Client Stories
Home Away / Holiday Rentals
Greg Grant
Hi. My name is Greg Grant. I run the UK business for the holding company, Home Away, and we're in the travel accommodations sector. Two brands - Holiday Rentals and Owners Direct. Previously I was the marketing director for Yahoo! UK, and before sector space for online home buying.
So our objectives for search marketing are to ensure that we can attract both owners, property owners, and travelers when they go on the Internet so when they're searching for properties abroad, they can find us in the most efficient way.
Search plays a very important part of our marketing mix, as you can imagine. For us, it's important that we try and attract customers and reach them in different sorts of media, and Internet is a core area for us because our business is purely online. Our CPA targets do fluctuate but not significantly. We have a very clear idea of what our CPA is and we work within tight parameters to deliver that. There are different objectives for us at different CPA levels and we try and make sure they are managed as effectively as possible throughout the year.
Describe the situation before working with Efficient Frontier
Before moving to Efficient Frontier, we as a company did work with an agency, but personally I've worked both with an agency and in-house in prior roles that I had, and both have their pros, and both have their cons. But we as a company are happy that we've decided to work with an agency such as Efficient Frontier.
So our holding company in America, Home Away, uses Efficient Frontier as their search engine marketing company, and when I joined the organization here, I was told that this was our partner in the U.S., and we evaluated them with other agencies and decided that, yes, they were indeed still the best partner for us in the U.K.
What influenced your decision to move to Efficient Frontier?
For me, a good agency's a balance of three things - good account management, and by that I mean good technical understanding of the search environment and also really good feedback and making sure that they're on top of your account. Two, having a technical solution that allows the bidding and effective management of your key words in a very competitive space in a technical environment, such as Google and Yahoo!. And three, an agency that wants to work alongside you to understand your business and work to continually optimize the drivers that are important for you. So we work very closely with our account manager, Surinder Puller, and her SMS expert, which is Phil Dance, and these two guys work very closely with us, and especially in the beginning stages of the account to get to grips with how business works and what we think is important, explaining their technology and putting a campaign in place that really, really works hard for us. They're both friendly and astute, and for us it's important that they remain in our account and continue to stand alongside us to drive our business fully.
What benefits have you experienced since working with Efficient Frontier?
In the month that we moved over to Efficient Frontier, we immediately saw significant gains on our click-through rates, on our ROIs and on our campaign size. This was important for us because we needed to immediately show the benefits of changing agencies. There were some key things for us we wanted to put in place, and not only were the numbers important but also making sure that we clicked with the agency. So from our perspective, the first couple of months have been very successful.
Moving from one agency to another agency is not as simple as it may sound. You can't just switch on one switch and switch off another and think that everything will be in place. And Efficient Frontier worked really hard with us to highlight all the steps and all the actions that needed to be taken to ensure a smooth transition. There are little things here and there that we would learn along the way, but they supported us and guided us, and at the end of the day, it was a smooth transition, worked well. We had very little negative effect on our campaigns with the transition, and the way that the accounts have now been structured put us in a lot better shape to grow our business.
We use quite a few tactics with Efficient Frontier to ensure that we can optimize our campaigns very effectively to meet our business needs. One of them is to ensure that we have multi objectives being delivered through the Efficient Frontier technology, and by that I mean we are able to deliver business objectives for both our owners and also for our travelers. We also have restructured all our campaigns to accurately mirror our current business structure of our different regions, and this is helpful so that when we're talking about one area, they are also talking about exactly the same area on their keyword campaigns.
They will get the job done efficiently and effectively. They're not flashy with bells and whistles. They just wanna get the job done. But they're still a smooth ride, and they will get you from A to B very comfortably.
