Eurostar speeds ahead with dynamic search campaign
Overview
Eurostar is the high-speed railway service connecting London with various European cities via the Channel Tunnel. Its website houses a large quantity of landing pages featuring content on the service’s range of destinations.
The Eurostar team wanted to leverage this content to expand the reach of its search marketing. But like many businesses, Eurostar.com had a dizzying array of landing pages to choose from.
In order for Eurostar to serve the user with the right content at the right moment, it overhauled its search strategy - and saw an 86% higher click-through rate than generic search campaigns as a result.
Partnering with iProspect, Eurostar used Google’s Dynamic Search Ads (DSA). This meant that, when a user enters a search on Google that’s relevant to Eurostar, DSA generates an ad with a headline, based on the query and with text based on the most relevant landing page. This gave the brand broader exposure without requiring changes to existing keyword campaigns.
Eurostar and iProspect began by identifying the top content pages to target. To decrease inefficient spend and increase return on investment, they also introduced strong negative coverage for site content that wouldn’t generate revenue, such as the customer service page.
What was the role of digital within the media mix?
Alongside refining the URL strategy, the team closely aligned Eurostar’s business objectives regarding key routes to the DSA campaign structure. It created destination-focused campaigns to be sure of maximising important routes based on availability, offers and seasonality, resulting in more tailored ad copy and far greater relevance for users.
With an eye on performance, the team also implemented audience bid adjustments. It used Google Analytics and Remarketing Lists for search ads to find in-market audiences across each ad group, and then optimised the bidding to a target cost per acquisition. Targets were also set at campaign level based on destination.
Key statistics
What results did you attain? What was the biggest achievement?
These strategies paid off, with the DSA campaigns producing a whopping 86% higher click-through rate than generic search campaigns and a 20% incremental increase in revenue.
The approach taken has also contributed to strong performance year-on-year from search: overall, Eurostar has seen 20% higher click-through rates, 10% lower costs per click, 26% more transactions and 37% more revenue as a result.
The strategy proves how important it is to align business objectives with campaign structure, and how brands can use DSA to adapt messaging according to what customers are searching for.
In a sentence...
How Eurostar ads presented the right services at the right time thanks to dynamic search.
