Case Study - British Airways - SEO & PPC

Objectives

Bigmouthmedia’s search account for British Airways has pushed the boundaries of campaign integration while synchronising the airline’s online strategy with its promotions and sales processes. The net result has been to break new ground in terms of what can be achieved with a leading edge digital marketing strategy.

After a successful track record of multi-channel campaigns, bigmouthmedia and British Airways partnered again to launch an ambitious search campaign aimed at:

• Creating content-rich landing pages that would rank well organically for key destinations and provide a high quality score for paid search
• Reducing PPC spend for expensive “flights to ” keywords
• Ensuring PPC was used tactically to drive incremental sales volume

Our Solution

1. Aggressive Landing Page Strategy

Bigmouthmedia focused on content development with the creation of new landing pages packed with destination-specific information. The pages were attractive, unique, rich in keywords and valuable to both visitors and search engines. In addition to being fundamentally sound from an SEO perspective, the pages provided a clear path to sale in an attempt to increase the conversion rate for the competitive generic keywords which would be driving the traffic to the new pages.

The resulting 400% increase in rankings for “flights to” keywords meant that paid search spend was reduced substantially for the generic keywords which were now ranking well. This enabled campaign budgets to be focussed on more cost effective longer tail terms and other destinations where BA had less of a search presence.

2. Implementation of a Unique Bid Management System

The improved rankings in SEO coupled with the clients’ need to build business information such as seat availability into their online strategy led to the creation of a PPC bid management model that split all BA's routes into three tiers to ensure budget was spent as eectively as possible. The tier model was essentially used as a system to prioritize routes which had low SEO rankings and high seat availability. This ensured that PPC was driving incremental sales and not cannibalizing other channels where sales would have been captured regardless.

According to this innovative model, if a route is identified as likely to sell out regardless of PPC activity, it is automatically placed in the low priority Tier 3 section for PPC – which means adverts will appear in a low position within the search results.

A finely-tuned tier model has many advantages as it:

• Ensures there is a correct budget balance between PPC and SEO investment
• Minimises cannibalisation between channels
• Helps design PPC campaigns that are a lot more tactical and strategic
• Focuses on incremental sales, not traffic
• Maximises the return on investment of online marketing spend

3. Enhanced Focus on Reporting and Analytics

Despite the numerous advances in online marketing, there still are very few companies correctly embracing reporting and analytics. In most cases duplication across channels abounds, and few companies truly understand that to ensure the success of an online marketing campaign it is necessary to take a holistic view covering all channels.

In this respect, the British Airways campaign stays well ahead of the pack with an integrated tracking system that carefully compares each of the online channels and runs advanced exposure to conversion reports to identify all the user touch points before a conversion is made. This has enabled crucial analysis that has highlighted the relationship between search marketing and other online channels such as affiliates and display advertising.