Rotana Hotels: Image-Driven Performance with Paid Search and Paid Social in Russia

Background

There are many approaches to promoting through paid search and paid social, but this is where the main difficulty lies. It's essential to select only those tools that align with specific campaign goals and available budgets. Based on our experience, the RMAA team can confidently say there is no universal successful instruction for launching such campaigns. Each client requires a customized approach.

In this case study, we will demonstrate how we moved away from the traditional lead generation model and replaced it with image promotion for an international hotel chain.

Goal

Rotana Hotels, one of the leading hotel management companies in the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Turkey, approached us to attract Russian-speaking tourists to their Dubai residence. Initially, the client required paid social, but in the course of analyzing the market and available opportunities, we advised them to add paid ads on search engines.

Solutions

The departure of major foreign booking platforms has allowed hotels to almost double their direct sales. We are talking about Booking, which took 60-70% of the total volume of online bookings in Russia, and Airbnb, which stopped operating in Russia at the beginning of 2022. As a result, the travel audience has undergone a significant shift in buying patterns. Russian tourists have turned their attention to buying tours on travel companies’ websites. They also began using direct online booking systems on hotel websites.

We seized this opportunity and developed a strategy to attract Russian tourists to the Rotana Hotels website in Dubai. We used paid search and paid social tools to drive traffic to the hotel website. The Russian-language version of the site was a huge plus, and the 15% discount for potential clients was a bonus.

Paid Social Strategy

The launch of the Rotana Hotels campaign was timed to coincide with significant changes in advertising inventory in Russia. We're talking about paid social services. At the negotiation stage, the client was certain that the myTarget advertising service was the best option for promotion. However, we made it clear that this was not the right solution at this time.

VK Holding (owner of myTarget) launched a new advertising service, VK Ads, in 2022. It unifies all the advertising functions of the "old" advertising platforms VK PRO (which ceased operations in 2023) and myTarget (which has limited functionality and authorization was done through VK Ads). VK Ads also has new features.

The RMAA team began actively testing the service and using it in our work, as the campaigns launched through it yielded excellent results for clients, including real estate brands, pharma, and other businesses.

We launched two types of advertising campaigns through VK Ads to promote Rotana Hotels in Russia.

• A media campaign focused on increasing reach and impressions. Traveling abroad and interest in Dubai were taken as key audience characteristics.
• Additional clicks strategy.

VK and Zen sites were the main priority for impressions. We also made sure to give an important role to working with creatives. At the test stage of the campaign launch (14 days), we used several variants of ads containing a headline, main text, and an image. The best creatives were selected during the A/B testing process and then refined for greater impact based on audience response. Furthermore, after the test period, we began optimizing traffic by removing sites with insignificant coverage and impressions.

It has to be said that when working with both paid social and paid search companies, A/B testing of creatives and traffic optimization are constant processes that must be periodically worked on by analyzing the main promotion indicators. It is a major misunderstanding to believe you can set up a campaign and then forget about it. Such campaigns require flexibility and improvement.

After the first month of promoting Rotana Hotels through the VK Ads platform, the results showed that our approach was correct. We met and exceeded expectations, achieving 6,579 clicks instead of the planned 2,558 (+157.2%). ‘Promised’ CTR of 0.70% became 1.75%, which is a pretty great stable campaign response rate. We continued to work on efficiency right up to the final advertising period.

Paid Search Strategy

Given the limitations of the Google Ads advertising cabinet in 2022, which no longer allows launching paid promotion in Google, and the unreliability of organic traffic in measuring campaign success, we have chosen to focus on Yandex Direct's advertising tools. It is worth noting that for several years now, Google and Yandex have been the main competitors in the search engine segment in Russia. However, in the last two years, users have unequivocally favored Yandex (in 2024, 73.93% of total traffic is occupied by Yandex).

In turn, Yandex Direct offers a comprehensive set of promotional tools. It is crucial to identify the least effective elements of the campaign and eliminate them, focusing on the most cost-effective options. The client's goals, budget, and auction rates for display/click within the advertising service all play a significant role.

When promoting Rotana Hotels, our paid search strategy had two main directions.

• Advertising in the Yandex search engine, customized according to key queries.
• Media advertising in the Yandex network (note - YAN; includes Yandex platforms and more than 20,000 partner sites), which was also customized partly on key queries, partly using queries taken from competitors in the segment.

The campaign's main focus was on media promotion. We deliberately chose to eschew the "classic" lead generation strategy, which appears to be the most effective at first glance. This was an unprofitable decision. Our preliminary analysis showed that the price per click on the ad exceeded the optimal limits. However, we were able to use the image campaign in YAN to increase coverage thanks to the client's other advantages. Firstly, it was a 15% discount on the creative, which attracted the user's attention. Secondly, it was Rotana Hotels' status in the international travel market. When a user clicks on an ad with a discount, they are directed to the website and immediately see that Rotana Hotels is not a newcomer to the market, but an established travel brand.

It should be noted that the launch and subsequent adjustments to the promotion were conducted with the same testing and optimization processes applied to the paid social strategy. These processes included A/B testing of creatives, finalizing key queries, and ‘cleaning’ the selected placement sites. To gain a more accurate analysis of the results, we set up Yandex.Metrics and transformed the promotion based on its indicators.

As a result, the Rotana Hotels campaign achieved the best results by gradually building traffic to the client's website and increasing the impact on the target audience.

Results

The campaign for Rotana Hotels was a resounding success in the period from June to August 2023. We exceeded the planned figures for reach, clicks, and CTR as part of the promotion. This was achieved through active work with the VK Ads platform and Yandex.Direct.

It was highly efficient, especially on social networks. We significantly increased the clickability of ads by optimizing creatives and running A/B tests. As for paid ads, the focus on media promotion allowed us to increase the number of impressions and attract more target audiences to the client's website.

The key to success was flexible campaign management, regular optimization of sites and content, and strategy adjustment based on data analysis. We also kept to the planned budget. The client was pleased with our work and now views the Russian market as a promising avenue for future promotion.