Company Background
Valamar is the largest Croatian hotel and camping chain with 36 hotels and resorts in Croatia and Austria and more than 15 camping resorts. Over 7000 employees accommodate more than 1.000.000 guests each year.
Expectations
Valamar wanted to increase the number of individual reservations on its website while maintaining the cost of sale under a defined percentage. Our job was to prepare the advertising strategy, setup and maintain paid ads on search engines (Google, Microsoft, Seznam) and Meta platform.
Campaigns were supposed to be active worldwide, DACH region being the most significant in terms of the number of reservations and revenue.
The initial focus was both on acquiring new users and protecting the brand in a highly competitive market (Booking, Expedia, Airbnb and other OTAs, other hotels and private accommodation).
Goals
Increase the number of individual reservations and corresponding revenue.
Maintain cost of sale in the defined range.
Solution
An overall solution from our side was pretty much simple but at the same time highly effective. We’ve set up brand and generic search campaigns on all search engines frequently used by Valamar guests and communicated Valamar’s strongest USPs.
Along with the presence on paid search channels, both remarketing and dynamic remarketing campaigns were active on both Google Ads & Meta platform. In order to acquire new guests besides search, upper-funnel campaigns were utilized through Meta, Google ads. Some smaller platforms (like Reddit), were tested as well.
In order to achieve the results, AI has been utilized to its full potential, either with smart bidding strategies, broad keywords, audiences or creatives.
We wanted to go beyond achieving the best possible result for our channel, but achieving the best possible results for the client. Having that in mind we’ve started utilizing incrementality testing in order to find optimal investment / result mix. What was exactly done? Brand search campaigns are low hanging fruit & a must for the majority of SEM managers. But the question is would a user find the way to the web (e.g. through organic) even without brand search ads on its path? The similar was done with other campaigns / channels. The findings were used to optimize campaigns / channels investment.
Not every customer is the same for business; some might be loyal, while some might be churners. Doing RFM customer segmentation, based on first-party data was something that was done. This brought to us a clearer picture on Valamar’s guests & enabled us to have a different approach per customer segment.
Being proactive, digging deep into data and doing frequent testing, and then reacting depending on data-driven results, was (and is) the core of our approach. Either it is about campaigns, bidding strategies or some other suggestion of business approach for the client.
In the end, we’ve managed, not only to significantly increase the results while maintaining desired cost of sale, but we’ve done it, again and again, each year since we started working on the campaigns.