Industry:
Location:
Crawley, UK
http://virgin-atlantic.com
  • 22% increase in revenue and a 10% increase in ROAS
  • Marin's URL builder automates the task of building URLs and provides a 75% time saving
  • Marin’s tracking pixel provides new insight into customer behavior

A little about OMD and Virgin Atlantic

Manning Gotlieb OMD (MG OMD), a communications planning and buying agency within the Omnicom Media Group, manage the Virgin Atlantic paid search campaigns. Virgin Atlantic is one of UK’s leading airlines serving the world’s most exciting business and leisure destinations.

It feels like Marin was designed to meet the challenges of any agency. The ability to integrate revenue into our optimization strategies and efficiently report on performance at scale saves us countless hours and has reduced our clients’ CPO by 20% on average.

Petr Abroskin
ArrowMedia

Challenge

In today’s data driven world, businesses rely on multiple pieces of technology to deliver, optimise and manage their online advertising and website analytics. If these adserving, tag management and optimisation technologies do not integrate, data discrepancies occur and brands risk poor bidding execution.

Secondly, in the highly competitive world of airline travel, airfare prices change constantly across the dozens of routes Virgin Atlantic operate, posing the challenge of showing the best fares to a consumer at time of their search. Manually applying these fare changes is a laborious task that takes up time which would be better spent strategically optimising the accounts and thinking of innovative ways to communicate with Virgin Atlantic’s customers.

Finally, as price per route changes, so does gross profit per booking. This poses a problem for traditional rules-based bid calculations which do not account for the fluctuations in volume and performance that are inevitable in price-sensitive verticals like air-travel.

Solution

Marin integrated seamlessly with existing Tagman and CoreMetrics tracking, which meant there was no need for Virgin Atlantic to re-engineer their advertising technology architecture. MG OMD’s search team quickly and simply deployed Marin’s tracking pixel within the TagMan container tag. In contrast, deploying tags directly on the website often means waiting for a development window to open up and fighting to prioritise the tag deployment above multiple other requests. The benefits of this approach go beyond time saving; data discrepancies are minimised and historical data is preserved which means there is no “learning period” for automated bidding. In fact, bids can be calculated from day one.

Combining these three tracking sources results in an extremely complex URL structure; Marin’s URL builder was leveraged to seamlessly combine the various URL parameters and automate the process of building URLs. This eliminated the need for the MG OMD team to manually build URLs each time new ad copy and keywords were added. The time that was saved could instead be used to optimise the accounts.

Rolling out Marin’s automated bidding has ensured keyword-level bids are updated automatically each day, taking into consideration the most recent performance data as well as seasonal changes, to maximise performance. In addition, Marin’s pixel captures not only conversion and revenue data and the user’s path-to-conversion; it also allows Virgin Atlantic to track specific information such as the cabin category (economy, premium economy, little red, upper class) and route. This allows MG OMD to gain insight into and understanding of the consumer’s research process so it can optimise the account accordingly and interact with the consumer effectively.

To tackle the challenge of frequently updating ad copy with new prices, MG OMD created Dimensions in Marin that group Campaigns by destination and market. When prices need to be updated the team now use Marin’s ‘Actions by Dimension’ capability. This feature allows users to upload a single instruction to Marin to change the price for all ad copy relating to a particular destination. Marin does this by automatically applying the same change to all ads within the Dimension, thus showing the best fares to a consumer. Without this feature, the MG OMD team would have to upload bulk sheets containing thousands of rows, a time consuming and error prone process.

Results

Using Marin allowed MG OMD to achieve significant time savings, allowing for resource to be reinvested into strategic optimisation. In particular, Marin’s URL builder and the usage of the ‘Actions by Dimension’ feature led to:

  • 17% decrease in cost per conversion
  • 22% increase in revenue
  • 10% increase in ROI