Rail Europe Increases Revenue the Support of Webtrends Ads

Overview

Rail Europe is the leading authority for train travel throughout Europe since setting up shop in New York City over a century ago. Rail Europe helps over one million travelers discover the rich heritage and scenic landscapes of Europe by train every year.

Over 60% of Rail Europe’s business is generated via online sales – and it’s not just selling rail passes. Rail Europe offers a wide range of European travel products including: reservations, airport transfers, luggage services, excursions & hotel packages and museum passes for Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Madrid, Barcelona, Rome, Florence, Paris, Prague and virtually every city in the UK. There’s even a Beatles tour!

Advertising these services, finding just the right audiences for the right products and optimizing campaign performance takes top-notch technology and digital marketing expertise. When Rail Europe sought to grow brand awareness in the U.S. and Canada, increase orders and accomplish everyone’s number one business goal – expand revenue – they turned to Webtrends Ads.

Challenge

Overall business challenges from 2009 to 2010:

• Diminishing margins on travel required a 15 percent lower Cost per order within same ad spend limits
• Increase overall yield on ad spend while Increasing revenue targets
• Expanded North America beyond the US and into Canada
• The Bing Alliance left the advertiser with less transparency and control

Solution

Working closely with Rail Europe over the course of more than two years, the Webtrends Ads team functions as a virtual extension of the company’s digital marketing division utilizing both the Webtrends Ads and Analytics in tandem.

• Expanded on Google display
• Remarketing on Google content
• Added Google Sitelinks to branded and non-branded campaigns
• Expanded to Google CA and expanded Bing campaigns
• Keyword expansion and regionalization of campaigns to KW specific Landing pages
• Optimization of bidding

The Webtrends Ads solution includes SEM strategy designed to support corporate growth and key performance indicators. Webtrends Ads supports day-to-day bid optimization, offers recommendations to ensure optimal ROI on ad spend and includes microstrategy development designed to address both seasonal and regional opportunities – important for a marketer within the travel industry such as Rail Europe whose sales cycle fluctuates with the seasons.

Webtrends Ads offers digital marketers an end-to-end, data-driven solution for creating, measuring and improving performance marketing across global paid search, content networks and Facebook in one easy-to- use, integrated solution delivering top return on ad spend (ROAS), enabling digital optimization through true customer insights.

Results

On Google, Rail Europe saw 16 percent year over year revenue growth in the U.S. market and 10 percent year over year revenue growth in Canada despite the competitive travel environment as a result of aggressive optimizations and targeted keyword expansion. Results from the same tactics on Bing were equally impressive with revenue increasing nearly 30 percent year over year in the North American market. Additionally, Rail Europe was able to scale performance while increasing their investment in paid search. Through localization and sophisticated bidding strategies enabled by the Webtrends Ads patented bidding algorithm, cost per order decreased by 18 percent and revenue grew by 15.8 percent all while the search investment was increased.