Executive summary
SPL Villas has been curating exceptional stays since 2017, offering a handpicked selection of over 1,200 villas across the Mediterranean and Florida.
To enhance their digital marketing effectiveness and expand their reach, SPL Villas partnered with Adido to optimise digital marketing efforts through PPC, SEO and social media advertising, as well as understanding their data more by completing a GA4 tracking project. This was all done alongside user experience and web development updates.
Through these strategic initiatives, SPL Villas aims to showcase their extensive portfolio to a broader audience, improve reporting on leads, sales and revenue, and create SEO-focused content to enhance search engine visibility within the luxury villa holiday market.
The problem
Following a recent website migration, SPL Villas needed to rapidly increase direct online sales of their flight and villa packages. A suspended Google Ads account meant the possibility of having to create a brand new account and potentiallylosing any valuable insights or data from the original property.
An incomplete tracking journey made it extremely difficult to understand the revenue drivers and how users were interacting with the new site.
Paid social was the biggest traffic driver, but had low conversion rates. Increases in organic search and paid search were required to increase not just traffic but also conversions.
While SPL Villas has a vast agent network who can book inventory on behalf of their clients, driving more direct B2C sales as a priority for SPL Villas. In a highly competitive market and with a need to optimise performance quickly, SPL Villas required a results-driven digital marketing strategy to accelerate growth.
The solution
To help SPL Villas achieve their goals, we devised a multi-channel performance marketing strategy focused on high-intent users.
Paid search
First and foremost, we aimed to keep the original Google Ads account in place and assisted SPL Villas with the reactivation of the account, enabling us to benefit from the historic data. Activity started with a generic campaign, complemented by multiple campaigns targeting individual locations, such as Cyprus, Mallorca, Paphos, Protaras, Dalmatia and Dubrovnik.
Destination campaigns were costly and ineffective, and subsequently paused. The generic campaign was optimised and built out to have a villa-only ad group and a flights-focused ad group. Geographical targeting was limited to London, Manchester and the home counties to make budget go further and increase competitiveness. An enquiry-driven landing page was created, with ad copy updated to suit ahead of peak seasonality, while a Pmax campaign was introduced, increasing numbers of soft conversions.
The numerous soft conversions were added to the account to see how users were interacting with the site, whilst the full ecommerce tracking solutions was being built.
These conversions included contact form submissions, live chat instigations, book now clicks, newsletter signups and social clicks.
PPC traffic quality was on point, but issues on the site prevented conversions, especially online sales.
Paid social
We used Meta (Facebook and Instagram), with video assets focusing on the joy of a SPL Villas holiday. Our approach included custom audience targeting based on previous website visitors, lifestyle ad creatives showcasing villa destinations, flexible booking options and limited time offers, as well as retargeting campaigns to re-engage users who had visited the site but had not yet booked.
Organic
Out of the gate, the focus was to work with SPL Villas to resolve the biggest technical issues on the site to create a good foundation for content creation and internal linking. Keyword research and content planning focused on keyword cluster, covering terms including ‘villas + flights’, ‘villa + flight + location’, ‘villas + type’ (e.g Greek villas with heated pools). This was the best way to understand where SPL Villas ranked for these terms but also to divide and conquer these terms in their priority locations.
Content was two-pronged, informational content, aimed at nurturing the customer journey with blog content and mixed with commercial landing page optimisations for users further down the funnel.
The initial content strategy was planned for six months, focusing on the priority locations that SPL Villas had provided, while technical consultancy would be a continuous theme throughout our partnership with SPL Villas.
Performance tracking & data insights
While GA4 was in place, it was not set up for success. A full tracking project was underway to fill in the holes in the existing tracking set up. This included reviewing the existing GA4 setup and auditing the numerous setting categories: Property settings, Data collection, Data display, Product links, GTM configuration tag setup, GA4 initialisation (page_view event behaviour), GA4 Session identification and - most importantly - the implementation of ecommerce events.
The projected culminated in a customised purchase journey, with the creation of exploration path reports for overall page analysis, customisation implementation within the purchase journey and ensuring the new events were correctly added to GA4 menus.
All the above allowed for a new level of detail and visibility for SPL Villas on how users interacted with the site.
The results
Since solidifying the Google Analytics 4 property, implementing the organic content strategy and prioritising PPC traffic to landing pages for flights and villas, SPL Villas has since seen incremental increases across their marketing channels. Overall keyword rankings have significantly increased for all optimised locations.
The average keyword ranking for Greek locations moved from 85 to 40, within six months. With further optimisation planned to build out the locations keyword clusters, we aim to improve this ranking further.
The foundations are now in place for Adido and SPL Villas, and the performance-driven strategy has delivered the following significant improvements for SPL Villas within the first few months:
Conclusion
By implementing a data-driven, multi-channel strategy, Adido helped SPL Villas overcome challenges from a website migration, tracking gaps, and paid media setbacks. Optimised PPC, paid social and SEO efforts led to a 135% increase in flight and villa page traffic and a 155% rise in blog impressions.
With improved tracking, refined targeting and a strong content strategy, SPL Villas is now positioned for sustained growth. Adido’s hands-on support, including reinstating their Google Ads account and securing a refund, reflects our commitment to driving real results and long-term success.
