Dragoman have been successfully selling worldwide overland adventure holidays for 30 years. They had been undertaking paid search for a number of years with the channel successfully delivering leads and sales. Dragoman wanted to achieve a step change in performance from their campaign to meet aggressive growth objectives from the channel.

12 months ago, John Dicks, Sales & Marketing Manager, asked Unscrambled to undertake a performance audit of their paid search campaign, with the objective of finding out what needed to change to accelerate growth.

Our audit found that the campaign had limited market exposure from their paid search campaign and that there being a clear opportunity for swift and effective growth. The keyword bid pricing strategy did not allow the better performing keywords to flourish and the ad creative was restricting click rates and volume. Also the match type strategy made performance evaluation and subsequent management more difficult. All these factors resulted in a sub optimal campaign quality score and increased costs. We presented the results to John and his team, also providing some clear recommendations on how to streamline the existing campaign to make it work smarter.

Further to the audit, Unscrambled were engaged to work with Dragoman to help with them with the implementation of the recommendations. Working closely with the Dragoman marketing team, Unscrambled were able to ensure that all the audit recommendations were fully implemented as quickly in order to accelerate online sales growth. A significant impact on PPC results was seen in a matter of weeks.

12 months on and the impact on results has been profound. While paid search budgets have remained static, bookings delivered from the channel has grown five fold, with revenue increasing by a factor of 7.5. The ROI achieved from paid search has increased by over 600% and the cost of acquiring a customer has fallen by two thirds.

John Dicks

(Sales & Marketing Manager, Dragoman) said “After Unscrambled audited our paid search account, we were able to fully understand how we could achieve more sales from our campaign and what we needed to do to achieve them. They continued to advise and consult on realising the growth potential they'd identified, and the improvement we've seen since has well exceeded our expectations.”