Increase in the number of bookings

luksuznih vila za 253%

About the client

MyIstria started its story in 2008 with only one villa available for rent for tourism purposes. Today, it offers nearly 1,300 luxury villas with over 410,000 guests annually. With a market share of 10% across the entire country and even 20% in Istria, MyIstria is the leading agency specialized in villa rentals in Croatia.

The client's uniqueness compared to the competition lies in direct cooperation with villa owners, which results in a very high level of offer and service, and thus customer satisfaction. Each villa is personally inspected, selected, and photographed to ensure the appropriate standard, so only top-notch villas with hospitable owners are included in the offer. The villa selection is diversified along the Adriatic coast, with a special emphasis on Istria, where the largest number of accommodations is located.

The cooperation with Arbona has been continuous since 2013.

PPC

Google Ads Advertising

SEO

Search Engine Optimization

Collaboration goals

At the beginning of the cooperation, two main goals were set:

Increase the number of users booking villas
Increase the number of villas included in the offer.

Although these goals did not have predefined values, year after year we jointly strived to achieve better results.

With the inclusion of SEO, the goals were expanded, remaining similar to the initial ones but extended to what every website ultimately aims to achieve:

generate as many users as possible
expand the offer
increase visibility on search engines for relevant search terms

What have we done?

At the very beginning, Google Ads was the only marketing channel used to reach users, and the service was later expanded to include advertising on social media and SEO. Additional services also include advertising on the BING search engine and the Criteo platform.

Google ads and social media advertising

Key target audiences

Target Group 1: Tourists

Finding new users, i.e., tourists, was a complex task as it required advertising over a very wide geographical area. Target markets included numerous European countries such as Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Norway, Spain, and Luxembourg, as well as overseas countries like Canada, the USA, and Australia.

Target Group 2: Property Owners

Given the goal of expanding the villa offering, the target group consisted of users interested in luxury villas, real estate investment, or renting luxury villas, primarily covering Istria but also other coastal areas.

We targeted users based on interests derived from Google Analytics reports "Affinity Categories" and "In-Market Segments." Additionally, we targeted users who had previously booked a villa, users who stayed on the site for more than a few minutes, as well as remarketing users.

Advertising results

Between 2016 and 2021, we achieved excellent results regarding the number of bookings across all channels, especially through Google Ads. This had a significant impact on the client’s revenue growth during the observed five-year period. Some highlighted advertising results include:

Increase in the number of direct bookings via the Google Ads channel by 331%
Total increase in direct bookings (from all channels) by 253%
Revenue growth (from all channels) by 270%
Social media user reach increased by 314%, reaching as many as 1,161,910 users
Increase in the number of villas offered from 400 to almost 1,300

Along with the main services (Google Ads, social media advertising, and SEO), which are responsible for the vast majority of these impressive results, from 2018 we also launched advertising on the BING search engine and the Criteo platform. These channels also proved successful and are showing good growth, although their share in total revenue remains relatively small. On the Bing search engine, from 2018 to today, clicks on ads grew by 159%, and revenue increased by 126%, while the Criteo platform has generated nearly 350,000 sessions to date.

Investment in these activities also led to a significant increase in MyIstria’s brand recognition. Based on the number of searches for the term MyIstria, as well as impressions and clicks, a strong increase in brand awareness can be confirmed compared to 2018. This trend remained stable until the onset of the pandemic in the first quarter of 2020 and its impact on tourism, after which it again showed significant growth.

SEO

The SEO strategy was focused on opening new opportunities for publishing quality content, creating content, and good technical optimization of the website. The mix of these elements led us to excellent results in keyword positioning, which influenced the growth of the website’s organic traffic as well as conversion rates.

Keywords

Long-term and continuous work on optimizing the website for search engines resulted in excellent keyword rankings on Google. A large number of relevant terms occupy the first position in search results, including terms in English and German related to villa rentals in Istria and specific cities.

What does this mean?

For example, when someone planning a vacation in Istria searches Google for terms like "villas istria" or "istrian villas for rent," the client’s website will appear as the first result. This has a significant impact on the organic, i.e., unpaid, increase in website visitors. And a higher number of visitors leads to higher conversion rates, meaning more completed bookings and consequently higher revenues.

Website Content

SEO involves many small steps, but it all begins with the basic distribution of content on the website. By better categorizing subpages of villa offers and the blog, we created the potential for adding a larger amount of relevant content. Location subpages were enriched with content optimized for each location, and accordingly, the meta content of each location’s page was also optimized.

The website thus became more informative, logical, and easier to use from the user’s perspective, and by implementing a large amount of optimized content, we fulfilled the technical aspect of SEO. These two elements worked in synergy and influenced the achievement of excellent results.

Featured Snippets

Well-optimized content resulted in featured snippets on Google search.

By searching for the term “top istrian wines,” Google displays snippets from the client’s website in the zero position, which enhances the website’s visibility and brings new visitors.

Good mutual understanding and clear communication of goals, as well as aligning them with capabilities, were a great foundation for overcoming major challenges such as the global pandemic and its impact on tourism.

This long-term collaboration achieves excellent results year after year, providing great motivation for realizing even higher goals in upcoming periods.