Google keyword bid pays off for Lufthansa

The month-long campaign, which began at the end of June, used search engine Google in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam, and is already delivering promising early results. This programme involved bidding for keywords on country-specific Google sites. The airline used keywords such as 'air ticket', 'Lufthansa' and 'air fare'. When a Google user types in the relevant term, Lufthansa's message would appear on the top blue bar above the search results. Different keywords would put the Lufthansa message on the right-hand side of the results page as well. The campaign was managed by independent marketing consultancy Blue. According to Blue director of media services Rosemary Lising, Lufthansa achieved a booking conversion of nearly 30 per cent for some of its destinations from the campaign. This was achieved at a cost of just over US$1 per visitor. Blue monitored bid prices, creative messaging and the effectiveness of key words. The consultancy also monitored click through rates and conversions to purchase. Said Lising: "Lufthansa is very happy with the results as they've been able to drive awareness, travel bookings as well as gather valuable insights from this campaign." She said that some of the lessons learned from this campaign were that relevancy of messaging and product offering were important in driving response. "We've also found that a high click rate does not necessarily translate into a high conversion rate. Some of the destinations we had showed high clicks but this did not always translate into a large number of bookings." The campaign targeted travellers, providing offers on specific destinations. For example, Thai users would see offers for Ho Chi Minh City, Manila and Kuala Lumpur while Singapore users would see a special offer to fly to Jakarta. Using Google's sponsored link programme, marketers can control how prominent their message will be -- as this depends on how high the bid is. The higher the bid, the higher a marketer appears in the search results for a chosen key word. This allows marketers to adjust adspend and position as the campaign progresses. As a pay per click model, marketers only pay when their messages are clicked on.