Enhancing ROAS for a Major Airline Through Custom Bidding

Leading agency C-K’s client, a major airline, has delivered affordable, high-value flights for over three decades. Their commitment to value and customer-centric services allows Guests to venture further and travel more often than ever before. The airline sought to expand its customer reach and achieve an even higher return on ad spend (ROAS) on their programmatic media efforts.

C-K’s challenge was twofold. First, they needed to develop a strategy to effectively reduce the airline's cost per acquisition (CPA) at both the advertiser and route levels. However, they needed specific and nuanced Display & Video 360 (DV360) knowledge and technical Python coding expertise to achieve this.

Second, the agency had to manage multiple campaign goals specific to each route, which made acquiring adequate data for efficient modeling challenging. The team needed a durable solution to help accurately drive customer actions, such as booking confirmations, and optimize the entire conversion funnel.

To lower CPAs and drive higher ROAS for their client, C-K collaborated with Adswerve to harness the power of DV360. This partnership was instrumental in developing a custom, robust solution utilizing one of DV360’s most sophisticated features, Custom Bidding.

Adswerve partnered with C-K to:

• Develop a custom algorithm: We used DV360’s Goal Builder to devise a custom algorithm to drive lower CPAs at the advertiser level.

• Implement A/B testing: We tested the Custom Bidding IO against a Fixed Bid IO for direct performance comparison.

• Augment skills: Adswerve’s Python and Google Marketing Platform experts helped train, support and advise throughout the entire process.

Leveraging Custom Bidding for the airline, C-K produced immediate and significant results. The strategy’s success was evident in the dramatic improvement of key performance indicators, including:

• 149% increase in conversions
  
  
• 1.5x increase in ROAS

Future plans include developing a custom script with u-variables for specific route CPA performance and
exploring more granular optimization strategies for media purchasing and allocation, ensuring sustained growth and an even higher ROAS for the client.