How did Blue Bay Travel use Infinity’s call intelligence solution to ramp up conversion rates and double year-on-year phone bookings?

Making more data-driven decisions to optimise PPC budgets and improve paid search lead quality

The challenge

80% of Blue Bay Travel’s bookings are completed over the phone, so 80% of their conversion data was invisible to them. It was therefore imperative that they understood what was causing the phone to ring, as well as how they could optimise those calls once they came in.

They relied on their phone agents to connect calls to a marketing source by asking the caller where they had come from. This method was subject to human error, put additional pressure on the agent, and left many holes in the insight that Blue Bay Travel had of their customer journeys. As an ambitious travel brand looking to grow, this wasn’t a solution that would scale.

Why Infinity?

As well as providing reliable, customisable, and insightful call tracking capabilities, Blue Bay Travel felt that Infinity’s ability to scale up across domains and markets matched their longer term ambitions.

Blue Bay Travel has also invested significantly in building a top quality analytics and development team, who immediately saw the value of Infinity’s flexible and easy to use API. Integrating Infinity into their existing systems meant that a huge amount of benefits and insights could be gleaned from call data, while Infinity also provided fast, knowledgeable answers to a wide range of queries.

The solution

Blue Bay Travel implemented Infinity’s call intelligence solution across the websites of all of their brands. The call goals recorded in Infinity could be fed into Google Ads as a bidding optimisation metric for PPC campaigns. Infinity was also integrated into Blue Bay Travel’s CRM system, so that call data is automatically connected to leads and displayed to the phone agent in real time.

This created a clear, actionable view on every customer journey that came in via the phone that could be acted upon at scale. By joining this data up from first click to a booking call, they could measure their return on advertising spend, enabling them to move to an automated bidding strategy in Google Ads, specifically targeting for cost-per-acquisition. They have also recently implemented Infinity’s Call Out URL integration across their installations, speeding up insights and expanding optimisation options in Google Ads.

The outcome

The new visibility on their call data helped double year-on-year phone bookings they received in 2018 compared to 2017. They then surpassed their entire 2018 total by the end of August in 2019. Infinity gave Blue Bay Travel the confidence to know precisely what was working to generate leads, which resulted in them doubling their annual PPC budget.

Some results that Blue Bay Travel achieved with Infinity include:

• 32% cost-per-booking reduction.
• 62.5% increase in conversion rate of visits to calls.
• 174% year-on-year uplift in PPC bookings.
• Cost-per-bookings savings alone delivered a 4x ROI on Infinity investment.

The call recordings and data are also used to help target training and improve a mix of skills across the call centre. Going forward, Blue Bay Travel is also looking at using Infinity’s Conversation Analytics suite to understand the content of calls better and improve their customer experience and call outcomes.

What the client says

Injecting goal events from phone calls was an absolute game changer for our digital strategy, allowing us to make intelligent, data-driven decisions for paid search. Infinity's API made this a simple process, rapidly delivering real, measurable results. Blue Bay Travel used part of its investment from LDC to create a Marketing Intelligence department, and this Infinity data has allowed us to enrich our lead insights and make profitable actions with regards to our search strategy.
Thomas Malbon | Marketing Intelligence Manager, Blue Bay Travel

Before you go, our infographic helps visually explain Blue Bay's ability to lower cost per booking and improve paid-search results.