Holiday Autos

Information about the company

In 1988 Holiday Autos Group,the first car rental broker in Europe, and one of the first travel companies to offer a pre-bookable pre-paid fully inclusive product that was guaranteed in price was co-founded by Clive Jacobs. The company also claimed to be the first to offer a late deals car hire website. Backed by ECI Ventures Jacobs bought out his partners in 1995. Jacobs went on to sell Holiday Autos to lastminute.com for £43 million in 2003.

Commercial approach

The team switched to Google Smart Bidding – a subset of automated bid strategies that use machine learning. Holiday Autos opted to use the Smart Bidding strategy Target ROAS, which sets a maximum bid with an aim of maximising conversion value in each and every auction while trying to achieve an average ROAS equal to the target set by Holiday Autos.

Google Ads success story

Next, the team set up a 50/50 cookie split experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of Google's Target ROAS bid strategy against the third-party bidding solution in driving their performance targets. They designed the test using Google Ads’ Drafts & Experiments feature and then ran it in the UK market over one quarter. Control and test group campaigns ran with equal budgets and targets, and with the same keyword strategies and campaign setups.

Results

- Google Target ROAS drove 85% more bookings.
- Twice as much revenue at 17% stronger ROI.