Case Studies

IDA Ireland Search Engine Optimisation

IDA Ireland IDA Ireland sought to generate a substantial increase in visibility in search engine visibility for the IDA website. They were looking to generate strong visibility for search terms that foreign investors would be using to research viable overseas markets. While Google was the primary objective they were also mindful of the other major engines for key terms associated with the activities of the IDA.

The overseas investment industry is a highly competitive area with many countries looking for overseas investment and funding. In addition, more organisations are fighting to achieve high rankings within the busy online marketing space. With the above points in mind, Interactive Return planned and implemented a suitable campaign to achieve IDA Ireland’s online objectives in the organic / unpaid listings.

Interactive Return introduced the practice of measuring website visibility based on the ranking of websites in those search engines used by the target audience for searches on the keywords most important to their business. The aggregation of these rankings into a single score ranging from 0% to 100% – the Interactive Return Visibility (IRV) metric – provides a measurement for the success of the search marketing campaign.

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Guinness Fantasy Rugby Website

Guinness GB – Bringing Targeted Visitors to the Guinness Fantasy Rugby
Website

Campaign Targets

Guinness RugbyThe Guinness Fantasy Rugby site was an initiative of Guinness GB during the Six Nations rugby championship 2004. The site was a completely separate site from Guinness.co.uk. The objective of the campaign was to drive qualified targeted traffic to the Guinness Fantasy Rugby site from UK search engines. Once users reached the site they picked and monitored a Fantasy Rugby team. Points were scored based on points scored by players in the actual Six Nations Championship. The prize for this competition was a SMEG fridge and one years supply of Guinness.

This campaign was a concentrated Pay-Per-Click and Google AdWords campaign based in the UK, running across all major UK search engines. The ads and listings online created both site awareness and branding online for Guinness. This campaign was launched in February and completed at the end of April 2004.

Strategy:

The strategy for this campaign involved

  • Comprehensive keyword research identifying terms outside of the Guinness brand terms. The terms targeted were very specific, focusing on rugby union, rugby in the six nations and Guinness Rugby. 
  • A Google AdWords campaign was set up and executed on Google.co.uk, AOL UK and Ask UK.

Results:

In the three months this ad ran, Google AdWords referred 536 visitors to the Guinness Fantasy Rugby site. The average cost per visitor was just £0.05p. The Overture UK campaign referred 1,128 visitors over three months. The average cost per visitor was £0.10p. In total 1,164 qualified visitors were referred to the site. These users in turn referred friends to the site resulting in a highly cost effective online marketing strategy. Online brand awareness was substantially increased for Guinness in the UK search engines while also promoting the involvement of Guinness in the Six Nations Championship.

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Murrays Europcar - Striking A Balance Between Functionality & Search Engine Compatibility

Murrays EuropcarInteractive Return successfully carried out the online marketing requirements for Murrays Europcar, for nearly a year resulting in an increase in visibility in all the major search engines and directories.
 

Identifying a need to update their website in line with corporate guidelines, address a number of functionality and content issues, and create a more search engine friendly site, Murrays Europcar approached Interactive Return to tackle this project, and turn it around within a four week time frame.

Strategy:

Given the short time frame, the Web Development and Online Marketing teams worked closely with Murrays Europcar to ensure that all needs were met.

The web development team paid particular emphasis to:

  • Designing a new website that would meet with corporate guidelines.
  • Incorporating additional functionality and navigation throughout the site.
  • Redesigning the booking form to include calendar facilities.
  • Building a content management system for the site.

The online marketing team were tasked with:

  • Applying new search engine friendly content and themes to all informational pages to increase the organic rankings for the site.
  • Improving the overall visibility of the website for all targeted key terms.
  • Ensuring user- and spider-friendly navigational paths were created, thus achieving a higher indexing in the search engines and directories.

Results:

Working closely with Murrays Europcar, the project went live on time and without glitches. As a result Murrays Europcar now have a more functional, corporate branded website that is more search engine compatible.

"I found Interactive Return to be at all times professional and proactive in all their dealings." commented Edo De Jongh, Murrays Europcar Sales & Marketing Manager. "Despite the project being more complicated than at first anticipated, all aspects were carried out on time and to the highest standard. The website is fast becoming one of our most important sales channels for car hire and we are already beginning to see a return on our investment."

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Creating an Online Presence for Phoenix Technology Group

Situation:

Phoenix Technology Group delivers integrated business process, document and case management solutions to the insurance and financial services industries. The company is a leader in its field.

Opportunity:

PhoenixPhoenix required an online presence whose graphic design and overall impact indicated the depth and sophistication of the company's expertise. It was also necessary to clearly communicate the features and benefits of the quite complex products and services offered by the company. Fiona Sexton, Marketing Manager with Phoenix, was also aware of the need to keep the website's content up to date so ease of maintenance was an important part of the site's specification.

Solution:

The web development team at Interactive Return worked intensively with Phoenix to determine the key objectives for the website and the critical user tasks that should be completed most easily by the visitor to the website. Together, Interactive Return and Phoenix ensured that all content for the site was web appropriate. Dynamic elements developed in Flash were used to communicate the interaction between the company's products and services. To facilitate the achievement of business objectives, the site was also designed for ease of optimisation with search engines and directories.

