Increasing Website Clicks With Eurail

Increasing website clicks with mobile-first Facebook video ads
The European rail pass network increasing website clicks by 7.7X more link clicks from mobile-friendly animated video ads than from photo ads when it compared formats in a Facebook campaign to build awareness and consideration.

The plan

Eurail provides travellers from all over the world the opportunity to experience flexible, borderless train travel in Europe. Every year, its Eurail and Interrail passes are used by more than 600,000 people to explore up to 33 European countries via 250,000 kilometres of interconnected railways.

Attracting website visitors

Eurail wanted to encourage people to use its service by motivating them to visit and explore its website during a traditionally quiet time of year for travel. It also wanted to use this off-promotional opportunity to experiment with new ways of creating mobile-first ad creatives.

Getting creative with a Facebook Marketing Partner

For this experimental campaign, Eurail and digital agency NMPi joined forces with Facebook Marketing Partner Shuttlerock, which specialises in transforming still images into captivating mobile video. Shuttlerock took some of Eurail’s existing image assets and user-generated content, then used animated branded overlays to produce exciting video ad creative. It also created versions optimised for the vertical Instagram Story format. The team then tested the performance of these new ad creative against still photo ads in a Facebook split test.
To run the test, Eurail created Custom Audiences of website visitors and past purchasers, plus a lookalike audience based on similar people. Then, in a series of prospecting and retargeting ads seen across Facebook and Instagram, it showed the photo ads to half of the overall audience and Shuttlerock’s animated video creative to another half of the audience. Facebook Insights allowed Eurail to compare the performance of both ad creative approaches with like-for-like results.

The outcome

Eurail’s January 2019 campaign demonstrated that the animated Shuttlerock ad creative comprehensively outperformed the photo ads across the board. Compared to photo ads, the animated ad creative resulted in:

• 3.2X more landing page views

• 7.7X more link clicks

• 78% lower cost per click