Lodgify case study · Head of Performance Marketing

Robert
Costart

Three problems from the brief. Three plays to answer them — built for real, in Lodgify's own design system, with claims from their live pages.

See the three plays↓ See the homepage replica
From the brief

The three problems

Problem 01
Spend is outgrowing customers
Paid spend +50% YoY against +31% customer growth. ROAS slid 0.202 → 0.180, and competitor-term CPCs doubled to €7–11. Every extra euro buys less.
Problem 02
Trials convert unevenly
Trials grew 30–50%, but trial-to-customer conversion swings 15–33% and dipped to ~15%. The top of the funnel grows faster than it converts — people sign up, then disappear.
Problem 03
One channel carries it all
Search is ~67% of attributed spend while Display and Demand Gen run at near-zero ROAS — and the US, the biggest market, is the least efficient. The engine needs new places to grow.
The answer

Three plays

01
Maximise PPC output — one term, one treatment

Stop chasing the auction with bids. Each top term graduates into its own ad group with bespoke ads, sitelinks and callouts — and every selling point gets a stripped, message-matched sub-page. Relevance raises Quality Score; Quality Score lowers CPC exactly where CPCs doubled. The sub-pages below are the sitelinks of the ad — and the retargeting sequence after the click.

→Open the ad-group blueprint hub
Head term · “vacation rental software”
Competitor term · “guesty” — CPCs €7–11
02
Build conversion rate — test, prove, then scale

A/B testing built into the landing system itself — no new tools. Every sub-page above doubles as a test cell: message variants in, winners promoted, losers quietly retired. Then the same system funds the big test: repurpose near-zero-ROAS display spend into a steady assurance layer around new trialists, with a 50/50 holdout reading true lift on trial-to-paid conversion. Prove it works first, optimise the cost second — a null result still frees €360k/yr.

→Open the experiments panel — the back end→Example test cell — pricing message→Example test cell — trial vs demo
03
Own the location journey — pages that compound

Landlords start their hosting journey searching like travellers — “Barcelona rentals”, “London flats”. Lodgify has zero city pages today, but owns the data to build them: real inventory density in every market, plus thousands of customer websites it builds and hosts, each linking back. Location pages capture host journeys at the start — a compounding channel that reduces the 67% dependence on paid Search.

Location-page demo — next build
Grab and go

The slides

Strategy deck
Diagnosis, the three plays, budget stance, 90-day plan. Dropping here soon.
Ad-group blueprint slides
The two worked examples — head term and competitor auction. Dropping here soon.
90-day plan one-pager
See → launch → read & scale. Dropping here soon.