Case Study
Left Travel Tests Revenue Impact on Advertising
Left Travel is a Canadian travel booking company with a unique intelligence platform, TravelMind™, that understands user intent to book the right customer with the right accommodations. With 16 distinct brands, each with its own site, identity, and goals, Left Travel serves any traveler, anywhere. Some of their customers include Booking.com, airbnb, Expedia, and TripAdvisor.
Left Travel began working with SiteSpect in January 2019. Their optimization group lives primarily in their Product Management organization, helmed by a CRO specialist and a dedicated team of developers.
Testing Revenue Impact
Like many sites, Left Travel works with an advertising partner to generate additional revenue. Left travel wanted to use A/B testing to measure the revenue impact of these ads. Their guiding questions were: Do the ads affect conversion? If they hinder conversions, does the revenue benefit outweigh that loss? Are we making the most of our advertising partnership?
While the advertising partner offered great additional value from users that won’t end up booking with Left Travel, there was some room to optimize. One particular ad popped up automatically on the listings page for certain users, however, this particular ad was more intrusive to the UX than others. The optimization team wanted to find out if the possible negative revenue impact of the ad on user experience outweighed the revenue from the ad itself.
Results
Using SiteSpect, Left Travel disabled this particular ad for 50% of the users who would see it. Now Left could understand exactly how much potential revenue the ad lost against the amount of revenue it brought in. It turned out users who did not see the ad converted at a 13.5% higher rate. By leveraging A/B testing, Left Travel was able to leverage both onsite conversions and ad revenue optimally.
