Client ATLAS OBSCURA
How a Travel and Experience Brand Drove Over 70% YoY Revenue Growth in Q1 2022 Through Performance Marketing
OVERVIEW
Atlas Obscura is a global travel community offering a range of publications, trips, and online courses. Their mission is to inspire wonder and curiosity about the incredible world we all share. With millions of visitors each year, Atlas Obscura is a leading travel publication providing unique trips and experiences to thousands of people.
OpenMoves has been working with Atlas Obscura since 2020 with an objective to drive online sales for trips and courses through paid media. The OpenMoves team has managed PPC for this exciting travel and experience brand on both Google Ads and Facebook/Instagram ads with many different campaign objectives, strategies and audiences.
70%
Lift in YoY ecommerce revenue in Q1 2022
100%
Lift in YoY ecommerce conversion rate in Q1 2022
100%
Improvement in user engagement from Google Ads
20m+
Users reached profitably on FB and IG
CLIENT TESTIMONIAL
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The OpenMoves team has been a really key partner for us on performance marketing! The team I work with is very responsive and always attentive to detail and deadlines. They are always ready with the reporting and updates we need and our PPC performance this year has been really important to driving our overall success.
THE CHALLENGE
It goes without saying that marketing travel over the last few years has been very challenging and dynamic with rapid changes in travel regulations and public sentiment impacting marketers’ ability to spend effectively and drive success, even for future bookings.
Furthermore, for Atlas Obscura the overall offering to market was highly complex, including many unique trips, online courses and experiences, all with different validity dates, different target markets and buyers, unique performance objectives and customized creative.
Finally, just like any other advertiser, Atlas Obscura needed to hit well defined performance goals in order to justify PPC spending and continue scaling. These performance metrics were more difficult to achieve given recent global uncertainty.
Primary Goals
Drive profitable trip sales for Atlas Obscura across a diverse range of travel programs in a challenging macroeconomic climate
Grow online course and experience sales in alignment with a complex calendar and multiple goals
Generate awareness and top funnel engagement for Atlas Obscura that can later be capitalized on through email marketing and other channels
Be flexible in response to demand, available inventory, and changing global conditions to promote the right offer at the right time
OPENMOVES PPC TEAM
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Atlas Obscura is a really exciting brand to work with! It has been great to see success with Google Ads across a range of campaigns and objectives, especially given the overall travel industry challenges lately! It’s definitely a unique effort given the need to produce a lot of different campaigns for different trips and courses places, and as with many clients that have long sales cycles measurement can be a challenge, but I love working with the Atlas team and our results so far this year have been great!
The Solution
Leaning into Machine Learning and Automation. Across both Google Ads and Facebook Ads our media buying team found success leveraging modern campaign types and strategies that use machine learning to deliver the right ads to the right audiences. On the FB/IG platform for example, by setting up a strong measurement strategy aligned with account structure best practices we were able to target broad audiences and allow the FB ads algorithm to find buyers across both trips and courses.
Succeeding with Creative Diversity. Atlas Obscura is definitely a creative-driven brand and the AO team provided us with great creative assets optimized to paid social. Importantly, in alignment with our automation strategies, AO was able to provide a diversity of creative including static ads and carousels, images with and without embedded text, images with and without people, and so on. By showing paid social audiences a range of creative messaging throughout their experience with Atlas Obscura we were able to drive proven incremental performance compared to single-ad audiences.
Full Funnel Approach. In the world of travel, brand is key and the user journey from awareness to purchase can be months away. This was certainly a key factor for OpenMoves in planning and understanding the AO PPC strategy. We knew that most upper funnel campaigns would be hard to measure to direct transactions, but that brand and remarketing would be highly profitable and we could measure across total web lift and across different attribution models to track success. Building campaigns including awareness, prospecting, and remarketing across both Google Ads and Facebook Ads was key to driving the user journey from awareness to purchase.
Comprehensive Campaign Planning. Atlas Obscura was a highly collaborative partner with OpenMoves, providing our media team with extensive planning and direction around trip and course availability and timing, creative assets and strategy, and budget allocation. In the same way, OM provided AO with extensive campaign success reporting and KPI tracking, allowing for a collaboration between teams that produced a nimble and coordinated campaign that successfully executed multiple variables at scale.
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HIGHER EDUCATION
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