Lodgify case study · Head of Performance Marketing

Robert
Costart

Three problems from the brief. Three plays to answer them. All built for real, in Lodgify's own design system, using 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 is up 50% but customers only 31%. ROAS slid from 0.202 to 0.180 and competitor CPCs doubled to €7–11. Every extra euro is buying less.
Answered by Play 01 ↓
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 and then they disappear.
Answered by Play 02 ↓
Problem 03
One channel carries it all
Search is about 67% of spend while Display and Demand Gen sit at near-zero ROAS. And the US, the biggest market, is the least efficient. The engine needs new places to grow.
Answered by Play 03 ↓
The method

How the team runs

The machine optimises. The team builds.

Specialists who ship: the whole team pushes to GitHub, AI reviews every change, and it's live on Cloudflare the same day. No channel silos, no dead budget, and one sprint question for everyone: what are you bringing that's new? This site was built exactly that way, and the three plays below all run on this engine.

→How the team runs: the operating model
The answer

Three plays

SOLVES PROBLEM 01 · spend is outgrowing customers
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, right where CPCs doubled. The sub-pages below become the sitelinks of the ad and the retargeting messages after the click.

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

A/B testing built into the landing system itself, no new tools needed. 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. We repurpose the near-zero display spend into a steady assurance layer around new trialists, with a 50/50 holdout reading the true lift on trial-to-paid. Prove it works first and optimise the cost second. Even a null result frees €360k a year.

→Open the experiments panel (the back end)→Example test cell: pricing message→Example test cell: trial vs demo
SOLVES PROBLEM 03 · one channel carries it all
03
Own the location journey: pages that compound

Landlords start their hosting journey searching like travellers, things like “Barcelona rentals” and “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 catch host journeys right at the start. It's a compounding channel that cuts the 67% dependence on paid Search.

→Open the location playbook→Barcelona: host-facing demo→Girona: traveller-facing demo
The budget stance

One pot. No walls.

This is the answer to the brief's geo and channel question. Stop hand-allocating budgets in meetings and let value-based bidding do the moving.

One global budget
If the US is making more money the system routes spend there. If Spain is, same. Geo allocation becomes a bid signal, not a quarterly meeting.
Caps that never bind
Daily caps set 20 to 40% above pacing. When competitors' budgets run out late in the day, we're still there buying the cheaper clicks they left behind.
Cut the dead spend
Near-zero display as cold acquisition dies, and that budget funds the trial assurance test instead. Nobody has to defend a corpse.
The plan

The first 90 days

Days 0 to 30 · See and seed
Fix the CAC definition and isolate paid-driven customers. Audit the account against the plays, build the ad groups for the top terms, and get the A/B system live in the landing pages.
Days 31 to 60 · Launch
Restructured campaigns live. Message rotation running. The retargeting holdout enrolling trialists. First location pages seeded where inventory density is strongest.
Days 61 to 90 · Read and scale
Read the CVR lift and scale it or kill it. Read the CPC delta on the money terms. Remove the last budget walls and lock the 12-month plan with real numbers.
Day 90 I owe you three numbers: the CPC delta on the money terms, the trial-to-paid delta on the holdout test, and the euros freed from dead spend.
The close

Keep the growth.
Restore the efficiency.

That's the brief, in Lodgify's own words. Everything on this page is live and clickable, and it was all built in days on the operating model above. That's the point.

Start the walkthrough→ How the team runs