Case Study - British Airways - SEO & PPC

Objectives

Bigmouthmedia’s pace-setting search campaign for British Airways has pushed the boundaries of campaign integration, synchronising the airline’s online strategy with its offline promotions and sales processes to break new ground in terms of what can be achieved with a leading edge digital marketing strategy.

Bigmouthmedia built the largest ever multi-channel account team to deliver a wide ranging and innovative strategy covering SEO, PPC and social media elements which saw BA’s ROI take off.

• To increase ROI and reduce CPA on British Airways’ digital marketing spend
• To increase web channel sales on key routes
• Integrate PPC and SEO to leverage synergies

Our Solution - PPC

Bigmouthmedia’s complex strategy involving over 700,000 individual keywords followed three core campaign strategies:

• Upgraded structure: a unique campaign structure comprising four main categories of account, this campaign model was designed to enable a strategic overview of spending, and built-in flexibility to switch budgets from underperforming destinations aligned to commercial priorities, maximising the use of the available budget.
• New technology: The latest click path analysis technology was introduced to enable both parties to track user behaviour and measure the relationship between brand and generic keywords. In addition, bigmouthmedia’s in-house technology team is designing and creating a custom-built online dashboard, enabling client access to real-time performance data and reports.
• Better integrated with business: With in excess of 200 destinations covered, bigmouthmedia’s innovative bid management system enables us to make changes in line with market conditions, seasonality and demand, within a matter of hours.

Our Solution - SEO

With a central aim of dynamically increasing organic exposure for generic and brand search terms (top level and longer tail), bigmouthmedia’s innovative, five pronged approach took BA into areas beyond flights such as holidays, car rental and hotels.

In order to turn this situation around bigmouthmedia established a proactive account management strategy based on three key areas:

• Research: Extensive keyword research indentified generic terms that could drive organic traffic and convert well. Key BA destination themes were identified and included primary search targets such as flights, holidays and car rental, as well as secondary targets e.g. city breaks, luxury holidays, ski holidays.
• Content development: A dedicated destination guide area was created and populated with custom content with the aim of making attractive, unique, keyword-rich content valuable to both visitors and search engines.
• Promotion: External link building efforts focused on online article distribution and press releases, with a travel news blog supporting the destination guide.
• Social media: Use of social bookmarking to support our content and article work.
• SEO & PPC synergy: We have been able to reduce PPC spend on under-performing campaigns by switching the focus to SEO where required.