Marketing & Revenue Management Collaborate to Optimize SEM Performance

Three airlines share how airSEM has improved their Paid Search Performance and Revenue

It’s no secret that Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a highly crowded and competitive space. While it takes constant strategy and optimization, when implemented with the right collaboration between Digital Marketing technology and Revenue Mangement strategies, SEM becomes the most cost-efficient channel to drive direct sales and incremental bookings. Airlines will share their experience on how with PROS’s airSEM product and integrations of external sources of data, they are only spending in SEM at the right time and at the right price.

PROS customers Aegean, Avianca and TAP joined us at Outperform for a panel discussion on how they are strategically using airSEM to enhance their paid search performance.

Aegean must navigate the sharp seasonal trends in seaches related to their network, as summer in Greece has extremely high demand that falls dramatially during the winder months. Additionally, Aegean must attract customers across a variety of different markets who are not searching the airline by their brand, in a variety of languages and currrencies. airSEM enables the airline to set up the campaigns they need to convert these customers and predict demand during times of seasonal fluctuations.

The airline feels that SEM is the most important channel for their direct sales because it is the only channel where they already know that the customer is there. SEM keywords power ads for customers that are sarching for those terms and enables the airline to capture that existing demand. When Aegean compares their SEM channel with Social Media and Display, SEM has better cost of sales and greater click through rates.

The Head of eCommerce at Aegean joined us for a panel on SEM strategy. See what he had to say:

“PROS is definitely helping us to shape the right audiences with new products and new ideas to stay up to date in the evolving digital landscape in terms of technology and robust reports so that we can make the most effective data-driven decisions.”

Dimosthenis Pettas
Head of eCommerce, Aegean

For Avianca, SEM is the most important channel in their direct sales strategy because the conversion rate is high. But SEM doesn’t work alone, SEM needs alignment with other channels – like a display campaigns or social media campaigns – because those channels are often the start of the customer journey.

Avianca integrates business data with the load factor by route in their airSEM dashboards, along with Google search trends by route, and webpage metrics like, look-to-book. These dashboards are used to coordinate strategies with not just with the Marketing team, but also with the eCommerce team the Revenue Management team to understand the route behavior for the business needs.

Hear highlights from Avianca on the Search Engine Marketing panel:

"EveryMundo has the experience, they have the knowledge for this industry. EveryMundo has the product and we combine SEM with the pricing feed [FareWire] so we can show the right price and make an update in real-time. EveryMundo has huge knowledge for this industry and gives the best expertise for airlines."

Fabian Torres
Global Marketing Manager, Avianca

For TAP, a successful SEM campaign is not only about integrating Revenue Management or load factor data, but also integrating a variety of analytics pieces, like looking into the NPS, the surveys that launch launch, the comments that they having on social media, and using all that data to determine actionable insights.

The airline views the importance of SEM for its ability to provide a baseline of attracting volume and quality of traffic to drive direct sales. otherwise the conversion will not occur. TAP’s Director of eCommerce and Digital shares how they have been able to do this in an optimized way with PROS.

Check out highlights from the SEM panel featuring TAP:

“We see EveryMundo as an extension of our internal team. This partnership makes us more innovative, pushes us to be risk takers, to adopt different tactics. The EveryMundo team has the capacity of being much more agile, so we need to embed that spirit within our business and our day-to-day work to really go further.”

Sara Walter de Freitas Director of eCommerce & Digital,
TAP Air Portugal
 

Watch the full session on Search Engine Marketing