Published by Sue Johns-Chapman
Published Date 11.07.2022 
easyJet has been connecting people across Europe for over 20 years and has been challenging the status quo with the introduction of low fares. Our mission has always been to make travel easy and affordable for all. Not only do we focus on our customers, but we are driven to become a more sustainable airline. For every single flight we operate, we offset all the carbon emissions from the fuel used, by supporting projects that protect against deforestation, plant trees, or drive the uptake of renewable energy. These projects either avoid the creation of new carbon elsewhere, or directly remove carbon from the atmosphere.
We have started to in-house our PPC team and SEO during the midst of the pandemic when the airline industry was facing the most difficult times of recent years. We began our journey with only 4 headcounts combined for both teams, it has now grown into a big team of 8 in less than two years and has strong ambition to continue to grow to improve site performance, be digital focus and to be more data driven.
During this time, we in-housed all PPC activity from our incumbent agency to realise vital cost savings and increase our pace of change, business & trading alignment, control, and effectiveness. It was this in-housing of PPC & SEO that gave us the opportunity to take things to the next level.
With the marketplace and government restrictions changing at a moment’s notice, we became increasingly agile in our ways of working and innovative in how we approached data and technology to solve issues.
Our hard work has paid off as we are in the running for Best Use of Search – Travel/Leisure PPC Large & Best Global PPC Campaign Large. The challenge for us was understanding the constant change in business needs and with the ever-changing government restrictions. By focusing on the different areas – Incrementality, Profitability & Automation. We were able to increase bookings by 300% and decrease bookings into flights that were full – from 30% to 1% in a short span of time. We work closely with SEO to monitor CTR curve as we invest in PPC and has dropped cannibalisation from 8% to 4% and is continuously decreasing.
The team is ecstatic when we found out we were shortlisted for multiple awards, as this was just the beginning for our success here at easyJet. The best news we found out was to be also shortlisted for the Best Global In-House team. In-Housing PPC and SEO was not an easy feat where it has proven difficult to hire people who are willing to take the risk and work for an industry that suffered the most during the pandemic. There are lots of hesitancy over joining an industry that was struggling the most, questions were asked about furlough or even redundancies. We gave trust in people and let them know that the business has hopes that we will recover, and things will get better.
The team formed in 2020 and majority of the PPC and SEO staff has remained and stayed on because we have hope that the business will recover, and we believe that travel will come back bigger and better. We are waiting for the next golden age of travel!
Website backlink: www.easyJet.com
Twitter: @easyJet
Facebook: www.facebook.com/easyJet
Instagram: www.instagram.com/easyJet
