Seatfrog

This is a UK based app allowing rail passengers to bid for upgrades to otherwise empty first class seats for as little as £5. They work with several trainlines including Virgin Trains (now Avanti West Coast), Crosscountry, GWR and London North Eastern Railway.

The Problem

Seatfrog is an Octopus ventures backed startup and originated in Sydney back in 2018. In 2019 they needed our help to understand acquisition channels and establish performance marketing metrics. They hadn’t ever ran any paid marketing previously so I was going into this ad account with no data or creatives. 

The Solution

After analysing their customers and use cases we launched ads across a number of channels (Facebook, Google, Apple Search Ads). I was responsible for Facebook & Instagram advertising.

It quickly became apparent that IOS and Android had different results with a broad strategy so I split the advertising and targeting between devices. I implemented a three prong approach which consisted of;

1. Top of funnel (TOF) advertising to quickly test and scale best performing audiences and creatives for mobile app installs
2. Middle of funnel remarketing to leverage current marketing efforts for cheap train upgrades
3. Bottom of funnel remarketing to maintain a relationship with current app users to ensure they didn’t forget about using the Seatfrog Services

The image above is one example of the creatives used to help generate the result they were after.

The Result

Overall we managed to achieve an upgrade cost of £16, an install cost of £1 and a return on ad spend of 0.6.  

For context the lifetime value of a customer is around the £60 mark meaning their lifetime return on ad spend was 375% 

By the end of us working together we had also established key channels for driving acquisition, average cost per upgrades and differences in LTV across channels.