, hence we had to make it clear with the client team about what we were going to deliver and what could be expected from our campaigns.
First of all, we knew that this was probably the easiest step. Even though we were running campaigns for multiple properties at the same time, the intelligent data tracking and reporting system on XPO has the ability to give us clear visibility and real-time trackability on the data such as CPM, CPC, CPV, clicks and CTR, etc. based on each different property.
As you might have guessed, data from only one source can never be enough. It has always been an important part of Media Console’s core philosophy to deliver transparency along with the satisfying results. The question that we asked our team, “What other ways or tools could possibly be the cross-references that validate our campaign performance?”
When the most essential tracking tool like pixel installation was out of the picture, we turned our focus to other more common tools available out there, the ones that could point out to the results generated by our campaign settings which already identified audience groups by their interests.
Working on XPO platform in parallel with public tools such as Bitly.com to track the campaign performance and to identify the performance of the audience groups allowing us to effectively optimise the campaigns throughout their lifetime, and Google Keyword Planner to identify and monitor the keyword search volume growth along our campaign period. All of these along with the manual effort and initiative ideas from both the client and our teams was the powerful synergy that after all flew our project over the obstacles that we had.
Search Volume Growth over the Campaign Period.
Learn more: 9 Creative Ways To Use Google’s Keyword Planner Tool
And thanks to XPO profound data extraction and intelligent report dashboard, we were able to perform in-depth campaign analysis to optimise its performance to the max.
The Results
Well, the first question was, “without the pixels how could we know if our campaigns really performed?” Of course, all the KPIs reached could be just euphonies and not even strong ones without the tracking pixels. But with those parallel indicators accompanied by quite an impressive ROAS realised, i.e. a significant increase of bookings from the targeted market geos, it was indisputable that our effort and determination really paid off.
Although the ROAS was just an estimated number due to the lack of pixel installation, the data from other tools was strong enough to point out our campaign success.
Beyond Results
But what does “success” really mean for Media Console? Learning is always the most valuable to us as it teaches our team based on real situations and real challenges. With those learnings, we keep growing.
The marketing service industry is actually a small world. We were glad that after all the hard work, extra effort and determination our name and impressive service were referred through word of mouth to at least three more hotel clienteles.
The challenge from this client gave us a big task, that was working together with the client’s team to find a way around the obstacle and to think more creatively. After all, in digital agencies we all know too well that the real bottom line is not all those KPIs and numbers that we can achieve in the report session, but the revenue in their pockets and the new learnings that strengthen their teams.