Advertising of Rent-a-car service in Greece
Case client — Rent's Car. WAMP agency provided a market research, set up analytics and launched Google search ads.
Foreword
Today, I will discuss a case study involving a client who rents out cars. They have their own fleet of vehicles located in several cities across Greece, and the task was to launch advertising correctly.
The first issue was analytics. Here we used a standard approach:
- checking the website and funnel,
- checking event tracking,
- setting up data sending to Google Analytics and advertising accounts.
At the start, we took into account all conversions: viewing a car card, adding a car to the cart, starting a booking.
However, after the first bookings were successfully completed, we shifted the campaigns to optimize for this specific target action. As a result, the main metric we continued to work with was successfully completed bookings.
On the one hand, it was immediately clear that the advertising had to be multilingual, because customers might search for car rentals in Greek cities in different languages. Therefore, the first step was to develop a plan for translating keywords and ads into different European languages. With the right approach, it is possible to translate advertising campaigns into approximately 24 languages, which significantly expands the reach.
On the other hand, we had to take into account the specifics of user behavior. Some people search for car rentals before their trip, while still in their home country, and in such cases, we should focus on queries that mention a city, for example: “car rental Athens.” It doesn't matter where the query comes from — the main thing is that it contains the name of a specific city in Greece where rentals are available.
Another scenario is when people search for rentals while already in Greece. Specifically, in Athens or other cities where the client has cars. In such cases, we launch separate campaigns without strict geo-targeting in keywords. Here, we use broader phrases such as “car rental,” “rent a car,” “car rental,” and so on.
Solution
Launched Google Search Ads in Greek, English and other languages, targeting people who are already in Athens and looking for car hire.
Launched ads in English for keywords containing the word Athens worldwide, targeting people who are planning their trip to Athens and want to book a car in advance.
Campaigns structure
As a result, we built the structure as follows:
- The first campaign uses keywords that must include a specific city in Greece.
- The second campaign works worldwide, but only with exact phrases that also include the city name.
In the first campaign, we use broader keywords, while in the second, we use only exact matches.
Once this structure was ready, we took the English-language campaigns and created ad groups within them with translations of keywords and texts into other languages. This allowed us to gather more semantics and expand our reach.
In addition to search advertising, we also launched banner campaigns. The audiences for these were assembled based on the keywords used in the search campaigns.
But here it is important to clarify: launching banner advertising “worldwide” is risky, as budgets can be spent without any real results. Therefore, we limited banner campaigns to two scenarios:
1. Remarketing — we target users who have already visited the website but have not booked a car.
2. Local targeting — we show banners to those who are in cities where it is actually possible to rent a car. Here it is important to select the “recently arrived” setting rather than “permanent residents” because the main focus is on tourists.
656 visits
€0.97 CPC
68 bookings
€9 CPL
Advertising in local languages is a separate issue. For example, if we are talking about car rental in Athens, we launch campaigns in Greek.
In this case, we can expand our targeting not only to tourists but also to local residents. After all, people who live in Athens may also need to rent a car. For example, if their car is being repaired, they need to leave the city urgently, or they simply need a car for a few days.
For such scenarios, we have developed separate offers and promotions for local users. Discounts and special offers for urgent rentals work particularly well.
In the first few months, advertising followed the standard pattern: collecting statistics and making adjustments. In the second month, we selected only key conversions (bookings) and switched the campaigns to “maximum conversions” or “target price per conversion” strategies. This gave us more control and allowed the algorithm to learn from high-quality applications.
Final conclusions
If you are advertising services for tourists, you should always set up several campaigns at once:
- one for the domestic market,
- another for the whole world.
In global campaigns, be sure to limit keywords to geo-queries, specifying the cities where the service is actually provided.
Don't forget about multilingualism. Translating ads and keywords into different languages allows you to collect more queries, which means you get more targeted traffic.
