Client: Fly Thomas Cook

Project: PPC Bid Optimisation Tool

Channel: Search

Challenge

In a highly competitive online travel market:

1. To drive maximum flight sales at a low cost per acquisition
2. To prioritise different flight destinations from one week to the next bearing in mind seasonality and availability
3. Realise the potential of generic search terms for each destination

Strategy

We have been dissatisfied with third party bid management tools due to their inability to maximize both volume and efficiency or take into consideration category specific variables. So we decided to create a bespoke PPC bid management system that considered the nuances of the flights market. This solution had to simultaneously maximise volume of bookings and efficiency.

Solution

Conversion rate for Flythomascook is affected mainly by three factors: seasonality, availability and pricing. We created a bespoke tool that looks at the impact of these variables individually for each destination. Each week Thomas Cook’s yield team send through flight data by destination. The tool works with this data and the previous week’s conversion rate and works out the expected conversion rate for the oncoming week.

Performance

Search performance continues to improve YoY:

In 2006 = Every £1 spent delivered £17 in revenue
In 2007 = Every £1 spent delivered £27 in revenue
In 2008 = Every £1 spent delivered £38 in revenue

Campaign Creative

(click thumbnail for creative example)

Our in-house technical solutions team develop proprietary tools to give us a competitive advantage in optimisation and forecasting.

We operate across every aspect of Search Engine Marketing, including both Search Engine Optimisation and Pay-Per-Click.