The Hunt
GoAir provides domestic air travel services within India. It operates in 11 destinations with 60 flights and a garage 3600 tickets inventory in different circles. The complexity of the system meant that search engines were unable to read the different destinations and dynamisms of ticket costs which are very competitive at domestic travel. In addition, the previous campaigns which were run by Google achieved moderate success but failed in driving booking in the market conditions. To date, search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns were conducted only occasionally, at the country level, without consistent monitoring and evaluation. GoAir needed an effective creative campaign with a competent SEM strategy.

The Labs Touch
The id8labs team came up with the SEM campaign which was initially implemented for a two-month trial period for just 30,000 keywords with 10,000 text ads in 47 verticals. Based on the results of this pilot program, the campaign was gradually rolled out across 0.1mill words and close to 20,000 text words. Then next step was to establish relevant search terms, based on the search terms, a campaign budget was defined and forecasts made of expected traffic levels. Keywords not expected to generate significant traffic were dropped or used for long tail effect.

The campaign was further divided into different groups of ads that reflected the defined search terms. Where possible, an individual deep link was defined for every search term, ensuring the strongest possible correspondence between search term and target web page. The rates for different sectors or routes were dynamically picked up from Booking engine through RSS and updated in Google and subsequently to Landing Pages.

Result
Before the campaign went live, tracking scripts were implemented across the entire website. The tracking system was then structured to give each division easy online access to the data. After going live, click prices, search terms, ad texts, and deep links were optimized on a daily basis, while complying with the defined cost per lead. The campaign achieved 40,000 leads per month with 62% conversion on booking engine, to add to it the bounce rate drastically reduced from 82% to 23%. The end result was far more than satisfying and the target set was achieved.