How Iberostar Group Used SEO To Improve Performance During COVID-19
Pep Juaneda Grimalt, digital marketing manager for the Iberostar Group, said a “very fluid communication” between Google and Iberostar’s ad agency, Ad-machina, led to success in a recent campaign during COVID-19.
Search & Performance Marketing Daily (S&PMD) spoke with Grimalt about how Iberostar has reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic and what marketers can do going forward.
S&PMD:
What you did was primarily improve your SEO strategy?
Pep Juaneda Grimalt:
We created some new campaigns with AdMachina, specifically based on generic keywords – keywords that do not include “Iberostar” in the terms. This helped us to increase click-through rates (CTRs).
Thanks to AdMachina’s keyword reduction, the ads the company showed started becoming more relevant to the user, resulting in a 43% improvement in click-through rates. Cost-per-click (CPC) got reduced and consequently, profitability increased.
S&PMD: When did the effort begin?
Grimalt: It began at the start of the pandemic. The goal was to be able to catch as many opportunities as possible when demand started to recover.
During the first months of the pandemic, we had to stop all the paid-performance campaigns and we saw an opportunity to make some big changes that are difficult to make when you are in the sales spiral that an international hotel company like Iberostar Hotels has during the year. We worked very closely with the agencies and Google, trying to choose the best options in terms of GoogleAds structure to cover all the existing demand.
