Sawadee travel is a specialist in worldwide adventure group tours, family tours, tours for single travellers and active cyclists for the Dutch speaking markets.
Sawadee prides itself on its strong focus on sustainable travel. Based in Amsterdam, most travellers are from The Netherlands and Belgium. Sawadee is part of Travelopia Holding, a collective of over 50 travel brands.
Increase the revenue from AdWords campaigns 20% year on year with a set budget.
Ensure all campaigns are live in AdWords.
Work around seasonality; drastic changes in traffic and budget on a month to month basis.
Understand the industry trends and make sure the messaging is in line with brand.
Have a very thorough understanding of Sawadee’s business. The products being offered, the target group, seasonality, recurring campaigns.
Complete overhaul of existing AdWords campaigns; taking out all keywords that are too broad, identifying which keywords were used by people that are dreaming about their trip without necessarily wanting to book organised group travel.
Campaign structure: identified keywords that are essential and should be always on and keywords that are more generic and can be live when there is more budget available. This structure reflected the need to make budget changes to the campaigns in a short time frame and allowed for always having the most relevant keywords active when the budget was lower.
Put KPI reports in place where the focus was wider than transaction only. Making sure to not cut out the people that are searching the broader keywords as part of the search funnel in their journey to book.
Extensive use of RLSA with different text ads to reengage with previous visitors.
Use of the existing database to target recurring travellers.
39%
increase
in revenue from AdWords year on year.
9%
decrease
in cost per click
9%
decrease
in bounce rate
Sawadee operates in a highly competitive niche market. One of the challenges with the AdWords campaign is that the relevant keywords drive vast volume of traffic, but the relevancy is difficult to determine. Many broad keywords are used by visitors that could be interested in visiting a certain destination, while not wanting to book an organised group tour. To distinguish between visitors that use the website as a tourist guide or with an intention to book is tricky. Furthermore, the cost of clicks is high, due to the competitive nature of the business. Another challenge is the fluctuation of the budgets. There is much more budget available in the most important booking months, but the last thing Sawadee wants is using more generic keywords, spending the budget and not getting more bookings in return.
Riksta analysed the campaigns and found the keywords that converted best. She then structured the campaigns in a way that the important keywords (the converting keywords) were always on in a core campaign structure. This ensured that the months were the budget was minimal, only the most important keywords were running. In addition to that, many adgroups were set up that represented a build out of the core keywords. Still very relevant keywords, but with a much higher volume in traffic and therefore only suitable for the months that there is more budget available. This way, it is easy to adjust the campaign with the month on month budget changes without spending budget on irrelevant keywords or keywords that drive vast amount of traffic and do not convert.
Another key part of the strategy was to broaden the focus from transactions and revenue to a wider scope of several KPI’s to identify the funnel better. Which keywords led visitors to make the pre-book decision? By using this approach, the active keywords that are important in the early stages of the funnel are not being paused, even when they do not convert into a transaction straight away, which makes more sense, given the lead time that is common for Sawadee.
Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) has proven to be another powerful tool for Sawadee. By remarketing previous visitors, writing specific ads for them and emphasizing specific key information about specific trips, the conversion rate improved.
A lot of thought, time and effort was put in the writing of the ads. Working with different ads for different audiences and A/B testing with the marketing principle of scarcity has shown good results.
Industry trends have proven to be of great value for us too. For example, when the ‘Wie is de Mol’ was on tv in the Netherlands (a very popular tv show) that was filmed in Georgia, the search volume was going up a lot. Riksta noticed that and used that trend by allocating more budget and rewriting ads. This has led to a good return in investment on that destination for us.
The AdWords campaigns in the past financial year delivered a marked improvement in performance compared to previous year: Click-through rates increased by 12%, CPCs decreased by 9%, and revenue increased by 39%.
Bastiaan Govers, marketing manager for Sawadee: "I have worked with Riksta on and off for almost 10 years now. When working with a consultant remotely, there is always the consideration whether the remote situation impacts the outcome. Riksta is a highly experienced digital marketer; creative, honest and fun to work with. She is consistent and reliable and most importantly, under her management, our AdWords campaigns have delivered very impressive returns."
