Booking.com is a global travel fare aggregator website and travel metasearch engine for lodging reservations with a mission to empower people to experience the world.
In 2017, Booking.com broadened its offering by adding vacation rental properties alongside hotels. This led to significant growth opportunities for the company‘s business across the homes and apartments sector.
Booking.com partnered with Outbrain as a key digital acquisition partner to help grow property owner registrations globally.
Booking.com initially used landing pages built for paid search across its native Outbrain Amplify campaigns – and while large volumes of property owners completed the first step of the sign up process (entering email) at a good CPL, many of them got stuck at this first step instead of moving further down the funnel to complete their registration.
The Outbrain team went to work to improve the ratio of Outbrain audiences clicking on an ad and completing 25% and 100% of the sign up funnel. The team created 3 different types of landing page copy for Booking.com, and advised them on page layout, including the addition of “proof points” such as customer testimonials, awards/recognitions as well as a dynamically updated “how much you can earn” function, which gives an estimated weekly earning based on visitor geo-location.
Following a 2-week internal A/B test using Outbrain Amplify, Booking.com saw a significant improvement in the number of users completing 25% of the sign-up funnel, as well as users who succeeded in completing the registration process and listing their property, proving that native-based landing pages that tell a story to give the user context increases consideration and intent.
In addition, Booking.com saw a significant decrease of cost-per-registration, resulting in a considerable improvement of media cost efficiency.
