Seamless site
migration in PPC

Over an 11-year history, resorthoppa had successfully established itself as one of the leading providers in airport transfers in the UK, with further expansion into Europe. With the help of addmustard’s Search Engine Management (SEM) team, the brand had a strong presence in search engines’ paid listings with top positions, high impression share, and click through rates above the industry average. In June 2015, the company launched its new website and a full rebrand under the name hoppa, following a customer research and rebranding project supported by addmustard.

Following the rebrand of resorthoppa to hoppa, addmustard’s objective was to ensure a seamless switch of PPC traffic to the new website, while maintaining healthy KPIs. The move to a new domain, website and account would mean that historical data that had been built up over the previous six years would be erased, and keyword quality scores would need to be completely rebuilt. This, coupled with a brand new site, new look and feel, and new name that would be unfamiliar to the business’ existing customers, meant there were many challenges to take into consideration when planning the new account build and PPC strategy. We were also faced with executing the migration during one of the business’ peak selling periods.

The goals set out by the business were:

     maintain sales and transaction volumes during the migration period;

     increase product visibility and traffic volumes to the new site;

     increase visibility and conversion on mobile devices;

     maintain strong positions and share of market;

     migrate 250,000+ keywords to a new account structure.

Using analysis from the structure and performance of the old brand’s PPC campaigns, combined with industry best practice, addmustard created a neatly structured, manageable and efficient account with more opportunity to convert on mobile devices on the new, fully responsive site.

addmustard’s strategy included:

     ensuring campaign and keyword coverage for all products;

     creating tightly aligned keywords and ads;

     PPC landing page creation and testing;

     split campaigns by match type for more efficient management;

     creating strong educational messaging including remarketing for new and returning visitors.

As hoppa had decided to run a soft launch of the site, the team began migrating a handful of campaigns that were historically stable, in terms of traffic volume and conversion, in order to experiment with ad copy, landing pages and bids. This strategy allowed us to plan the full migration strategy based on actual data.

While a new brand and website meant a temporary, but expected, decrease in conversion directly following the launch, the careful planning of the new account structure enabled us to quickly recover our positions and visibility. This meant that not only were we able to maintain traffic, but we also increased volumes in line with hoppa’s plans for year on year growth.

     Increased visits by 45% YoY during peak summer period

     Increased mobile traffic by 143%

     Increased product visibility by 97% YoY

     Reduced average CPCs by 10% YoY, while improving average position by 14%

     Reduced mobile CPCs by 7.5%, while maintaining an average position of 1.5

     Increased overall click through rate by 24%

     Increased mobile click through rate by 42%

     Increased mobile conversion rate by 20%

     Drove 168% more mobile conversions YoY