Results:

"From the outset it was obvious that Interactive Return had the experience from both a usability and design perspective to deliver on Phoenix's online objectives. It was a big project and quite complex. I was immediately delighted with the first draft results so the project got off to a speedy start. Throughout the project I found Interactive Return to be proactive and professional to deal with, which is half the battle! I was very pleased with the end result, it suited my requirements exactly".

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Delivering Return on Investment for ebookers

Situation:

Founded in 2000, ebookers Ireland are now one of Ireland's leading travel agents and www.ebookers.ie is certainly the most recognised branded travel website in the country.

Opportunity:

eBookersSince ebookers' website is their primary sales channel, all their marketing efforts are concentrated on directing people online. Ebookers were quick to realise that a huge percentage (about 80%) of Irish people use search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo! when surfing the Internet for flights and holidays. Currently, 75,500 people search for "cheap flights" every month on the Internet. If ebookers could achieve a high ranking on all the global search engines, they could get the lion's share of these potential customers.
Furthermore, ebookers wanted to improve the return on their online investment by increasing the conversion rate of website visitors to ticket sales.

Solution:

Faced with the task of search engine marketing, Rose Kervick, ebookers.ie Managing Director decided to outsource the work to Interactive Return. Already working with many of Ireland's blue chip companies such as Guinness, Permanent TSB, IONA Technologies and Swiftcall, Interactive Return had the skills and niche experience to successfully implement an online marketing strategy at this level.

Online Marketing:

After researching the online travel and holiday environment Interactive Return created and implemented an online strategy for ebookers Ireland. To achieve a top ranking on the search engines, Interactive Return used a combination of techniques; meta tag development, search engine registration, cloaking, paid submissions and inclusions into directories as well as pay-per-click campaigns and media purchasing.

Usability Study:

The objective was to increase sales by radically improving the website's conversion rate from visitors to customers. The usability study consisted of the following elements:

  • Demographic profiling of the website's target audiences
  • Determination of critical user tasks
  • Recruitment of user's who match the site's target audiences
  • User testing
  • Heuristic (expert) evaluation of the site
  • Generation of specific and practical recommendations to improve conversion rates
  • Assistance with the implementation of recommendations

Results:

Rose explains "We had tried to promote our online visibility, but did not have the available resources or the experience in this area. We felt it was best to leave it to the experts, so we asked Interactive Return to help. Since contracting Interactive Return's services we have seen a quantified increase in our visibility online. Our growth in online sales can be attributed to many factors, but the ease with which customers can now find us through search engines has certainly driven quality traffic to the site.'

By October 2001, ebookers.ie were ranked No.1 across all the major search engines for a wide range of travel related phrases such as "travel agent Ireland", "flights from Ireland" and "holiday from Ireland", "cheap flights from Ireland" and "sun holiday from Ireland".

In regard to Interactive Return's Usability work, Paula Thomas, Marketing Manager with ebookers, commented, "Interactive Return provided recommendations which we could implement immediately. Every recommendation was backed-up by evidence proving that it was the right way forward. The work done by Interactive Return has paid for itself many times over".

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Carlsberg's "Time for a change" email Campaign

Overview:

CarlsbergAs the official beer of the Irish World Cup squad, Carlsberg decided to use email to stir up some excitement about the Irish matches and to boost their brand. Interactive Return, in association with Slattery PR, developed the "Time for a Change" email campaign for the run-up to the World Cup.

Idea: Create an online petition to force the Irish government to bring Irish time in line with Japanese time for the Irish matches in June 2002.

Campaign:

Slattery PR commissioned email-marketing specialists, Interactive Return, to implement the campaign. The first step was to create a petition microsite for Irish fans to sign. Interactive Return then distributed a HTML e-flyer to Carlsberg's Fantasy Football database of self-professed soccer fans directing them to the microsite.

Everybody that signed the petition was encouraged to email it on to friends. During the 6-week campaign, five e-flyers were delivered to all those that signed the petition, updating them on the campaign's progress.

Results:

At the height of the campaign, one person was signing the petition every 27 seconds of the working day!

The Carlsberg "Time for a Change" campaign proved to be hugely successful. The email campaign was innovative, fast, trackable and generated Carlsberg brand awareness and hype, both online and offline, for the Irish World Cup campaign in June 2002.

The email campaign also made news on Ireland.com, in The Sun, The Star, The Independent and on the Pat Kenny morning radio show. Specifically, the results speak for themselves:

  • Approximately 13,000 people signed the petition on the microsite.
  • The average response rate from the five fliers was over 18%.
  • On the last e-flyer, the response rate exceeded 36%.
    This towers above traditional direct mail response rates of 2-3%
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Glenmalure Lodge

Background:

Glenmalure Lodge Glenmalure Lodge is a development of self-catering lodges available for rent in Wicklow, Ireland. The client required an online presence that conveyed the quality of the product offering and made online booking very simple for the user.

Strategy:

Interactive Return brought three different sets of expertise to bear on this project:

  • Graphic Design to ensure that the mood of the lodges and their setting was appropriately conveyed.
  • Usability to deliver a website designed for the completion of crtical user tasks, i.e. bookings.
  • Search engine optimisation to provide a website that will achieve and maintain an excellent ranking in search engines and directories.

As part of the project Interactive Return designed, developed and implemented a sophisticated booking engine that allows for seasonal pricing, special offers, and multiple booking discounts.

Results:

The result is an extremely successful website. Within a month of going live the client was able to report very positive feedback from users, high rankings in search engines and vastly increased conversion rates from visitors to customers.

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