Otelz.com & Zeo Agency - Google Ads Success Story

— Hello everybody, this is Erdal. I work at ZEO Agency as a Performance Marketing and Analytics consultant. In this video, we will talk about the Google Ads automation project that we created in cooperation with Otelz.com. My guests today are İbrahim Bakış, the IT Project Manager, and Kerem Cicek, Digital Marketing Manager at Otelz.com. First of all, I would like to welcome you to our video. To start with, could you tell us a bit about Otelz.com and your digital marketing strategy?

— Of course, thank you very much, Erdal. As Otelz.com, we have made many innovations in the booking vertical in our country since the day we were founded. We've been trying to provide an exceptional user experience that is not similar to the rest of our competition. To tell a few of the features on our platform that stand out: Our users can find and book rooms from more than 10 thousand contracted hotels, without prepayment or providing credit card information. We consider our platform to be a full-fledged marketplace for hotel rooms.

In 2018, more than a million travelers have booked their accommodation via Otelz.com. We are aiming to provide our reservation services to 3 million travelers throughout 2019. As a company operating in such volumes, our digital marketing strategy falls under 3 main pillars. These are... Using machine learning-based advanced technologies, merging every data source regarding our performance marketing channels and continuous optimization on our ad accounts. As a company with a data & amp; automation-centric digital marketing strategy, how did you decide to partner up with ZEO Agency?

Let me put it this way, we do not think managing ad accounts manually is efficient enough. That is why we wanted to address the need for automation in our team since we were managing our campaigns in a manual fashion until then. Then we decided to talk to the agencies and other consultants with whom we cooperate and exchanged ideas with them about what kind of a solution we could have come up with. We were working with ZEO Agency on our SEO project and we found out that they can produce unconventional data-oriented automation projects. We got together and we decided to kick our project off. Now, if we get to the details of the project that we came up with to manage your account via Google Ads API, what kind of issues are being addressed with this solution?

Of course, Erdal, I would like to elaborate on this one. We now have an automation software that performs three main functionalities. The first one is inventory management. We are able to programmatically create, update and manage our Google Search Ads for more than ten thousand unique hotels. The automation system can create and set up ads from scratch on its own when there is a new addition to our inventory of contracted hotel rooms. Likewise, an existing ad is automatically stopped from delivery when a specific room is removed from the inventory.

The second functionality is the delivery status control. When you do it manually in an account where hundreds of different campaigns sit inside, you have to perform highly complex operations to decide which ads should continue delivering. We have now reduced the margin of error to zero and left the heavy lifting of delivery management to this automated system. The last and the most important one for me is bid management. We have created a solution that manages more than one hundred thousand keywords in our account, according to the rules we created on our own end as well as being able to perform on-demand bulk actions.

To speak with numbers, right now, 200 Google Search Ads campaigns, more than 10 thousand ad groups, and about 100 thousand keywords are now being managed with just a few clicks. How did you benefit from automating complex account management tasks from a perspective of work & time efficiency in your digital marketing team? Most importantly, this project reduced our operational load to zero. We can spend the time we saved on strategic planning and optimization. In addition to the gained efficiencies from automation and streamlining the workflow of your digital marketing team, what were the other results in terms of campaign performance and return on investment?

Since we would do batch operations, initially the most important metric for us was CTR. Which we can call ad relevance, in other words. Since we are running Google Search Ads, it was very important that the ads we would create and the keywords we would target based on templates had to be highly relevant to the users. CTR was the very first metric we monitored initially as we created hundreds of thousands of ads with one click in this system. In the first phase, we achieved a 26% increase in CTR, which was way above our expectations. So we have set up our ads with one click, and these ads turned out to be 26% more relevant to our users.

In addition to that, we still continue experimenting with A/B tests to measure the effect of the automated campaign creation on other important metrics, such as conversion rate and cost per acquisition. So far, We've achieved performance improvements on our campaigns. We foresee the future much more positively, as the purpose of establishing the whole system is to perform continuous optimization. Therefore, we can say that the numbers in your Google Ads account are positively affected and your campaign results continue to improve. Those who watch this video may wonder. Google Ads in fact has many advertising features that use automation and machine learning. Why were those features such as Dynamic Search Ads not good enough to meet your automation needs? If you are selling toothpaste, Google's machine learning features such as Dynamic Search Ads or smart bidding can do it justice.

Because (products) would have a certain stock, you could control price parity but if you are a booking platform that brings hotels and travelers together, there are different parameters to consider. For example, the availability of the rooms can change, the prices can change fluctuate, seasonal sales periods are very critical, sometimes you need to adjust your bids on a weekly or an hourly basis. In such situations Google Ads' machine learning capatibilies fall short and what we do is actually to help Google a little bit because we are operating on our own data which depends on external factors. We wouldn't say that Google Ads is insufficient, but let's say that here we are trying to support Google's own capabilities to benefit more.

Lastly, we know that Otelz.com gives great importance to the accurate measurement and optimization of advertising spend and you have made a serious technology investment in this direction. With this approach in mind, what are the next steps for Otelz.com? We plan to blend artificial intelligence in our own product understanding and make our advertising management strategy more systematic. Therefore, we are working on a structure in which we aim to increase the number of travelers that we help book rooms on our contracted hotels while increasing our own revenue.

And soon we will be announcing breakthrough investments that we are making in this regard right now. In addition to that, this year we were selected as the only tourism company in the top 10 list of the Deloitte Technology Fast50 program. This should be proof of the great deal of importance that we give to our technology. We wish you success in your growth journey. We listened to the details of the Google Ads automation project that we created for Otelz.com.

— Thank you to our participants. See you in our next video, goodbye.