Taking Personalised Engagement to New Heights

Skyscanner originated in 2001 when programmer Gareth Williams, in his personal time, created a spreadsheet to help him scour the web for the best flights. It is now a global service offering flight searches in over 30 languages and its mobile app has been downloaded more than 40M times. Expanding to offer car and hotel search, the company continues to grow quickly, with a 77% increase in mobile visitors and 42% increase in revenue in 2014.

Available on: Web, iOS, Android

Goals: The world’s go-to app

Skyscanner’s goal is to become the world’s go-to app for travel search. To achieve this, the company wanted to better understand its customers in order to deliver personalised experience and content. To target mobile advertising more accurately, optimising ad content and creating greater engagement with consumers, the team needed to understand their audience and their journey across devices better.

Solution: Homing in on the customer journey

Skyscanner’s strategy began with incorporating Facebook Login that proved helpful for the company to serve personalised content to their users. Using Facebook's Analytics for Apps cohort analysis, the team improved their onboarding messages for new launches based on the 'first launch to search' patterns of their cohorts, thus increasing Facebook logins by 2X.

App Events proved crucial in allowing the company to target its customers with extremely relevant and personalised content. For example, through event-based targeting, the Skyscanner team served family-related content to people searching for flights with children. By creating these Custom Audiences the team managed to more than double the average click-through rates, with the rates peaking at 5X on this event-based targeted content against general interest targeting for similar content.

Armed with the ability to target with greater precision, Skyscanner used Facebook's Mobile App Engagement and Install Ads to acquire high-quality customers with 2X the lifetime value compared to that of other users

Customers who stay for the long haul

By simply changing the position of Facebook Login on their app, Skyscanner saw sign-ins double. Improved targeting using Facebook Analytics for Apps helped achieve 100% increase in Login conversions. Even more impressive was that the customers acquired via Facebook Mobile App Install Ads were of a far higher quality, with 2X the lifetime value compared to those acquired from other sources.

Results

• 100%
  increase of Facebook Login conversion through improved on-boarding based on Cohort Analysis
• 5X
  click-through rates in peak season by targeting ads and content using App Events
• 2X
  lifetime value of people acquired by Mobile App Ads

Facebook Products Used:

• Mobile App Ads: To create a community of highly-engaged consumers
• Facebook Login: To serve personalised content and increase retention
• Facebook Analytics for Apps: To better define consumer behaviour
• App Events: To target the right audience with the most relevant content