Contextual Advertising for LauferJet Airline
424
million cities covered
by advertising worldwide
127
new VIP clients engaged
from the website within 4 months
Testing the Russian-speaking segment
of the business aviation online market
About the Customer
Laufer Jet (Israel) is a business airline operator, and is part of LauferAviation-GHI Holding, which is a leading global provider of aviation, ground and VIP services. The airline operates up to 9,000 flights annually, of which about 800 to the CIS countries.
Task
To help increase LauferJet sales in the business aviation market by attracting Russian-speaking customers worldwide through Internet marketing.

The management of LauferJet has no experience in using digital tools in promoting its services and offers to conduct a pilot advertising campaign during 4 months with a modest budget of 500,000 RUB.
Performed Works

1
Analysis of the Situation
Market Research and LauferJet Positions
According to various sources, the market volume in the Russian Federation and the CIS is 1-2 billion dollars per year.

The number of market participants exceeds 200. Two-thirds of them are foreign companies.
The number of flights ranges from 1200 to 2400 per month, depending on the season.
The cost of services starts at $ 25,000 per flight, and, as a result, they are subjected to a very limited demand.

LauferJet provides the following services:
- organization of business flights and private - flights;
- lease of VIP aircrafts;
- aircraft rentals for transporting patients.

In the Middle East, Laufer Aviation-GHI is a recognizable brand. Companies of the Holding carry out a significant part of VIP air transportation and ground services in Israel and neighboring countries.

LauferJet is still quite unknown in the Russian market, the main source of Russian-speaking customers are recommendations and word of mouth.
Target Audience Identification
At the project launch, the share of Russian-speaking customers in the LauferJet portfolio was approximately 6%. These were primarily representatives of the political and business elite of Russia and the CIS, having professional and business ties with Israel, as well as wealthy immigrants from the CIS residing in Israel, the Middle East, and Africa.

It was necessary to expand the audience and cover the following customers by a proper advertising campaign:
- owners and top managers of the largest Russian companies from Expert-600 and Forbs-200 ratings, including their personal assistants;
- millionaires with net worth exceeding 10 million dollars, residing in the Russian Federation and the CIS;
- people with annual income exceeding $ 1 million, residing in the Russian Federation and the CIS;
- wealthy immigrants from Russia and neighboring countries around the world;
- Russian-speaking buyers of luxury goods around the world;
- Federal Authorities and Governments of all constituent entities of the Russian Federation;
- high-ranking clergy and pilgrims;
- private individuals and charitable foundations in the Russian Federation and the CIS in need of medical transportation (Israel is a country with developed medical tourism);

The idea of the age and gender composition of the target audience was generated by analyzing users of popular Russian-language business aviation portals. The most active were men (61.7%) and women (38.3%) between 25 and 45 years old. The majority of portal visitors were residents of megacities and regional centers.
Possible sources to engage the target audience from
A list of possible sources for Laufer Jet target audience has been identified:
- Search and ad networks Yandex and Google.
- Specialized portals on business aviation services.
- Russian-language resources dedicated to sale of luxury goods (real estate, yachts, cars, jewelry, works of art, antiques, etc.).
- Business resources such as RBC, Banks.ru, etc.
- Popular among businessmen information resources such as echo.msk.ru and others.
- Business conferences and affiliate programs.
- Air shows, viz. MAKS, etc.
- Facebook and LinkedIn social networks, theme groups and communities.
- Business press (Vedomosti, Kommersant, DK, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Nezavisimaya Gazeta) and certain magazines such as Top Flight.
- Resources providing information on medical treatment abroad.

2
Campaign Strategy
Development
When developing the strategy, the tight deadlines and the moderate campaign budget were taken into account.
The main channels of promotion
- Contextual advertising in Yandex and Google.
This allowed to reach the audience:
- interested in information about private flights and looking for it in search engines;
- visitors of news, information and business resources through advertising in YAN and Google Display Network.

Additional promotion channels
As an additional source of traffic and for a wider reach of audience, it was decided to use targeted advertising on Facebook.
Project team
A project team of 5 people was engaged: a project manager, an analyst, a designer, a contextual advertising specialist, and a targetologist.
Website Redesign
It was decided that in order to obtain a long-term effect, it made sense to convince the client of the need to redesign the existing corporate website and to perform search engine optimization.

3
Development of landing pages
At the start of cooperation, lauferjet.com had three language versions: in Hebrew, English, and Russian. The Russian version was created by an Israeli agency and could not serve as a quality landing page for an effective advertising campaign due to an unsuccessful structure, an ill-conceived UX and lack of conversion forms.

Therefore, the only logical solution in this situation was to develop landing pages focused specifically on the Russian-speaking audience.

