Supercharging customer growth with data, automation & Channable

Sunweb Group partnered with DEPT to enhance its Search Engine Advertising (SEA) bookings. However, before focusing on growth, the travel operator needed to address the complexities and inefficiencies in its ad campaign management.

The COVID-19 pandemic severely impacted the travel industry, leading to canceled vacations, grounded flights, and restricted movements. Sunweb Group, one of Europe’s largest travel operators, survived the disruption by undergoing an organizational reset.

Prioritizing growth, Sunweb initiated a collaboration with DEPT, a leading marketing and technology agency, supported by a significant migration project involving Channable and Search Ads 360 (SA360).

The objective

Sunweb’s primary objective was to increase SEA bookings during the early season (January) by 5% compared to 2019. This goal was broken down into three key performance indicators (KPIs):

1. Effectiveness: Integrate data and automation for more actionable insights and fewer standalone campaigns. The goal was to reduce the number of current campaigns by 80% (from 1650 to 200) to deliver higher performance.

2. Efficiency: Managing campaigns had to become more efficient. The goal was to reduce the time spent on managing campaigns by 20%.

3. Scalability: The new setup had to be scalable for multiple countries, labels, and channels to reduce time and costs by 50%. The goal was to reduce the time spent on migration for one account/country from 50 hours to 25 hours, lowering migration costs per label significantly.
   

A strategy crafted collaboratively

DEPT quickly identified that enhancing efficiency at Sunweb was crucial to fostering growth. The Sunweb team was managing campaigns across seven markets and more than six brands, resulting in a substantial workload.

Ongoing Google Ads campaigns were divided into different accounts per country with distinctions per season, leading to thousands of campaigns that required individual management.

The strategy and roadmap focused on enhancing the performance and efficiency of the paid channels. To achieve the set goals and KPIs, a future-proof setup for Google and Microsoft Ads was needed. The previous, complex campaign setup (before 2022) was time-consuming due to the manual connections and optimizations required.

DEPT collaborated with Sunweb to reshape all of its brands and countries in Google and Microsoft Ads into a future-proof, fully automated setup using Search Ads 360 (SA360). The team switched tooling, moving away from bGenius to adopt Search Ads 360 and Channable.

All connections from various data sources were automated and aggregated, allowing Sunweb to maintain a broad audience while operating more efficiently.

By reorganizing the campaign structure and management, a future-proof setup was established for Sunweb, Eliza Was Here, GOGO, and Primavera. This improved both effectiveness and efficiency, which is crucial in the current travel industry landscape.

DEPT quickly identified that all of Sunweb’s campaign connections needed to be automated and consolidated, regardless of the data source. In partnership with DEPT, Sunweb decided to migrate its old processes to SA360 and restructure the feed and account setup using Channable to enable more efficient operations.

The strategy developed by DEPT allowed Sunweb to reach its target audience more effectively. The optimized setup became better organized due to data integration and automation opportunities.

Given the significance of the channel and country, the migration began with Search in the Netherlands before scaling to other channels and markets.

Implementation challenges

The strategy devised for Sunweb represented one of the most complex Channable and SA360 migration projects undertaken by DEPT. The migration extended beyond Google Ads and Channable, requiring innovative thinking. Several challenges emerged during the process:

A complete redesign

The entire digital marketing structure was rebuilt in Channable, from campaigns to ads and keywords. This approach ensured a centralized platform for all paid campaigns, using Channable feeds as inputs for SA360.

Business data and other tools in SA360 were used, bypassing the Channable PPC tool. Over 300 feeds were redesigned and enriched with offline data, such as sales priority and lowest prices. For example, a separate import for destination-level priority was processed in SA360, allowing adjustments at the campaign and ad group levels to optimize bidding strategies.

Disparate data sources

More than 50 different data sources were connected to an extensive Channable setup, which served as the central hub for all feeds and channels across all brands and countries. This setup drove all channels, including affiliate, social, search, and display.

Keeping things up to date in real-time

Scalability and technical challenges were encountered, such as maintaining over 20,000 accommodations up-to-date in real-time in SA360 despite a maximum of 20 business data uploads allowed per day. These and other limitations of Google Ads were addressed through complex feed management and smart rules in Channable.

Delivering results

By focusing on automation-driven growth in managing all of Sunweb’s campaigns, DEPT successfully achieved all of the client’s goals within nine months, revitalizing and future-proofing the group’s entire digital marketing setup.

The number of ongoing campaigns was significantly reduced, enabling Sunweb to innovate its digital marketing practices. The migration minimized manual campaign management, resulting in substantial time and cost savings.

As a result of these efforts, Sunweb achieved excellent results, with PPC bookings increasing by 23% during the early booking season, greatly surpassing the objective for 2022.

The following results were also achieved as a result of the automation:

• Effectiveness: The number of campaigns was reduced from 1650 to 136, leading to an approximate 60% reduction in manual work hours for campaign management.

• Efficiency: As a result of more efficient campaign organization with Channable, Sunweb was able to manage campaigns with their core team again. The result was a 35% time saving on campaign management, allowing for an extra 224 hours per month to be spent on more strategic and innovative projects.

• Scalability: The migration framework can now be easily replicated across Sunweb’s accounts. Adding a new country or label now takes only around 15 hours, reducing work by approximately 70%.

This case study demonstrates how Channable’s campaign management processes empowered DEPT to deliver exceptional service for its client Sunweb. By greatly exceeding KPIs, the Sunweb Group can now prioritize growth in an industry primed for expansion in the aftermath of the pandemic.