Air France Maximizing Roi

Ans of Q1: To maximize the return on investment, I think Media Contacts should tailor each publish strategy to maximize the ROI. First of all, the numbers of user, the search engine algorithm and the user traits or search behaviors of each search engine publisher are diversified in a large extent, therefore unified strategy may not helpful to fully utilized the features of the platform and lead to optimal business result. For example, while Google, Yahoo or MSN focus the mass market, the target audiences of Kayak are highly focusing in the travel context and the possibility that they will purchase flight tickets from Air France is most likely higher comparing with users of other platforms. Hence, for instance, using sales promotion on Kayak maybe more effective as the audiences already gone through the stages of awareness and educate and they are ready to purchase.

Secondly, according to reading, it is found that the competitions and the economic environment in airline industry vary a lot between US and global market. For example, in the US and as of 2007, the absent of Ryanair - the leader of low-fare airline means that Air France in the US may not need to lower their flight fare so much to compete for the sales. Besides, while most airlines could catch up the global economic growth and gain modest profits since 2002 outside the US, the airline industry of the US had suffered from net loss for 6 years and barely achieved break even in 2006. Therefore, the economic or revenue pressure that Air France was bearing in the US market shall lead to different business and search engine marketing strategy while comparing with the global market.

Ans of Q2: Improving return on investment means optimizing spending and maximizing revenue. In below, I would like to take the performance of Overture US – the second most spending publisher but not having a very good ROAS as an example.

First of all, pausing keywords or keyword groups for the underperforming campaigns, such as those spent much but with no or few conversions, those low in click through rate and negative in ROAS (highlighted with red colour in below table) would be the first step to save cost.

Top 10 spending keywords of Overture - US

Besides, as a result, bidding the highest ads position with high cost per click does not always equal to high conversion rate (except branded terms). Historical data and performance shall be review carefully to optimize the CPC and the reasonable ads position and gain sufficient online present on the search engine with justifiable cost and conversion rate.

On the other hand, pay attention to those promising keywords/keyword groups (eg: those with many conversions, high in ROAS or net revenue) and see if there is any room to raise up the cost per click and budget to bring more conversions with positive ROAS (highlighted with green colour in above table). Secondly, explore if any related or long tailed keywords could be expanded. While general keywords could easily gain more impressions, however, it is found that long tailed keywords favor conversion on the contrary as users with concrete search intention and search terms are more likely to convert.

As for ad copy, for those campaigns that target specific region or city, the ad copy shall include the name of the location that users have input in the search box to create a stronger sense of relevancy to attract users to click on the ads. And for those sales or price reduction campaigns, price and discount rate, as well as the