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Pay Later Travel was founded in 2017 with a simple mission: to make travel accessible for everyone. They believe that there’s a better way to pay for travel – one that allows you to book, budget and pay for your getaway, without getting into debt.
Pay Later Travel promotes responsible financial habits by providing traditional layby for travel. Their layby system allows their customers to secure great travel deals on the world’s best airlines and hotels with a fraction of the upfront cost, providing protection from price increases. The remainder of the payments are then spread in affordable instalments that suit the customer’s budgets and lifestyle. The best part is, the trip will be paid in full before they depart, allowing them to travel with peace of mind.
PayLater Travel came to Defiant Digital looking to scale their business in both the US and AU via paid Meta advertising. They wanted to increase their revenue, increase avg. ROAS and strengthen brand awareness and scalability. At the time of meeting them, they had seen some success in their creatives, however no true direction in regards to creative performance testing and were struggling to scale in the US.
Our performance marketing team took over management of PayLater’s Meta ads and strategy, rapidly testing a series of creatives and copy. Through our personalised testing process, we were able to determine PayLater’s strongest creative formats, hooks and copy options and went to work developing a series of ads iterations to further test.
Within 180 days we had scaled Pay Later‘s Revenue by 428% YOY with a 384% increase in purchases.
Let’s take a look at the strategies that helped us scale this exciting brands to record growth.
Pay Later Travel’s founder Farouk was running his own Meta ads when we first met, and he’d been able to achieve results with very limited creative resources, but he knew it was time to engage a team of experts if he really wanted to take things up a notch.
The first thing we did to improve results was to allocate more budget into top of funnel, attracting cold audiences to fill the funnel. In order to do this effectively without ROAS tanking, our ads needed to be sharp and catch people in the scroll. More importantly, we needed to test a wide variety of different creatives fast in order to identify winning video creatives as the account had never tested video ads.
We knew that video would work well, after all travel is such a visual experience & we could leverage content from amazing locations to make people FEEL as if they were there.
Key Learnings: We could have tapped into the technology aspects of the product, but instead we focused on the psychology of people “needing a holiday”. Showing awesome visuals of locations hooked people in and got them interested in what we were offering.
When we took over Pay Later Travel’s account, creative testing was practically non existent and the only thing running was image ads. Their approach was mainly focused on hitting warm audiences that has been generated via Google ads, making it imperative for us to discover effective creatives that would resonate with a broader, colder audience.
Without delay, we implemented our 3-2-2 testing strategy: 3 distinct versions of a single creative, 2 headline variants, and 2 primary texts. We employed a dynamic creative ad format for this process. This approach enabled us to evaluate numerous creative variations in a limited span, and by the end of the second month, we had identified scalable winners.
Key Learnings: Our 3-2-2 technique allowed us to harness machine learning’s potential to handle the bulk of our creative testing. Instead of establishing separate ads that competed for spend, our dynamic creative ads complemented one another, presenting the most suitable variation tailored to each individual’s preference, based on Meta’s predictive conversion metrics.
One of the first activities we complete when we onboard a new client is to run a 100 point conversion rate optimisation audit. Our theory is that no matter how good our ads are at getting attention and clicks, if they land on a website that is confusing or hard to navigate then we have no hope of driving strong growth for brands.
In Pay Later’s case, there was one simple and glaringly obvious fix that would make a world of difference. In order to search for destinations, you had to type out the airport you were looking for i.e LAX or Heathrow. But alot of people simply didn’t know the names of the airports they were looking to travel to. We made the simple yet effective recommendation to switch their search function to city based searches and conversion rate from search to booking improved by over 37% instantly.
Key Learnings: Always put yourself in the end users shoes when developing your strategy. As a business owner, it’s easy to miss things like this because you are so familiar with the product or service you have built, but having a fresh set of eyes audit your website can lead to breakthrough outcomes like this one.
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Defiant Digital is a Sydney based Digital Marketing agency that specialises in Creative Performance.
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