An airport client re-wrote the rules to achieve better performance
The client advertised short-term, long-term, covered and valet parking to travelers in a specific geographical region. They wished to halve their budgeted online spend for ‘always-on’ parking as an arbitrary starting point to reduced advertising costs.
Objectives Reduce budgets but look for ways to make spend work harder – optimising conversions and test new strategies to deliver better performance.
Insight Preconceived ideas about parking, like people who live close to the airport are less likely to drive and park when travelling, may be false until proven with actual data. We found ‘pockets’ of suburbs close to the airport that delivered significant bookings because people living there could afford to park and the ease of travelling was more important to them.
Strategy We divided the total market catchment into two zones. An outer zone where long distance travel meant Uber and taxi pricing far out-weighed the cost of parking. An inner zone where Uber and taxi pricing were comparable or economically better than parking. Within both these regions we broke it down further into geo targeted suburbs so that we could measure conversions. We used search, display and remarketing and used different levels of display to test the effect of awareness on search performance. We introduced video into remarketing to demonstrate a new guided parking system to show the ease of parking. We discarded not performing suburbs and increased spend on performing ones.