Grecos Holiday | Meta Ads

Brand overview

Grecos is a travel brand that offers exceptional holiday experiences in Greece, including flights and hotel accommodations. Operating primarily during the peak travel season from April to mid-October, Grecos needed a strategy to re-establish its market presence post-pandemic, rebuild consumer trust, and optimize its marketing expenditures. For this, we used channels such as Meta Ads and Google ads, but for this case study, we will only focus on Meta Ads activities.

Challenges and goals

In the aftermath of the pandemic, our client faced the dual challenge of optimizing costs while also rebuilding public trust in flights, tours, international vacations, and organized trips. Our primary goal was to streamline advertising efforts across Meta and reduce the Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) through strategic fine-tuning and advanced targeting options. By achieving these objectives, we aimed not only to lower overall expenses but also to restore consumer confidence in travel, ultimately positioning the client for sustained growth in a recovering market. Grecos also aimed to boost online sales and solidify its position in the Polish travel market.

Solution

We created a thorough strategy to address these challenges and help Grecos boost online sales and strengthen their market position. The plan focused on budget optimization, retargeting of the ads, and testing different creative ideas to make the ad campaigns more effective. Here are the steps we took to reach these goals:

1. Active budget management – locations: We dynamically allocated budgets between different airport cities and selected hotels in Greece to maximize reach and efficiency. Here, we mainly focused on building the right campaign scheme: splitting campaigns, ad sets and ads to create a testing environment inside them, additionally using the budget where it makes the most sense and seeing easily those opportunities to reduce costs – in a word, we did a “tidy up”.
2. End-of-season retargeting campaigns: Introducing retargeting campaigns towards the season’s end, which the client had not previously anticipated, significantly boosted sales closures. We noticed some search trends a few months after the pandemic began and used remarketing to reach people who were pining for a vacation during the pandemic and needed a break. Additionally, we noticed a significant increase in comments under posts when we slightly boosted organic posts. Tourists started to share their experiences from trips and leave positive feedback eagerly. The following year, we also used an audience group based on people who had left comments in recent months to reach out to them with offers in the next year. Moreover, by managing campaigns on Meta Ads (Facebook), we boosted brand awareness and website traffic, leading to increased conversions (sales).
3. Creative testing: We decided to conduct extensive creative testing to leverage Grecos’s engaged social media community, primarily consisting of individuals aged 40 or older. This involved experimenting with various marketing messages tailored to the demographics most likely to engage with Grecos. In the first year of operations, we noticed that the video format has a lower cost-per-purchase and lower CPC, yet more than 2x higher CPM. In addition to cost reduction, our goal was to deliver the required number of impressions. That’s why we added a Reach and Frequency campaign, which provided us with a certain number of impressions for a given amount, while in the other campaigns, we focused on reducing cost-per-purchase. This made us decide that despite higher CPMs on video ads, it is worth investing in this format, as it brings us a significantly higher CTR at a lower cost-per-purchase. Audiences feel more encouraged to make decisions quicker when they see a video rather than just a banner, and these were exactly the kind of people we were looking for. The following year, the client already knew that video format was what we would be focusing on, so he provided even better-quality materials that showed the beauty of tourist directions, which were not just simple animations. Thus, the cost per purchase went down even more.