How Afristay got +64% in Coversions at -50% cost per click, +43% to Facebook fans & SEO traffic wins through a redirect
January 04, 2025
"Bohdan and the team was efficient, helpful, methodical and highly knowledgeable.
I highly recommend him."
Rupert Bryant
CEO, Afristay
Afristay is an online accommodation booking service. It is a South African start up that has been generating 50k visits monthly and has been active in Adwords.
Company bio
Afristay (old name AccomodationDirect) is an online accommodation booking service. It is a South African start up that has been generating 50k visits monthly and has heavily relied on SEO and Google Ads for traffic.
Industry: Travel, Online Travel Agencies (OTA), travel platforms.
The problem
The company's new site emerged as a result of redirect of a half of dozen of regional country websites, which caused tech problems too. Plus, company Google Ads performance as well as conversion rate were relatively low.
Afristay logo
WHAT WE'VE SEEN
Hypothesis
After sites' migration Rupert and the team understood how the site's traffic hinged on redirecting users from a half of a dozen sub-regional websites to specific categories on the new domain. They've suspected these 301 redirects were not been implemented perfectly.
Each regional websites has their own promotion and link building practices, so as a part of ongoing consolidation the idea was to bring them to a single denominator.
Afristay also used Google Ads to support Organic traffic in 3 core travel destinations and were looking to cope with the rising Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC).
Our hypothesis was:
Redirection was not technically sound
301 redirect has not been implemented perfectly, so we thought to ensure the granularity of redirect and overall new domain’s tech validity.
Social media performed weakly
Social Media traffic and conversion has historically been very low. And we were to understand why.
Google Ads required optimisation
They generated lost of clients from Ads but the cost per click was high.
Afristay site's homepage fragment
What We Did
Scope of our work included 4 main assignments:
AccomodationDirect becomes Afristay: timeline
Afristay promotion banner
Afristay's client badge look
SEO Traffic Consolidation
As a part of the work we have made suggestions on how to avoid a risk of penalties for linking patterns between related websites, advised on a proper redirect implementation and also suggested the updates to the new domain’s website architecture.
New Backlinks Strategy
With the site’s incoming links pattern dominated by related domains, we advised Afristay on how to diversify incoming links sources.
"I understand that in an online travel agency (OTA) business, it might be hard to get a link from a hotel’s site, especially when you compete with it for a ranking. So, I came up with a strategy rooted in the idea of fitting the needs of participants of the travel content consumption chain.."
BOHDAN LYTVYN
Founder, Nertis
This particularly included visitor reviews, valuable gadgets, things to do & guides that were definitely worth a link or two. It also included fun content ideas to attract the attention of blogging hotels, established travel blogs, news sites, etc. As a part of the strategy research I also have done a competitor backlinks research and analysis.
Social media
Social Media traffic and conversion has historically been very low. We've changed that.
Afristay's social media promo materials
After spending some time exploring Conversion paths in Google Analytics we've have come to the conclusion that on Social the company would win a customer with an idea to travel somewhere, rather than a specific selling proposition, i.e. accommodation type.
So, we came up with a suggestion to focus on stirring discussions on Facebook and engaging folks through different competitions.
The Results
The Facebook fan base increased by 43% over 1 month only.
As a result, the Facebook page has been increasingly busy in hosting different competitions (and even created a Competition tab on their profile).
+43%
Facebook fan base
Google Ads
The client uses Google Ads search ads campaign targeted to three busiest destinations. We have analysed both Adwords and Google analytics data to identify keywords that perform the best. In our case those were keywords with both highest Goal Completion rate and lowest Bounce Rate. We've implemented Enhanced cost-per-click (ECPC) bidding feature to maximise exposure for keywords that most likely lead to conversions.
I analysed the time graphs of site’s conversions and advised to enable the Ad Scheduling option to remove Ads showing between 0:00 – 7:00 where I have detected no historical conversion whatsoever. Also, I have set Time and Device Bid adjustment to increase Impressions to users with tablets and within the time frames when users historically would most likely convert.
BOHDAN LYTVYN
Founder, Nertis
We've updated Ad copy where the bounce rate would stand in the way of conversions. In addition to that I set up Review extensions, which alone resulted in 20% CTR increase.
I also have used Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) with Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) on a portion of the site’s pages. DSAs would automatically generate ads based on website content. RLSA allowed me to show relevant ads on Google.com to users that had previously visited the site but did not convert.
The Results
As a result, website-wide conversion from Google Ads rose 46% while spending decreased 9%. With DSA and RLSA - the conversion rose 64%, cost per click fell by 50%.
When the DSA and RLSA strategy was implemented, conversion rose 64% in the first two months while the cost per click was nearly 50% lower than that of the conventional keywords lists. Presently, I am expanding the DSA and RLSA on a larger portion of the website's pages.
+64%
Conversions