Norse Atlantic Airways

The challenge

As a fast-growing airline, Norse needed to drive high-quality sessions to its site to open up ample opportunity to engage prospects across various other channels to boost consideration of its brand.

Our current mid-funnel strategy uses display placements across a number of premium travel publishers, in order to reach an audience who are already in-market to travel but have not yet selected an airline. While the data is robust and the placements are high-quality, these audiences come with high CPMs.

With this in mind, we were tasked to increase the amount of qualified traffic to the site, in the most cost-efficient way.

The strategy

Strategic insights highlighted several European markets that had high YouTube consumption (above 90%), presenting the ideal opportunity to reach our audience in a space where they were already spending a lot of their time.

France was selected as the test market as the cost of sessions driven by our current publisher activity was the highest, so would benefit most significantly from an improvement in efficiency.

We set up a brand new YouTube campaign, optimised toward driving conversions via a maximise conversions bid strategy. We targeted users’ in-market for the destinations that Norse travel to, with a series of 5 videos outlining each of Norse’s KPIs as an airline.

Success was measured against Norse’s mid-funnel KPIs – cost-per-session (primary) and click-through rate (secondary) – in order for the campaign to be fairly compared to the existing activity.

The results

After initially launching in May, the campaign was given ample time to optimise and for the algorithms to reach their full potential. At the end of July, the campaign showed that it was possible to deliver more efficient sessions to support Norse’s traffic-driving goals, by running YouTube activity alongside the always-on publisher campaigns.

Findings from both YouTube and Publisher activity displayed a need for a mix of placements via Publisher platforms and YouTube, with Publisher sites generating 80% longer sessions.

Following the success of the campaign, the strategy is being tested in additional European markets to understand the effectiveness of the strategy in delivering a reduction in cost per session.

43%

Lower cost per session and 2% higher engagement rate from YouTube activity vs Publisher activity

98%

Lower CPC from YouTube activity vs Publisher activity

77%

Lower CPM from YouTube activitiy vs Publisher activity

I would recommend Impression as a digital marketing agency. The team are friendly, helpful and competent. It has been great working with them over the past year and I look forward to working with them in future.

Gemma Launchbury VP of Marketing, Norse Atlantic Airways