AIDA Cruises speeds ahead with scaled insights and efficiencies from Google Marketing Platform

AIDA Cruises is one of the largest brands under Costa Cruises Group, which delivers seafaring experiences for half of all continental European cruise guests. AIDA is based in Germany and plays a key role in the European market. Vacationers visit the AIDA website from all over Europe to learn about cruises and book add-on options before, during, and after their journeys.

AIDA wanted to know more about the online journey of its customers: how they became customers, their behavior on the site, and when they made a transaction. AIDA partnered with Trakken, a Google Marketing Platform Partner, to create a best-in-class analytics environment that could give AIDA a competitive edge.

AIDA needed to relaunch thousands of pages, including a full online booking system, and measure their performance. To support this objective, Trakken set up Google Tag Manager 360 and Google Analytics 360 to create an agile, scalable environment for reporting and analysis.

Tag Manager 360 made it easy for the AIDA team to deploy and test new tags on all pages, and to standardize tag code and quality in all AIDA domains. The faster deployment process required far less input from AIDA’s IT team, reducing the time needed to deploy new tags from 21 days to a single day. Faster tag deployment gave AIDA better insights sooner.

Next, Trakken implemented auto-event tracking, a Tag Manager 360 solution that automatically generates an event each time a customer clicks an HTML element on a page. This event can be sent to Analytics 360 using an event tag. Coupled with e-commerce tracking, event tags gave AIDA a deeper and clearer understanding of customers’ actions. The AIDA team could see which destinations were popular searches and whether customers abandoned purchases or made it all the way through checkout.

Standardized auto-tagging makes it easy to understand the context of important events such as cruise searches. The marketing team can use the results to rethink and adjust marketing strategies, making better use of their budget and boosting conversion rates.

“Auto-event tracking of cruise searches provides especially interesting insights regarding destinations and desired travel dates,” says Marc Schwinzer, web analyst at AIDA. “That leads to more efficient and user-centric campaign development based on travelers’ demands.”

AIDA uses these insights to plan discounts and marketing activity based on customers’ website behaviors. When customers search the AIDA site for an Asian destination, they’ll begin to see other Asian destinations displayed more prominently on the site. Plus, with the pairing of remarketing and Analytics 360, users who add a destination to their baskets but don’t complete the purchase will begin to see ads for the same destination throughout the Google Display Network and in Google Search.

Analytics 360 also lets the entire company create and share reports more easily. The Analytics 360 roll-up property combines several AIDA domains into one view. That gives AIDA a powerful picture of customer acquisition and behavior throughout the AIDA online universe, including multiple websites and mobile environments in countries across Europe. With a single interface, the AIDA team can now review online performance and react to the rise and fall of traffic and revenue in near real-time. And since it integrates with Tag Manager 360 on all platforms, AIDA can compare results and share insights throughout the company.