Nederlands 
English 20% lower performance costs.
With no loss of result.
How an online travel player in a demand-driven market discovered which part of its performance spend produced bookings that would have come anyway, and cut that budget without losing revenue.
The challenge
Travel is a demand-driven market: when people want to book a trip, they go looking themselves. That is exactly when every performance channel claims the conversion, even when the booking would have happened without that last click. The platform reports each showed a healthy return, yet total performance spend kept growing year after year without anyone being able to say which part was truly incremental.
The approach
Datafy built a marketing mix model across the full media mix of CheapTickets.nl:
- All media costs and booking data in one model, with season and market demand as external factors;
- The incremental effect calculated per channel: what does the channel add on top of the demand that was already there;
- Budget scenarios run each quarter: what happens to bookings when performance budget is scaled back;
- The reduction carried out step by step and every step checked against the actuals.
The result
The scenarios consistently pointed the same way: part of the performance budget was buying bookings that would have come anyway. CheapTickets cut that part back, with evidence, step by step, with the model as referee.
“We have been using Datafy for CheapTickets.nl for several years now. With Datafy we have far-reaching insight into the performance of the media mix. The result is a well-founded 20% reduction in performance costs with no loss of result.”
Erik Zomerhuis · CheapTickets.nlHow much of your performance budget is truly incremental?
In a 30-minute demo we show you how the model calculates that, on your channels.