Golfbreaks is Europe’s leading Golf operator. Helping thousands of golfers play the courses of their dreams.
They specialise in group travel bookings to the main UK venues, the US, Spain, Portugal and 20 other countries.
The challenge
- To reduce the high CPAs in new locations and increase volumes of enquires.
- Continue growing revenue for the largest golf provider in the UK.
- Generate as many enquiries as possible broken into short/mid/long haul trips.
- Grow the start-up business in Denmark and Sweden.
- Expand the business into the US.
The approach
APPROACH 1: RESEARCH NEW MARKETS
- As the Scandinavian and US markets were completely new we continually researched how our campaigns and keywords should be different to the UK account.
- Different holiday and seasonal periods meant planning budgets in Scandinavia across the year completely differently to the UK.
- Different climates across the US meant domestic travel had to be more segmented.
APPROACH 2: REVIEW CURRENT STRUCTURE
- The current structure is broken into targeting general golf +trip/tour/holidays etc, locations (golf + london/ireland/scotland etc) and venue (golf +the belfry/st Andrews etc).
- These were then split into modified broad and exact campaigns only.
APROACH 3: SCRIPTS & BETAS
- Our Keyword Checker script instantly cross matches with all live keywords in the account and fires back whether A) they are in the account B) they are live/paused and C) what match types do we have them in. We now have over 64,000 keywords in the UK.
- Scripts have been used for nearly all components of managing the 4 accounts.
- They have been used for bidding, search queries, ad scheduling, building new campaigns, customising ads, pulling in pricing, switching over to responsive ads in bulk and much, much, more.
- We used Google BETAs such as visual extensions and Ad variation to keep ahead of the competition.
APPROACH 4: EXTERNAL DATA
- We matched tournament dates to specific venue and location ad groups to ensure we are on top of the dramatic change in search behaviour when major tournaments are televised.
APROACH 5: ANALYSED CUSTOMER SEGMENTS
- Booking values in this industry can hugely differ between audiences. We’ve used CID tracking & end-user statistics to make positive decisions on where and how we bid and spend budget using external data.
- In the US we made use of the average income options and in the UK we’ve used age and gender data to create a robust bidding strategy across the board and at venue level. Golfbreaks are a great lover of data and have invested heavily in bringing external and internal data together.
- The US account, in particular, had to be run in two stages. 1) Research and grow leads for those in the US looking for long haul trips to the UK, & 2) the huge prospect of opening up domestic travel in the US.
- Considering the US has 45% of all golf courses in the world (over 34,000) we’ve built scripts to copy and replace venues, locations and heavily used keywords (vacation as opposed to holiday to make everything localised) to very quickly build tight campaigns.
The results
UNITED STATES
- Comparing Jan- May 2018 to Jan – May 2016 the budget has increased by 420%.
- Online enquiries have risen by 1,020%.
- The cost per conversion has decreased by 62%.
- We are now running across 8 domestic states with plans to move to another 4 by the end of the year.
- The team size in the US has risen from 3 to 7.
UNITED KINGDOM
- Comparing Jan – May 2018 to Jan – May 2017 the budget has been increased by 23%.
- Online enquiries have risen by 40%.
- Gross profit has increased by 15%.
