Opodo is an online travel company selling a variety of travel products such as flights and hotels. They were unsure of the role that online advertising played as part of their media mix. The question was: Does online advertising affect brand metrics, or is it simply a direct response medium?
A campaign to promote the Hotels category was set up as a discrete test - with no other Opodo activity. The campaign ran on three websites, sponsoring hotel sections with a heavy presence in travel channels of This is Travel, The Guardian/Observer and Tiscali. We chose these sites so that we were testing the different stages in the purchase cycle - active travel buyers, travel lifestyle readers and 'passing trade'
We ran the campaign through the DoubleClick DART adserving system to cover quantitative metrics and then implemented an online awareness survey, AdIndex, to test for qualitative shifts.
The campaign was a huge success, significantly increasing aided awareness (up 15%), message association (up 165%), and ad awareness (up 29%).
As well as a huge brand success the Opodo hotel campaign was also extremely profitable. The campaign was tracked right through to the sale and showed that not only did the brand campaign fall into the direct response cost-per-sale but it generated E15 of revenue for every E1 spent!
In answer to their original question, online advertising drives sales and shifts awareness metrics - and MediaCom proved it, while also giving the client valuable information on how best to use the medium. All Opodo campaigns now using our tracking. Proven campaigns have led to extra budget - and extra business for Opodo!
"We were extremely pleased with the results from the online Hotel campaign both in terms of the branding effect but also the sales it generated.
MediaCom were really helpful - making everything extremely clear and ensuring the campaign ran smoothly"
