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Overview

Using Google Print Ads to buy newspaper ads produced smooth sailing for a major cruise retailer – and a 30% savings in cost per lead.

"Cruise.com found that using the Google Print Ads interface was an efficient way of reaching new markets that, in the past, were normally avoided because of the time required to execute new agreements."

Anthony Hamawy Managing Director


Business

Established in 1999, today Cruise.com has annual revenues of over $200 million and is one of the Internet's largest cruise retailers. The company's defining characteristic is its commitment to exceptional customer service and its traditional approach to doing business. For example, all call centers are staffed with trained travel consultants, not just reservation-takers. The result is "expert advice at the lowest price," meaning that both individual and business customers can rely on Cruise.com for traditional service with the convenience of today's technology. Because Cruise.com represents some 78 different cruise lines ranging from mass market to luxury, travelers can find the cruise that's right for them.

Approach

Besides being a significant online advertiser, Cruise.com also spends several millions of dollars annually in traditional forms of media, with an emphasis on newspapers. Recently the company planned a large-scale test of new markets that used only newspaper, because newspaper can target specific geographies in ways that other media cannot. "Cruise.com found that using the Google Print Ads interface was an efficient way of reaching new markets that, in the past, were normally avoided because of the time required to execute new agreements," says Anthony Hamawy, Cruise.com's Managing Director.

"When we identified that a specific newspaper market was doing well... we were able to quickly capitalize."

Cruise.com used the central Google Print Ads web interface to set up a short newspaper campaign that extended offers for ads in the travel sections of over 70 newspapers in new markets. To get the best rates, they made low initial bids to this wide array of papers, then set a weekly budget cap to limit the number of bids that could actually be accepted. Since their metric for market efficiency was cost per call, they used trackable 800 numbers for the creatives that ran in each market. They also had Google Analytics installed on their homepage to measure website visits coming from each newspaper market.

In the end, the campaign placed several hundred ads in a large number of newspapers. Having a tool that streamlined the process of placing ads in so many papers was revolutionary for Cruise.com. Jeanne Wyndrum, Director of Operations, praises "the consistency of procedure" when negotiating across the different papers. Anthony added that Print Ads' enormous inventory gave them the "ability to have many alternatives right at our fingertips." Cruise.com even leveraged those alternatives while the test campaign was still running. After reviewing a few weeks' worth of test results, Cruise. com shifted budgets for the later weeks towards the markets that were performing most efficiently. As Anthony puts it, Print Ads helped Cruise.com "be more intelligent in what we are doing. When we identified that a specific newspaper market was doing well using the Google interface we were able to quickly capitalize by picking up additional papers in the same market."

Results

Cruise.com cut their cost per call by roughly 30% during the test campaign and gave much of the credit to Print Ads. The offer marketplace let them employ an opportunistic bidding strategy that yielded great rates. And the combination of their tracking data with Print Ads' flexible interface let them optimize their budgets on the fly.

Another major source of efficiency turned out to be smaller newspapers that Cruise.com would never have considered before. "Small papers were a windfall for us," Anthony acknowledges. Due to the considerable resource costs, executing large numbers of small buys was not worthwhile in past, but thanks to Print Ads these smaller papers are now a central part of Cruise.com's media strategy.

"Small papers were a windfall for us."

In fact, following the success of their initial test, Cruise.com launched a long-term newspaper campaign through Print Ads that bid on over 100 newspapers. Like some other newspaper advertisers, they had been slowly decreasing newspaper spending as more of their advertising dollars moved online. "This test encouraged Cruise.com to continue looking at print," says Anthony. "Google Print Ads kept us within the print game."