Wild Frontiers, PPC

Wild Frontiers is a premium tour operator with over 25 years’ experience in creating extraordinary travel experiences. Specialising in small group tours and tailor-made holidays worldwide, we joined forces with their in-house team to build on their current PPC activity.

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Brief

Drive high-quality leads in the form of enquiry forms and phone calls via Wild Frontiers’ website as well as securing online and offline bookings from our campaigns on Google and Microsoft Ads. Run a variety of campaigns, promoting a range of destinations in three target markets – the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia.

Challenges & Solutions

Budget vs Priority Pushes

Wild Frontiers offer tours to a large variety of destinations, however for good visibility we would need a considerable amount of media spend to compete across all destinations effectively. Whilst budgets were strong over peak periods, we were conscious to not spread ourselves too thin in each auction.

High Competition

As part of the travel and tourism sector, Wild Frontiers is up against aggressive competition from large companies, and even non-direct brand’s blanket bidding. This results in higher CPCs on core keywords and lower than optimum impression share. Ensuring we were choosing the right keywords was instrumental in our approach.

Out-dated Account Structure

Whilst the account was performing well, the structure could have been modernised to make the most of the budget, restructuring for ease of analysis, account growth, and working to Google’s recommendations. Previously the account had many campaigns live so our initial focus was on how we can implement the best structure.

Our Approach

Our goal was to develop a new account structure that harnessed Google’s automation capabilities, adopted the most modern structure following updated best practices to increase the chance of showing in more ad auctions, improve quality scores, ad strength and efficiency metrics, as well as allowing for flexibility and growth in seasonal periods.

By adopting a stringent auditing process, we produced a campaign restructure plan of three phases. Phase 1 focused on optimising the top 5 legacy campaigns to leave these live whilst we transitionally launched new ones preventing sending the whole account back into learning. We focused our phase 1 builds on client priorities, so we were able to enter the travel peak selling period with campaigns that had gone through the learning phase by the time we reached the peak period.

Phase 2 focused on non-priority destinations and new campaign types such as display and performance max campaigns to capitalise on the already strong performance we were seeing from an existing campaign. This allowed us to serve across a selection of networks and channels to accommodate the change in consumer behaviour in the travel industry, where trust and brand presence have become more important post-pandemic.

Once we had launched our new campaigns, we worked on improving efficiencies through reviewing our audience strategy, ad scheduling, and strict use of negative keywords. We started to see an uplift in certain campaign types and certain destinations in each market. Our goals were focused on lowering account CPAs and hitting conversion rate and ROAS targets across destinations.

Phase 3 has been focused on a selection of A/B tests which have fed into our ongoing strategies. Our restructure aimed to improve account efficiency and was built in a way that scaling budgets up and down is more manageable. As we enter the lower season for travel, we have still been able to maintain an account CPA within target, as well as activity improving the channels ROAS and cost-per-booking.

Results

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Increase in Online Revenue

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Reduction in CPA

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Increase in CTR

Quote

“We have been delighted with the work the Talking Stick team have done on our PPC account. They have taken the time to really understand our brand and have crafted campaigns that fit with our product priorities and business strategy. They are quick to respond to requests, which is so important in the world of travel where anything can and does happen, and regularly share insights from the latest trends in search, which is a huge help to our digital team.” Michael Pullman, Head of Marketing