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, Bing, Yandex, Seznam) and social networks (mainly Facebook and Instagram).
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 strongest USPs.
At the same time, we’ve developed a remarketing strategy both on Google and Facebook/Instagram, combining classic and dynamic remarketing in different phases of the user path. Occasionally we’ve also run upper-funnel campaigns depending on specific goals.
As mentioned, the overall solution was pretty much straightforward, something that most hotel chains do, but the details in the background were the real difference that made Valamar stand out.
While smart bidding 5 years ago was still not as evolved as it is today we’ve put maximum effort in bid details, doing deep analysis in Google Analytics and defining bid modifiers on all levels (location, device, demographics, time). Also, we’ve done a record number of bid changes in that period. As soon as smart bidding became what it is today, we’ve leveraged it’s power to automate and improve the process even further.
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 creatives, bidding or different strategies.
To back up our highly engaged approach we can share that we had more than 4500 campaigns active during the whole period, almost 30 different accounts, more than 22.500.000 changes in change history just in Google Ads.
In the end, we’ve managed, not only to significantly increase the results and reduce the cost of sale during the period, but we’ve done it, again and again, each year since we started working on the campaigns.