The QBE Autumn International and RBS Six Nations matches at Twickenham, are Hospitality Finder's most important fixtures in the sporting calendar. To ensure maximum online visibility during the 2014 seasons, we were tasked with the following:

• Drive as many online enquiries as possible, which their Sales team would then follow up on over the phone.

• Because of the potential value of an enquiry which then ended in a group booking, to a degree Hospitality Finder were willing to be flexible on cost per acquisition (CPA) but a general target was set to £100. As and when this figure was reached in a given week or month we would then discuss which fixture it related to before making a decision on any bid reductions or further actions.
• There was also an underlying brand awareness objective to maintain a strong and consistent ad position in the banner slots on the Google search results pages for searches on international rugby during the two month peak period around these fixtures.

We elected to build two main Search campaigns for the Autumn International Rugby Tests; one for the England fixtures at Twickenham and one for the other home nation's fixtures in Dublin, Cardiff, and Edinburgh.

Campaign Structure
Ad group structure was chosen to separate generic keywords from those explicitly referencing 'corporate hospitality, VIP packages…etc.' so each match had two ad groups, allowing us to compare, monitor, and report back on performance separately. Additionally, we built a 'Venues' campaign with ad groups containing non match-specific 'hospitality' keywords for each stadium in the series.

Remarketing
We utilised the AdWords remarketing pixel to re-target visitors who had looked at rugby-related pages on the site over a certain amount of time. Hospitality Finder's target customers are a combination of individuals and corporate bookings, and Hospitality Finder know that people interested in bookings for the Six Nations are also highly likely to be interested in the Autumn matches. We settled on a longer time period to build a larger cookie pool including visitors browsing pages for either of these events.

Sitelinks
In addition to these campaigns we utilised six descriptive sitelinks at ad group level to further enhance click through rate (CTR) and try to encourage more conversions; these sitelinks were specific to teams playing in a given fixture ad group, so that we could also upsell the other fixtures during the series. We also used Autumn Internationals sitelinks on their Six Nations campaigns and vice a versa to tap into the larger potential customer pool of people interested in hospitality for international rugby.

Optimisation
Finally, to maintain the prominent high ad position as requested we utilised proprietary bid management software to adjust bids daily targeting specific positions at both ad group and keyword level, whilst also reviewing the performance of these keywords frequently and making manual adjustments based on keyword level CPAs.

Results

By building comprehensive new campaigns separating generic and hospitality-related terms for every match in each of these events, and driving further enquiries through remarketing, we greatly reduced the overall CPA (online enquiry submissions) year on year in November while conversions rose significantly.

• 52% increase in clicks for the Autumn International Rugby campaigns
• 6% increase in CTR
• 51% reduction in CPA
• 350% increase in conversions (online enquiry submissions
   

“If you're looking to for a company to enhance your pay-per-click campaigns, I would highly recommend both Daniel Stock and Merkle. During the time I've worked alongside them I've been impressed with their proactive approach and insightful analysis, which ultimately had led to us seeing improved performance from our campaigns. Keep up the good work!”

Amir Eloush, Marketing Manager, Hospitality Finder