Etstur: Maximising Their Facebook Ads Spend

The holiday industry has one of the tightest profits margins in the world. Therefore, companies need to be smart with their marketing budget by fully maximising the potential benefits from campaigns.
Etstur was established in 1991, 28 years later and it now stands tall as Turkey’s largest travel company. Their tour packages go to over 100 destinates both within and outside Turkey. Being on the frontier of innovation and technology has allowed them to provide the best service possible, as Etstur was a pioneer for online booking in the early days of the internet and assessing customer satisfaction once their holiday was over.
As mentioned previously, it’s important for holiday firms to be efficient with their ad spend and so Etsture wanted to assess the difference that Facebook Ads was having on their brand awareness. This information would then be used to design their marketing plan to increase both online and offline sales effectively.

How did they do it?

In order to: create demand, drive online and offline sales whilst boosting app installs, Etstur ran a month-long campaign. Use of dynamic, video and photo ads allowed the company to raise brand awareness and inspire people to visit new places by showing viewers scenic imagery. The trip consideration feature helped Etstur optimise ad delivery to people that had the intent to travel. They also used ads to retarget to people who had previously shown an interest in the company by clicking through the site or the app. Fortunately, these ads were able to be delivered for the lowest cost across Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network using automatic placements.
A conversion lift test was then conducted to calibrate the current rule-based attribution model for increased accuracy. Put simply, this test compared the results of two different groups: those shown the Facebook ads and those not shown them in order to assess their online and offline purchases. Based on this, Etstur reconsigned that it’s previous attribution model (which used a cookie-based web analytics tool) had in fact undervalued Facebook’s impact. After a joint analysis with the Facebook Marketing Science team, a calibration factor was calculated, which inspired the redesign of Etstur’s internal reporting, and helped them to plan media spending better and allowed them to see a higher return on ad spend.
Being able to keep up to date with offline sales is difficult to the time lag, but Etsture integrated the Offline Conversion API with its customer management database so that they were able to measure the sales in near-real-time. The benefit of this was that it allowed them to optimise the campaign with the help of online signals from the website and app, whilst also utilising data from offline destinations (call centre and stores), where a large number of conversions happen. 
This campaign ran during March 8th - Apri 7th 2019. Seeing fantastic results, and setting the groundwork for more effective future campaigns: 

• 14.5X increase in incremental purchases from Facebook (compared to previous attribution model findings)

• 59X incremental return on ad spend

• 30% increase in revenue compared to a control group

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