Success Stories: KAYAK

— The team that launched the service already had experience in creating successful online projects in the tourism sector. Ticket sales were actively developing on the Internet in the early 2000s in the USA. Both agencies and the airlines themselves were involved. As the number of offers grew faster, it became harder to compare them. As a result, the idea to create a resource which gathered together information on all offers into one place emerged.

It was important to get away from any association with ticket sales, so they came up with a name for the service that wasn’t directly connected with traveling or flying. The name had to be easy to remember and no bigger than six characters long. The word “kayak” was picked out of several thousand variants.

Today, KAYAK is one of the world’s largest services for searching travel offers. Each month we process more than 150 million searches, helping travelers quickly plan the best trip to anywhere in the world.

— People want to get away from standard package tours and at the same time don’t want to overpay for additional services. An online service saves a lot of time as booking or buying tickets takes just a couple of minutes. It’s possible to put more thought into planning out a trip, such as comparing alternative routes, reading reviews and finding the best deals. Independent tourism is developing around the world, and in recent years it’s become very interesting in Russia too.

— Yes, Russia has one of the most promising markets with great growth dynamics. According to our estimates, the year’s total share of the tourist segment on the Russian Internet increased one and a half times.

— First of all we localized the product correctly, using the power of the head office in the USA. Russia is one of the few countries where international services are noticeably less popular than the local ones. A different approach to promotion is required. Therefore the second important step is choosing the right marketing strategy. Our main channel of attracting customers has always been search engines. So, we focused on the advertising technologies of Yandex – particularly on contextual advertising in Yandex.Direct.

— Yandex.Direct was a new tool for us, so we decided to involve a local partner with the necessary knowledge – Artics Internet Solutions. We didn’t simply shift all the work to an outside agency, but integrated the agency into our processes. We managed to build trust, so that information about the growth and profitability of the business is always open to the agency.

— In the tourism business we work with a huge database of keyword phrases, and it took us six weeks alone to prepare for the launch of the ad campaign. We immediately decided to place ads for queries about all hotels and destinations, sorting them by country, grade, price range and popularity among users. Now we have 9 million keywords and nearly a thousand ad campaigns that we set up taking into account the seasonality of demand.

— Templates for instance are very helpful in creating a number of similar ads. They can be easily configured to create similar advertising campaigns for different sites and regions.

Using the keyword selection tool, we can follow the change in frequency of queries in different seasons, which is important in the tourism business. In addition we use the Direct Commander application. It’s great for working with a large volume of advertising campaigns.

— Thanks to Yandex.Direct, from the very beginning we took the pace that was appropriate to our business plan. We properly configured ad placement, gradually got closer to getting a return on our advertising investment target and increased our Yandex.Direct budget. As a result, over the last year our business in Russia has grown by an average of 20-30% a month, and this is the most important result.

— I’d compare it to a spacecraft which has lots of different levers and switches on the dashboard. If you carefully follow all the instruments, it will lead any pilot to their desired goal.

— Yandex.Direct became our biggest channel for attracting a target audience. If you are an international player and want to successfully enter the Russian market, it’s essential to work with Yandex.Direct. The usual advertising tools seen in the West will not be sufficient here.