IIM Kozhikode

IMC Case Submission

AIR FRANCE INTERNET MARKETING

Group 8

Anubhuti Gupta 15/72

Dwip Sengupta 15/86

Riyas Moosa 15/45

Sanish Machyan 15/110

Shiladitya Sengupta 15/114

Q1. Should Media Contacts recommend a uniform strategy for Air France across search

engine publishers? Or would it be more effective to tailor each publisher strategy to

maximize return on investment?

Air France wants to increase its ticket sales and improve ROA which can be achieved only by

using a customized approach for each publisher to maximize return on investment

The ROI can be seen in the table below. Each publisher has different CPC rates, booking

probability and thus the average revenue per transaction. We can target different demographics

and customers using different search techniques, provide them with a customized strategy.

Overture-US has low average of transaction conversion resulting in smaller volume of bookings

so it should not be used. Google, Yahoo and MSN should be used for SEO marketing strategies.

They could leverage Google’s Page rank technology, Yahoo’s content matching advertisements,

and MSN’s focused demographic targeting techniques to get more customers.

Publisher Name

Sum of Clicks

Sum of Impressions

Sum of Total Volume of Bookings

Sum of Total Cost

Average of Trans. Conv. %

Sum of Amount

Avg. of Avg revenue per booking

Total Revenue

ROI

Google - US

192109 3855689 1550 353641 41.48% 1745482 909 1408950 298.4%

MSN - US

10808 170120 140 16098 73.15% 181550 941 131740 718.3%

Overture - US

119323 17062488 289 141976 9.49% 347433 1132 1754600 396.2%

Yahoo - US

45598 933345 662 46198 182.88% 882289 1273 178220 1007.1%

Grand Total

367838 22021642 2641 557913 62.19% 3156754 3473510

Q2. How can campaigns be improved to increase overall value gained from investment with

n search engine publisher? Should keywords be added or dropped from the campaign?

Should campaign tactics or copy be adjusted to improve campaign performance?

To increase the value gained from investments:

1. The bid strategy of the ads should be adjusted to get more ROI

2. Intensive keyword research should be done by analyzing and selecting the most profitable

keywords

3. Campaigns having high Cost Per Click and negative ROA should be dropped

4. Campaigns with less CPC and high ROI should be selected

5. Improve sales copy, enhancing the benefits of the product so that the customers are

motivated to visit the site and make a transaction.

6. Experiment with different ads, and split test every element and every step of the

campaign to fine tune the campaign and improve results

In this case keywords should be purchased since the average conversion rate of transaction is

still low for the publishers and can largely increase the ROI if careful selection is done of the

keywords especially the branded ones. This will additionally help in efficient indexing

resulting in higher conversion rates of booking. Also, the campaign copy and site copy

should be improved as increasing the CTR rate will increase the ticket sales substantially for

all the publishers.

Q3. What are the most important KPIs, and what impact will campaign changes these have

on these KPIs?

The objective is to achieve the following:

1. Cost Reduction

2. Revenue Maximization

3. Volume increase

The main KPI’s that we need to consider here are:

1. Average cost per click: Should be minimized. This can be accomplished by the search

engine in two ways – reduction in total cost or increase in clicks by customer. Indicates

average spending by Air France on customer response.

2. Engine Click Through Percentage: This indicates the percentage of viewers who actually

clicked on the ad. A higher figure indicates more relevance to the viewer.

3. Transaction Conversion Rate: Indicates how many clicks actually converted into

transactions and also hints the transaction volume per click. A higher conversion rate

would mean higher revenue and higher customer relevance.

Campaign changes will impact these as for a new campaign, the company will have to:

1. Bid for new keywords

2. The bid amount, cost per click and the engine click through will decide the ranking and

position of the ad on the page.

3. Thus these will impact the number of clicks obtained.

4. Depending upon the relevance of the ads with the campaign, these could lead to a higher

transaction conversion rate.

Data

Campaign Average of Trans. Conv. % Average of Engine Click Thru % Sum of Total Volume of Bookings

Air France Brand & French Destinations 0.822007697 9.254424063 699

Air France Branded 1.82105456 13.05116763 1932

Air France Global Campaign 0.368907032 7.644761365 367

Business Class 0.01116196 7.802087995 1

French Destinations 0.164519349 14.66148915 14

General Terms 0.193050193 0.358979334 1

Geo Targeted Atlanta 0.45045045 21.53382893 1

Geo Targeted Boston 0.276058131 22.91422506 4

Geo Targeted Chicago 0.271260094 28.31454447 5

Geo Targeted Cincinnati 0 15.74782362 0

Geo Targeted DC 1.494537209 20.4646283 9

Geo Targeted Detroit 0.476190476 17.4250331 1

Geo Targeted Houston 0.354343932 22.32783081 5

Geo Targeted Los Angeles 0.101010101 20.15663255 2

Geo Targeted Miami 1.923076923 26.94204021 1

Geo Targeted New York 0.73610832 22.52169982 46

Geo Targeted Philadelphia 0.543478261 27.1705081 1

Geo Targeted San Francisco 0.341666667 19.68129968 3

Geo Targeted Seattle 0.614465718 24.34901303 4

Google_Yearlong 2006 0.053887602 5.841766598 15

Outside Western Europe 0 11.4493599 0

Paris & France Terms 0.446830828 9.164546068 122

Unassigned 0.159038814 3.071433192 661

Western Europe Destinations 2.356067016 7.198595254 45

Grand Total 0.569255075 11.14145058 3939

Q4. How should future SEM campaigns be structured? In the past, Media Contacts had

concentrated on Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo; was there now an opportunity to optimize

search advertizing with metasearch companies like Kayak?

Future SEM campaigns should be integrated to include meta-search companies like Kayak. This

is due to the following reasons:

a. Significantly higher click-through rate for Kayak (8%) as compared to 0.8% industry

average for online travel sites.

b. Rich Internet Application (RIA) architecture which allowed greater processing capacity

by transferring some processing load to the user’s computer. This effectively increased

the analytical capability and allowed a wider range of data to be available.

Future campaigns should involve not just search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo,

but search aggregators like Kayak as well. Based on sales volume, as indicated in the pivot

table snapshot and chart below, Kayak has overtaken established players like MSN and

Overture, and seems poised to grow further. This makes it a potentially sound investment for

SEM.

Sum of Amount

Publisher Name Total

Google - Global 929549.8

Google - US 1745481.8

MSN - Global 145524.25

MSN - US 181549.8

Overture - Global 430084.7

Overture - US 347433.25

Yahoo - US 882288.95

Grand Total 4661912.55