case study

The MyTravel Group, one of the UK's largest tour operators incorporating Airtours, Direct Holidays and MyTravel to name but a few, recognised that in an industry as competitive as travel, being at the cutting edge of new online initiatives was essential in reaching the changing consumer. This understanding led to the need for a search and online marketing campaign,.

Challenge

As the internet drastically alters the way in which travel is purchased, and with over 16.4 million overseas holidays booked online every year, ambergreen recognised the importance of a strong online presence in a market of price sensitive consumers. The majority of visitors were finding the MyTravel sites based purely on brand, but in order to increase revenue consumers had to be caught in the early stages of the buying cycle.

Solution

In order to increase visitors and sustain a strong online presence, ambergreen developed a strategy that would not only deliver tangible results in the short term, but also ensure that essential knowledge and skills were passed to MyTravel in order to sustain and develop the strategy in the long term.

Over the first year, ambergreen worked with MyTravel to overcome technical barriers, while fresh additional content was developed to provide a more worthwhile user experience and establish the sites as a hub of valuable holiday destination information.

As users begin researching holidays as far as nine months in advance of booking, using generic terms to find information, ambergreen identified high volume search phrases and created pages to reflect these, in a bid to capture early consumers in the first stages of a holiday purchase.

ambergreen also developed detailed training sessions designed to educate in-house teams, enabling them to become independent in their online marketing activities in the long term.

Result

Since working with ambergreen, the MyTravel sites natural search rankings for popular consumer driven terms has increased dramatically, with revenues from non branded terms increasing by 311%.

Despite these positive figures, the real achievement for ambergreen came from the training and development of in-house knowledge. MyTravel are closer to reaching their goal of becoming a search centre of excellence, which in the travel sector, is one destination everyone is trying to reach.

'ambergreen is a world class SEO company and as experts in search they ... help us... provide our online customers with the best possible service.'

Russell Gould, Director of Digital Marketing, MyTravel