Assignment:
Case study
Submitted By: M. Hassan Shafiq
L1F11MBAM1160
Muhammad Ameen
L1S11MBAM
Abdul Qayoom
Section: A
Submitted By: PROF. Asim Tanvir
Air France
Five French airlines merged to form Air France in 1993. Launched its first successful flight to the United States in July 1946 between Paris and New York City after Second World War. Served 185 destinations in 83 countries and its total fleet size stood at 383 aircraft. Air France and Netherlands-based KLM airlines joined forces and created the Sky Team global alliance. Air France-KLM continued to grow at the end of 2006 -2007.
60% 50% 40% 30% 20%
48%
42% 31%
10%
17%
0%
3%
Msn
Google
Yahoo
Aol
Ask Jeeves
Travel Industry and E-Commerce
Travel industry was one of the earliest to adopt e- commerce into their sales strategies. This helped in easy accessibility to the customer and held huge potential for increasing businesses’ sales by vastly increasing their reach. E-Commerce emerged as a very fast growing sales medium. With the adoption of e-tickets, airlines were better protected from many of the logistical problems. Travel industry comprised several different types of online service providers. Direct websites (Owned and hosted by the individual airlines) Aggregator websites (offered service beyond flight purchase including hotel and vacation packages)
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) SEM was a well-known method of marketing in which businesses promoted their products and services through targeted placements on Internet search engine results pages (SERPs).
This provided a highly targeted space to connect consumers to exactly what they were looking for. Promoting websites by increasing visibility in SERPs through multiple unique techniques: Search Engine Optimization Paid advertising (CPC, CPM, PPC) Contextual Advertising There are regular search engines and vertical search engines Example: www.kayak.com SEM mainly consists of two things:
1. SEO (Search engine optimization)
It analyses the structure and content of a business’s Web site to maximize its readability and relevance. It mainly looks at technological part of the websites like URL address structure, Web server settings, Simply put, working on your website to improve pe rformance Aimed at improving PageRank and visits
2. Pay-per-click or sponsored search
Businesses bid on keywords for sponsored link listings consisting of a title. Charges were dependent upon the number of times an ad had been clicked on for a keyword. Cost-per-click could reduce with volume as the search engine provider determined the ad was more relevant to those keywords.
The larger search engines allowed for broad, exact, and phrase keyword campaigns to allow advertisers to cast either wide or narrow nets of impressions. Geotar getting had become easier now. These campaigns were easily measurable due to the availability of some tracking devices on internet.
Media Contacts and DoubleClick
Media Contacts was the global interactive media network of Havas media. It provides data driven media solutions. Media Contacts worked to form strategic partnerships with a number of research and technology providers in order to gain access to granular data sets. DoubleClick was an internet ad service company.
Google Pursued an aggressive growth strategy through new product development, acquisitions and partnerships. Position of an ad is determined by CPC and CTR Uses highly complex mathematical “black box” algorithm.
MSN MSN did partnership with other service and content providers in order to drive traffic to MSN.com. MSN received revenue from three key sources; Microsoft adCenter, MSN Shopping, and subscription based web service.
Yahoo
As the predecessor of Yahoo Search Marketing, commercial Web search services company Overture was one of the early pioneers in monetizing the internet search traffic.
Kayak
Differentiate itself in two ways - As an alternative business model from aggregators - unique technology architecture Provided more exhaustive search including the inventory of 551 airlines and 91,500 hotels. Its goal is to find and search every hotel on earth, which it estimates at 300,000 properties.
Challenges and probable Solutions The Media Contacts team had only a short time to make sense of all of its research and determine a way to optimize future campaigns. Use branded or unbranded keywords. Broad or focused keywords are more profitable Which search engine will deliver the most value
Solutions
Using both branded and unbranded keywords can be best suitable option for Media Contacts because it appeared that using branded keywords might bring in more revenue, it was also apparent that unbranded keywords produced a larger percentage of single-click conversions. In Internet one should try to adopt multiple strategies at a single time because in this one can easily target their customers according to demographics and can do geotargeting and in the last one should analyse that which strategy has performed well one should focus more on that strategy. Since air France is working with all top most search engines therefore according to their target customers they should utilize the potential of search engines like on Google they can use the strategy of pay per click and sponsored search because on Google it is difficult to know about the prospective customer. While in the case of Yahoo ,MSN and all other social networking websites one can easily advertise according to their target customer and can do the segmentation Demographically, Geographically, time wise and Liking wise, so are very important aspects of any internet advertisement campaign and there are very less chances of loss of money. They can go for affiliate marketing also by doing partnership with other online travel booking sites and can maximize their revenue.
Strategies Geotargeting helps restrict campaign settings to a particular location (state/city/country). For Air France, currently, it’s not a good idea, People using Paris as a hub to travel to the US
shouldn’t be excluded. Google.com/Yahoo.com is global domains – essential that the ads be
visible there. MAINTAIN
DISPLAY ADVERTISING
SEASONAL CAMPAIGNS
SPECIALIZED APPLICATION
DEVELOPMENT
SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS
DATA SEGMENTATION
REFINE EXISTING CAMPAIGNS
IMPROVE SEO
This involves using sophisticated data analytics to truly create value by using the correct key word strategy to ensure that every click on your ad is by an actual prospective customer.
Air France needs to focus on driving visitors to their website, using both SEO and SEM strategies with the overall goals to be converting web surfing to online booking while minimizing click costs. The recommendations given will ensure that Air France continues to gain global market share especially on Trans-Atlantic routes.
