Delivering always-on paid search
Read how we successfully utilised new platforms, technology and tactics for Celebrity Cruises.
With an ambitious goal of increasing Direct’s share of passenger numbers by 40% by 2025, and with search marketing (particularly paid, with results sitting at the top of the search page) being the fulfilment of the above-the-line brand awareness and consideration activity, we not only needed to make this channel live up to its potential, but we also needed to achieve less wastage and more efficiency.
Strategy
PPC
“During the most recent Wave campaign, Accord helped us deliver some record-breaking sales days through their bold media choices and campaign optimisation. Their agile and flexible approach has made them a great partner and a pleasure to work with.”
Jo Rzymowska
Vice President and Managing Director, EMEA Celebrity Cruises
Smart Bidding
To increase performance and aid efficiency, we implemented Smart Bidding across our generic and brand campaigns starting with generic activity first, which was more expensive, competitive and had greater wastage.
The approach for generic activity was firstly to switch keywords to broad match, which helped to drive additional traffic, so that Google’s algorithm could identify, learn and drive signals faster for our selected target CPA strategy to capture as many conversions as possible, whilst not exceeding a pre-agreed level of cost.
Our brand activity was aligned to a dual strategy of maximising conversion and maximising conversion value (target ROAS). As we knew the volume of conversion would come through here, we wanted to maximise our daily budgets, driving the right people to site to convert at the highest value possible.
Using these machine learning technologies, we were able to optimise our bids to every auction, showing ads more or less frequently based on Google’s view on propensity to convert.
