CUSTOMER STORY

With a sophisticated, data-driven programmatic advertising strategy, Ve enabled Shearings to bring abandoned bookers back to their site and encourage more online users to complete their booking.

Shearings Holidays.

A bit about Shearings...Shearings Holidays is the UK’s number one

coach holiday tour operator, offering travelers

coach, air, rail, cruise and hotel breaks across

Europe and beyond.

With extensive expertise in the travel industry,

Ve employed a data-driven programmatic

advertising strategy, incorporating the

segmentation of specific audiences, brand

safety protection and continuous campaign

testing and optimisation.

CPA in the first month

£6.98CPA in April 2016 Average number of

conversions from each campaign

£6.03 400

The main aim Shearings wanted to achieve was to reach a lower cost-per-

acquisition whilst driving incremental bookings. But in an industry that

faces tough competition, a prolonged booker research phase, as well

as a particularly high abandonment rate of 81%, this can be a complex

challenge. Ve’s programmatic advertising solution, matched with industry

knowledge from the account management team, built out a strategy to

effectively achieve this goal.

Display retargetingAbandoned bookers were served static and dynamic retargeting ads to

encourage them to return to the Shearings website and complete their

booking. The ad creative and messaging were based on each user’s

individual customer intent data, booking summary or stage in the booker

journey, boosting conversion.

A frequency cap was also implemented to ensure brand protection. Retirees

are Shearings’ prominent target audience, so using a combination of

proprietary and second party data, Ve accurately retargeted this particular

segment by layering a mix of behavioural data to give a complete 360 view

of the target Shearings customer.

Intelligent campaign optimisationThrough animated HTML5, native creative and data-led imagery that was

seasonality-specific, Ve adapted creative for every user segment to increase

engagement. The account management team also implemented a reactive

strategy to take advantage of seasonal opportunities, creating personalised

sales messaging, for example, to coincide with the Bank Holiday Sale.

We were initially working with another retargeting provider, but due to Ve’s performance within the first month we moved our retargeting budget to Ve completely. Achieving a CPA as low as £6.03 within the first couple of months when the initial target was to get below £10 was very impressive.”

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