Hotel.de

Efficient Frontier Maximizes Hotel.de’s Efficiency, Reducing Workload and Increasing Revenues

Overview

hotel.de AG, an Efficient Frontier client since June 2009, provides a comprehensive internet-based hotel reservation service through www.hotel.de and www.hotel.info. They service 3.3 million visitors per month and have more than 4 million registered customers. With so many visitors depending on accurate hotel information, hotel.de needed to make sure that their search engine marketing ads contain the most up-to-date hotel availability and pricing. By using Efficient Frontier's Advanced Campaign Management tool, which automatically creates comprehensive ads based on the latest available hotel rooms and prices, hotel.de reduced manual campaign management labor by 40% and increased sales by 20%.

Challenge

Ads targeted to individual hotels that include current pricing are very effective in increasing conversion rates and return on investment.  However, manually updating campaigns, ad groups, and ad copy for each change in hotel availability and price is not scalable. Hotel.de experienced this firsthand when they attempted to manage targeted ads manually. They found that determining which ads to activate and deactivate based on hotel availability was time consuming and ineffective; constantly updating hotel rates was nearly impossible.

Solution

To solve this problem, hotel.de uploaded a feed of their internal hotel database to the Efficient Frontier system.  The hotel database contains specific information for each hotel (name, address, rate, availability, etc.). Through the Advanced Campaign Management (CM) feature, they set up templates, which automatically insert data, such as a hotel's availability or price into the ads directly from the information in their hotel database.  Any change in the hotel.de internal database is automatically reflected in the ads dynamically created by the advanced campaign management tool. As a result, ads always include the most up to date and specific hotel information.

Results

By using the Advanced CM tool, hotel.de decreased the workload involved in campaign management by 40%. Due to this time savings, they are now able to focus on value added search marketing activities such as setting business metrics and goals.  They have also seen 16% higher conversion rates and sales have increased by 20%. Juergen Geier, Online Marketing Manger for SEM states: "Thank you for the steady implementation of client-tailored needs. It is truly a lot of fun to work with the Advanced Campaign Management tool and it has maximized our efficiency and allowed our search campaigns to be targeted and fully complete."