How Indonesia’s Tiket.com boosted bookings

Background

Online travel platform Tiket.com partnered with Glispa Global Group to drive high-quality mobile users and increase engagement for travel bookings. To increase app installs, the company created a special promotion applicable only on bookings through the app.

Although the company was using social channels like Facebook, offline events and mobile campaigns, it wanted to explore the positive correlation between visibility in the Google Play Store charts and organic installs.

The brand embarked on a strategy to increase the app’s ranking position and thus acquire more app users via a mobile-burst campaign.

Tiket.com’s goal was to achieve and maintain a top-ranking position for 10 days. The steps of the campaign were:

• Phase 1: Increase average revenue coming from the app through longer-term user acquisition campaigns (sustainable campaign)
• Phase 2: Decrease cost per acquisition by improving the app’s visibility and gaining organic, high-quality downloads (burst campaign)
• Phase 3: Maintain the app’s ranking and optimize to leverage ad sources that provide the best quality users.

Execution

Glispa and Tiket.com made use of a mix of strategies in order to provide the app with a fresh wave of high-quality users

Pre-launch phase: 

Tiket.com and Glispa reviewed past banner communication and aligned it to better suit Tiket.com’s marketing strategy. In the case of the mobile-only train-travel promotion, they used a banner that specifically highlighted the fact that it was exclusively available on mobile. KPIs were tied to monitoring via shared event data from the app.

Launch phase:

The launch started using a sustainable promotion through Glispa’s gPerform product. Glispa worked on optimizing the ad source toward the booking rate, which led to an increased number of transactions.

In the second phase, Glispa activated its gBoost app ranking solution with partners across Indonesia. The campaign resulted in better visibility over a period of 10 days, and the resulting increase of organic downloads helped Tiket.com reach top rankings for the travel category over seven consecutive days.

Glispa also activated its gNative solution, which placed non-intrusive native ads directly in the app’s content.

The companies worked together to analyse user data, optimize, and understand how to best target engagement levels and reach client KPIs.

Post-launch phase:

To sustain the app’s ranking, the team performed proactive optimization by monitoring post-install events in the campaign and adjusting to focus on channels that were proven to hit their KPI benchmark.

The campaign also incorporated a compliance-check programme that had zero tolerance for any non-compliant activities, and proactive analysis and filtering of non-compliant traffic.

Tiket.com’s key success factor in this campaign was to customize each banner to show the current promotion that Tiket.com had for each of its services.

Left banner: Flight and hotel promotion. Right banner: Ticket promotion

Additionally, video ads were used to display compelling places to visit. Jogyakarta, a popular Indonesian destination for local tourists, can be easily reached by train from various locations. The video showed a special promo code that users could implement when making a transaction through their mobile app only, encouraging more users to buy a product via the platform.

An interesting point that arose during execution was that although Tiket.com’s KPI was to increase bookings through the mobile app, the company discovered that following the sales funnel within the app, most people dropped out of the app before even reaching the content view.

To solve this issue, the company changed its strategy dramatically, by optimizing the ad source towards the content view first, for higher-quality users, followed with a second optimization towards purchase.

Results

The multi-phase approach with its mix of media garnered:

• 400 percent increase in mobile users compared with last year
• Twice as many bookings over three months
• Top 3 ranking in travel apps in Indonesia

Credits:

• Rio Hascaryo Hastowo – manager of promotion, Tiket.com
• Febrina Syaifullana – digital media specialist, Tiket.com
• Glispa Global Group – business growth team SEA