Advertising Case Study

Bookit.com
Company Background
BookIt.com is currently the nations largest privately owned online travel website, featuring deeply discounted hotels, flights and vacation packages, in addition to complementary services and activities. BookIt.com differs from other online travel sites in that it strives to provide the most intuitive booking experience on the web, citing a primary dedication to Guest Elation while focusing on delivering the most competitive leisure and vacation destination offers.

Facebook Executive Summary

Client:

www.facebook.com/bookitdotcom Objective: Engage existing fans and grow the fan base for the BookIt.com Facebook page Solution: Sponsor a giveaway called Trip a Day in May, supported by targeted Facebook Ads and Sponsored Stories Key Lessons: ponsored Stories on Facebook S dont require the production of any creative, which can make them easy and costeffective to deploy. U sing Friends of Connections targeting can help identify likely customers or fans as their friends already like the brand.

Objective
Increasingly, consumer choices about travel rely heavily on personal recommendations. BookIt.com recognized early in its growth that having a large, active Facebook community would give potential guests a forum for true dialogue about their travel choices. Fans would be able to engage with one another, share experiences and offer peer-to-peer consumer advice. Additionally, the platform would provide a cost-effective means for dedicated BookIt. com Team Members to assist existing or potential guests with questions, feedback and issue resolution. When it initiated its targeted Facebook campaign, the company page had nearly 30,000 fans, but BookIt. com was looking for a way to better engage existing fans and to acquire new ones. This campaign was really about opening the lines of communication

With the Trip a Day in May campaign, I think we have only seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of how we will be able to leverage Facebooks capabilities. We plan to use the Facebook platform both as a communications and a distribution tool, as well as a sounding board to help us better develop our business models, both online and offline, in the future.
Damion White, Social Media Marketing Coordinator, BookIt.com

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between BookIt.com and our friends, and more formally introducing ourselves to the larger Facebook community, says Damion White, Social Media Marketing Coordinator for the company. We believe in skating in the direction of the puck, and in our experience, there has been no better platform for doing that than Facebook.

Results
65,000 unique entries to the competition. More than 1 million total entries. 39,031 fans added to the BookIt.com Facebook page directly from the Facebook Ads and 14,493 fans added through organic impressions. Organic impressions are free, value-added impressions that result from fans sharing and posting comments. With more than 106,000 fans by early August 2011, BookIt.com could potentially reach nearly 33 million friends of these fans with Friends of Connections Targeting. 35-40 percent of the total number of fans added to the Facebook page were generated by the Sponsored Stories. 72 percent of people who clicked on a Sponsored Story became a fan of the Bookit.com Facebook page. The Sponsored Stories were by far the best-performing product in this campaign, says Damion. 460 million total impressions for the campaign; 198 million of them were social impressions or displayed the name of a friend who liked the brand. 94,000 clicks, 47,000 of which were social. 30 percent increase in revenue driven by Facebook month over month in June, following the Trip A Day in May Giveaway. 1,400 percent increase in revenue driven by Facebook for the second quarter of 2011 compared with the same quarter a year ago.

Approach
In May 2011, the company launched a month-long giveaway called the Trip a Day in May Giveaway. The contest gave away a free trip on each of the 31 days in May. People could submit entries either by email or by connecting to Facebook through the Facebook Connect social plug-in on the BookIt.com site. BookIt.com supported the giveaway with Facebook Ads; it used various ad units but emphasized Marketplace Ads, which are often used to incite people to take a specific action, such as entering a contest. The campaign targeted individuals with travel-related interests by using Facebooks Likes & Interests feature. BookIt.com also used Friends of Connections targeting. We determined that it would be more powerful to introduce ourselves to people who were friends of our existing community, and therefore more likely to take action, says Damion. Sponsored Stories was the important second component to the strategy as this product allows businesses to increase the visibility of fans interactions with brands on Facebook by featuring them on the right column of pages. When someone liked the page, the action created a Like Sponsored Story, which was displayed to that persons friends on the right-hand column of his or her page. With Sponsored Stories, you see your friends profile picture and you see the number of people who like the page followed by the page name, and thats it, says Damion. Its the simplicity and the fact that it leads with the familiar, your personal friend, and that makes it compelling.

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The company also saw a very high level of engagement with the BookIt.com Facebook page, particularly during the giveaway campaign. We would post something as simple as a photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge on the day of the San Francisco giveaway, and that would generate 400 Likes and 250 Comments, says Damion. Then, it trended that way for most of the entire month.

The Future
BookIt.com is working on a concept for a Facebook application that leverages the companys large and continually growing fan base, and encourages content sharing in innovative ways. Because travel is an industry about which individuals are often passionate, consumers generate excellent content that can supplement content added by BookIt.com staff. The company looks forward to promoting the new application and its future Facebook endeavors with robust Facebook Ads campaigns.