182% increase in performance for Point Hacks, Australia’s leading frequent flyer comparison website.

A Facebook advertising and SEO case study by In Marketing We Trust

Like many growing online brands in the travel industry, Point Hacks is an extremely agile operation. As a result, marketing tactics were being planned and deployed by the MarTech team wearing multiple hats, rather than digital marketing channel specialists.

Paid social media advertising was performing well, but it was evident that with specialist channel knowledge and experience, performance could be dramatically improved to boost conversion rates, while slashing the cost per acquisition on Facebook.

• Under performing ROMI (Return On Marketing Investment)
• High CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)
• Minimal audience segmentation and intelligence
• Minimal campaign structure and format intelligence
• Lack of internal bandwidth

As a credit card affiliate website, the goal was ultimately to increase conversion whilst driving down campaign spend, resulting in improved campaign performance. However, we wanted to ensure the process resulted in learnings that would put in place the building blocks for continually improving Point Hacks paid Facebook advertising.

• Increase CTR (click-through-rate)
• Increase CvR (conversation rate)
• Lower the CPA (cost per acquisition)
• Improve understanding of Facebook audience segments
• Define priority target audience segments
• Create an optimised base Facebook campaign structure and format

Testing and continual improvement are the foundations of how we increase marketing performance for our clients. To meet the performance criteria, our focus was on the immediate Facebook campaign optimisation requirement, while also ensuring that insights were gathered to build a high performance ‘out of the blocks’ paid social media advertising campaign process. Here is what we did:

• Designed a solid testing programme
• Created multiple campaign creatives and formats
• Defined nested audience structure from customers and fans to lookalike audiences
• Provided live management and optimisation process
• Delivered intelligence through post campaign analysis
• Devised an optimised social advertising campaign process

The live optimisation process allowed us to continually iterate the format, structure and targeting of the social adverts over the lifespan of the campaign, pushing budget to the best performing adverts. The campaign resulted in a 182% increase in performance against the benchmark campaign.

• 182% increase in performance against benchmark
• 14% performance gain through format testing
• Audience testing revealed optimal and maximum lookalike audience threshold
• Audience testing revealed priority segmentation (by gender and age range)
• Definition of “out of the blocks” campaign format
• Definition of “out of the blocks” audience targeting

IMWT has taken a systematic approach to improving our paid social campaigns in a number of ways, working with us to identify areas of improvement and optimisation to ensure each dollar we spend is accounted for more effectively and is working harder. This has involved bringing in the right resources, in a flexible manner, to work on our campaigns, plus creation and reporting campaign performance back to us.

They have been willing to work with us in using the platforms we already use, and recommend new platforms to develop and add more opportunities for future campaigns that we couldn’t do ourselves. I admire their approach to doing this at the best possible cost for us; minimising their overheads by working in a remote, flexible and adaptable way with their staff, whilst the team still remains available to us to discuss anything at the drop of a hat. We are growing the business together, and I look forward to working with them to develop a number of growth opportunities for us which we didn’t have capacity or skill to do on our own.

– Keith M., Founder, Point Hacks