Running 90% of all lastminute.com’s PPC Category accounts
Absorb began working with lastminute.com on a consultation basis in March 2009, to help turn around lastminute.com’s PPC activity – which at the time was only Brand, Hotels and Car Hire. We quickly identified that Brand and Hotels were being managed poorly by lastminute.com’s previous agency.
We pinpointed Brand as a very quick win and were given the scope to implement changes to the Brand account. In a matter of weeks we made the Brand campaign highly profitable and highly efficient – increasing daily bookings by up to 20%.
lastminute.com ended their relationship with their previous agency and Absorb took over, beginning with a complete overhaul of lastminute.com’s most important category – Hotels. We restructured the whole Hotels account in the UK as well as in France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. In the UK we regularly hit and exceeded their Hotels efficiency targets.
During this period lastminute.com also asked Absorb to manage the City Breaks category (previously switched off due to it being unprofitable) and we took over this account and instantly hit and exceeded their efficiency target. Brand continued to perform very strongly and that performance continues today.
Absorb are running 90% of all lastminute.com’s travel category accounts consisting of
- Hotels
- Holidays
- City Breaks
- and most recently Flights.
Flights Case Study
The whole of the Flights category had previously been switched off by lastminute.com in September 2008 had not been live since. Previously, it was highly unprofitable and, internally, all attempts to reverse this trend had failed. The Flights category has the smallest margin of all lastminute.com categories – and therefore can be extremely challenging to drive profit off the back of this, and would therefore, only yield relatively small revenue for any external agency, so driving maximum performance here is essential.
In early December 2009, lastminute.com gave Absorb instructions to devise and manage a Flights category PPC trial – to go live in the first week of January and run for 6 weeks.
After setting the Flights trial live within the agreed timeframe, we have since seen the following results:
- The Flights trial was breaking even within a couple of weeks of implementation. This exceeded lastminute.com’s expectations as the initial goal was to bring the category into profitability by the 6th week.
- The Flights trial was in profit half-way through the trial.
- lastminute.com were so encouraged by the results that they requested we continue the PPC management for flights indefinitely.
- As Week-on-Week performance continued to improve, lastminute.com asked us to double the size of the activity and add additional destinations.
- After the new wave of destinations were added, performance remained strong.
- During the volatile period in late April and early May brought on by the volcanic ash cloud, the Flights category was the only category at lastminute.com to consistently perform strongly and make profit.
