Loveholidays - Metageni

Case study:

Love Holidays - huge growth with machine learning attribution

Loveholidays.com is a rapidly growing online travel agency. Travel is a sector that has a major marketing attribution challenge, facing all of the challenges that multi-touch attribution (MTA) tries to address –

High levels of cross-device use with research on mobile and purchase on desktop
Long complex customer journeys with extended research before booking
Competitive space with many companies chasing each click

The Challenge

Online travel agency Loveholidays has data for millions of anonymous user interactions, but their attribution model was not identifying how different marketing channels and devices worked together to drive sales.

They needed data-driven marketing optimization to increase marketing efficiency and ROI

The Solution

In 2017 Loveholidays partnered with Metageni to develop a custom attribution model. The team explored multiple supervised machine learning classifier models, including decision trees, high order Markov chains, and ensemble methods of predicting holiday booking to determine the best model.

The best performing model tended to credit ‘upper funnel’ marketing activity more strongly than ever before and showed interesting patterns of variation between channels. It also highlighted key opportunities, including their email newsletters to past customers.

The Results

Loveholidays has been able to use its custom attribution model to re-estimate its marketing Cost Per Sale and adjust digital bids and budgets to drive efficient growth. The model can also identify, at any stage, the likelihood that a user with a given set of interactions will go on to make a booking.

Surpassing all expectations, Loveholidays achieved year-on-year growth of more than 190%, and in 2019 came UK number 1 in the Sunday Times Profit Track 100 list.

Loveholidays continues to work with Metageni, providing dynamic bidding for further ROI optimisation.

Loveholiday testimonial

“We deliver highly accurate customer prediction results for sales and marketing teams, we improve both conversion and retention rates. This provides objective, confident decision-making, saving time and guesswork to create successful sales and marketing strategies.”

Can we help unlock the value of your analytics and marketing data? Metageni is a London UK-based marketing analytics and optimisation company offering support for developing in-house capabilities.

Please email us at [email protected]