AKA is a collection of eight luxury extended-stay properties within the Washington DC, Philadelphia and New York metro areas with plans to expand to Los Angeles and London. They specialize in extended stays of seven nights or more and offer the luxury and comfort of a fully appointed condominium with the convenience of hotel amenities.
“The audience for our product is very specific so we were hesitant to spend a lot of money on a traditional online advertising campaign that reaches a general audience. The team at Sabre Hospitality Solutions worked with us to build an effective retargeting campaign and we were impressed with the results. We rely on our team to come up with innovative solutions that will produce a strong ROI and we truly appreciate the work and the results that were achieved.” 

Elana Friedman, Vice President of Marketing

The Challenge

With a limited budget, AKA wanted to generate revenue from long-term stay guests, AKA’s ideal target market.  

The Solution

The Online Media team at Sabre Hospitality Solutions created a “retargeting campaign” designed to market a special offer only to those travelers who had visited the AKA online booking engine but did not book a stay. Those visitors were tagged with a special cookie or identifier. Any time, during the next 30 days, if the user visited a Website in the Google Display Network*, the user was eligible to receive a AKA ad (example, the above image), reinforcing the brand message. Clicking on the ad would take them to a special landing page with a “7th night free offer” and the ability to book the special online. *The Google Display Network includes thousands of publishers and reaches 80% of the Internet using population on average.  

The Results

Using this very targeted approach enables you to market to the “who” (people who already showed interest in your property and even went so far as to check rates) in place of the “where” (an online media partner such as Kayak.com or TripAdvisor). The results of this campaign during the four months it ran were:
  • Impressions (number of times the ad was displayed) – 476,450
  • Visits to landing page – 1,356
  • Click through Rate = 0.28% (compared to an industry average of 0.10%)
  • Looks (number of visits to the booking engine) – 297
  • Return On Investment (ROI) – 5.6 to 1 (based on the ad dollars spent versus the revenue generated.