Air France - Search Engine Marketing (sem) Campaigns

The business background information of Air France and its interactive marketing strategies has stressed that the company would like to increase its business on a global perspective.  The management was focusing on the growth of the market share in specific to United States air travel market. The usage of online booking has been proven with a continuous growing figure that consumers were more favorable to arrange their travel schedules through online, such as booking flights and hotels.

As the investment on search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns was the future direction and the spending on search advertising was also growing, evaluating the tactics should be taken into consideration in order to maintain a positive revenue and profit returns and keep the cost minimized. Based on this consideration, Media Contacts would have to formulate a feasible marketing plan to fulfil the business needs of Air France.

A summary of SEM indicators of the search engine platforms has shown the overall performance (Table 1.). As illustrated in the article, these three search engine platforms have their own matching algorithm. Yahoo-US has the highest Return on Ad Dollar (ROA), while Google-US generated most of the net revenue, yet the return of ROA was listed in the second place. The strategies should be based on the ROA and made investment plan tailored more on particular search engine platforms accordingly.

From existing data set provided by DoubleClick, the average of return on Ad dollar spent was varies on three major search engines, namely, Google, Microsoft MSN and Yahoo!. The keyword used to search under the same campaign named “Air France Branded” has been shown differently (Table 2.). For instance, “air france us” generated the average of ROA is 23080.96% at Google US; while ranking the first at Yahoo US is “airfrance.us” with average of ROA on 11479.22%. With reference to pivot table (Table 3.), the campaign entitled “Geo Targeted San Francisco” gained positive ROA on Google US in average of 352.55%. Alternatively, it was found that campaign entitled “Geo Targeted DC” with ROA in average of 8634.21%. It was agreed that Media Contacts should consider dropping and adding particular keywords with tailor-made campaigns applied to different search engine platforms.

Four variables would be taken account on the KPIs, including, Return on Ad Dollar Spent, Total Volume of Bookings, Average Revenue Per Booking, and Probability of Booking. Data showing from Table 4. indicated that the campaigns had to be discontinued with negative Return on Ad Dollar Spent and zero probability of booking.

Distinctive advantage of using Kayak is the platform focusing on travel products with searching booking availabilities on airlines and hotels. The forecast described from the article has been mentioned that the company was starting to boost the sales volume on monthly basis. The Kayak data provided is one-week performance. However, the data is relatively limited without any information on keyword and campaign like DoubleClick Data in details.  By comparing average cost per click, Kayak data showed that the result is $1.26 which lower than the main three search engine platforms with over two dollars per click. (Table 5.).   In addition, the average revenue per booking is $1106.38 in which higher the amount that Google- Global, Google-US and MSN-US.  The overall performance of Kayak could be considered as one of the marketing strategies in the next planning.

Table 1.

Table 2.

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