Butlin’s

Butlin’s, part of Bourne Leisure was looking to build out an in-house digital marketing team but required an external agency to build the foundations of their account and take responsibility of the strategy and management in the interim.

Bamboo Nine were the preferred choice due to our no contract, no margins policy and after extensive research into historical search queries, ad copy, audiences and user intent, it was clear that a unique structure was required with a distinctive split between new users and users who have previously visited the site (RLSA).

By the end of the build, there were over 4,000 campaigns split between 2 Google Ads accounts, with campaigns split by:

• Geographic location
• Resort location
• New Users or RLSA
• Seasonal events
• UK or non-UK searches
• Break types
• Competitors
• Search phrasing (ie ‘cheap’, ‘last minute’, ‘holidays’, ‘breaks’)

For new users, our strategy was to serve compelling, engaging and often price-led ads for high-intent searches, for example ‘family christmas holidays uk’, whereas for the RLSA campaigns we allowed for much more broader phrasing and more research-based searches to trigger, for example ‘christmas holidays’.

To avoid inflating costs due to serving less-relevant ads to users, we adopted the SKAG model to ensure that ads were as close as possible to the user’s search, resulting in lower cost-per-clicks and higher click-through rates.

In such a competitive market, particularly July-September, users’ typical path to booking involves several touch points and often, several days/weeks to finalise the decision. Therefore, post-click optimisation and reporting was utilised, and more aggression was input to the RLSA campaigns in order to ensure ads were visible when users were ready to book.

We worked with the team at Butlin’s to improve analytics tracking and fully embrace using enhanced ecommerce metrics. This strategy enabled us to optimise profitability of bookings by critically reviewing bid strategy and optimising across the funnel resulting in a 121% improvement in ROAS.

It was a pleasure to assist Butlin’s and Big Weekends with their goals and extremely satisfying to meet and exceed their expectations. We look forward to a continued working relationship with Bourne Leisure as we still are on hand to offer support and guidance if needed. I’d like to also praise Zak and Chris Johnson (and their internal departments) for their professional approach in dealing with a company the size of Bourne Leisure. It makes me proud to work with such talented and hardworking people here at Bamboo Nine.