A high-quality design has been created, so that visitors to the landing pages have almost instantly grasped that LauferJet is a modern, high-tech company that is completely trustworthy.
In the process of creating the landing pages we:
- generated a unique offer for the client, so that the consumer would understand the benefits of cooperation with LauferJet, and not with 200 competing companies;
- prepared a line of reasoning on why it is beneficial to use the services by LauferJet;
- created interaction forms.
    To reach the target audience around the world by the maximum number of queries (including low-frequency ones), as well as to increase conversion and optimize advertising budgets, it was decided to create SEO-optimized landing pages for all the world's million-plus cities.

    By multiplication the landing page and inclusion of different cities, 424 landing pages were created.

    We performed installation and configuration of analytics systems.

    3
    Contextual advertising
    Configured and launched contextual advertising campaigns in Yandex.Direct and Google Adwords. All traffic was directed to landing pages. Campaigns were worked out according to the following strategies:
    Ad campaign by the main types of services in Russia and the CIS;
    Ad campaign by geo-dependent requests;
    Ad campaign by brands of competitors in Russia and the CIS;
    Ad campaign by brands of competitors in Europe, the USA and Asia;
    Ad campaign on the main types of services for Europe, the USA, Israel and Asia;
    Display campaigns in YAN and Google Display Network.

    When developing ads, we used the same competitive advantages as when creating landing pages, i.e. low price, European quality of service, a full range of services, and extensive experience.
    A service of contextual advertisement automation called Marilyn has been connected.
    LEARN MORE
    Using the functionality of this service:

    - A / B testing of ads was conducted to identify the most clickable headers and banners;
    - conversion campaigns optimization was setup;
    - monitoring of planned KPIs was carried out;
    - automatic management of daily campaign budgets was setup.
    Analytical support of campaigns.
    In the course of advertising campaigns, the following preliminary results were obtained:

    Slicing by platforms
    Most of the contextual traffic came from Yandex.Direct (42.9%), a smaller part came from GoogleAdWords (33.5%).
    Slicing by countries
    Leaders in the amount of incoming traffic among Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the USA, and Belarus
    Slicing by cities
    Leaders among cities: Moscow, Kiev, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, San Francisco, Almaty, Sochi-Krasnodar, and Minsk.
    Number of conversions
    In the number of conversions, GoogleAdWords was ahead of Yandex.Direct by a little more than 4%. Most conversions were from clicks in Moscow and Kiev (41%).
    Cost per click
    In Google AdWords, the cost per click was 30% lower than on Yandex.Direct.
    Based on the data received, adjustments to the settings of advertising campaigns were constantly made.
    For example:

    Campaigns on brands of competitors in Russia and the CIS were suspended, except for Moscow and Kiev due to their low efficiency;
    Budgets were redistributed to Google in foreign countries and in Ukraine;
    The list of key phrases and creatives by types and models of aircrafts, etc. was extended;
    Thus, the campaigns were adjusted in Israel so that on Shabbat (from Friday evening to Saturday evening), the campaign intensity significantly decreased.
    Result
    The audience reach covered 441 730 people.
    Contextual advertising attracted 4,683 visitors.
    116 applications were received for organization of VIP-flights.

    Landing pages showed a conversion rate of 2.48%, which was a good result for promoting services with a value of $ 20,000 or more.

    The average cost of attracting applications from contextual advertising reached 1820.60 RUB

    4
    Targeting Advertisement
    in Facebook
    The official Russian-language page of Laufer Jet was created. News got published every 3-4 days. The page was created in order to use all the optimal types of placement: the Facebook advertising network (partner sites and mobile applications), the right column on desktops, news feeds on computers and mobile devices, because broadcasting of an advertisement in the news feed for the target audience is not possible without reference to the official page.
    No cheating with numbers or attracting participants through advertising was allowed, because the entire advertising budget was directed to landing ads. The graph shows that all Likes were organic.
    Targeting

    Due to the lack of time and budget, a rather broad targeting strategy was chosen by geography and interests only:
    - 25 most promising cities were selected;
    - interest categories - financial market, stock exchange, investment management, securities market, equity, etc.
    Potential reach of more than 1.6 million network users.

    As a result, despite a rather wide sampling, the cost per click averaged to 2.0 RUB, or even lower for certain ads.
    As a result, we got additional cheap traffic and good audience reach. Within 4 months, 6,297 users of Facebook came to the website. Of these, 11 people submitted applications. The conversion cost amounted to 1,144.90 RUB.
    Results
    As a result of the 4-month advertising campaign, 127 applications were received for VIP air travel from 14 countries: Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Belarus, the USA, France, Czech Republic, Germany, Cyprus, China, Thailand, Israel, and Mali.



    Taking into account all the work on strategy development, creating landing pages and ideas, conducting campaigns and analytics, the cost of one application did not exceed 50 USD per client.
    Currently, the management of LauferJet Airlines is busy creating a full-fledged support department for Russian-speaking customers and approving a full-scale strategy for entering the Russian market.