With over 15 years' experience and a portfolio of over 6000 handpicked properties across Europe, the Caribbean, Asia and North America, Oliver’s Travel’s pride themselves on personally handpicking villas that are quirky and full of character.

Oliver’s Travels knew they had a rich data lake but it remained untapped and unharnessed, they didn’t have confidence in their web data and were struggling to measure the efficacy and ROI of their social campaigns. GA4 didn’t have revenue figures, and measurement in Meta needed improving so they reached out for support to validate their social marketing spend by improving measurement in GA4 and Meta.

Objective

The client reached out to our analytics team at Hookflash, after interviewing key stakeholders, we decided to focus on upgrading the client’s data collection solution, enriching what was tracked in GA4, and leveraging 1 st party data and conversions API for Meta to make the most of their dataset’s potential. The key objectives were:

Ensure revenue was measured in GA4 and attributed correctly across channels
To be able to analyse bookings made on site by villa, location, number of guests, number of nights and many other variables
To improve measurement in Meta as there was little trust in the data
GA4's ecom data model is inflexible but needed to be used if we wanted to pass revenue and property level data. We needed to work out a way to use this predominantly retail focussed data model for the travel sector

In summary, Oliver's Travels wanted better data to make better decisions which is our mantra here at Hookflash

Solution

Hookflash worked with the client as well as their marketing and CRO agencies to build a measurement framework that covered the needs of analysts and marketers. We leveraged a server-side implementation to streamline GA4 measurement and take advantage of Meta’s Conversions API. By Implementing a new dataLayer, analytics and marketing platforms now all share the same triggering conditions and data, and by using Server-Side tagging the code bloat was significantly reduced.

In order to measure the performance of different properties by location, villa name, number of guests, booking dates etc Hookflash implemented a particularly novel solution by reusing the default events GA4 gives us and assigning our own item scoped booking stages. This way channels could report in as granular or broad way as they wish and make better decisions about their strategies.

Results

GA4 now has more comprehensive data, villas can be analysed using Oliver’s Travels rich data categories at all parts of the user journey. Virtual and in person sessions were conducted to onboard the Oliver’s Travel’s team to their new and improved web dataset, empowering their agencies to build more tailored audiences and user experiences to test.

The Meta conversions API was deployed and saw huge improvements to measurement for Facebook: