Case study

Madagascar Airlines Getting the Early Bird fare off the ground on domestic flights

A fare reserved for people who book early is only worth anything if they hear about it early. We built the Meta Ads and Google Ads operation that carried the Early Bird offer on domestic routes, managed continuously, with online booking as its destination.

The context

Madagascar Airlines serves around ten domestic destinations out of Antananarivo — Nosy Be, Diego Suarez, Majunga, Tamatave, Tuléar, Fort Dauphin, Morondava, Sainte-Marie, Sambava, Maroantsetra.

Early Bird is its advance-booking fare: a price kept for people who plan ahead. The airline puts it plainly itself — an exceptional fare for the quickest off the mark.

That is where the difficulty sits, and it is not a pricing problem. An advance offer does not reward a purchase: it rewards a calendar. It can therefore do nothing for a traveller who discovers it at the moment of booking — by then it is already too late to benefit. It has to be known before the decision is made.

To which a second objective was added: strengthening the online sales channel, that is, moving bookings onto the site rather than a counter.

What we produced

A digital operation combining Meta Ads and Google Ads, Search and Display, each in its place in the decision.

Reaching the traveller before they start looking

Meta carries the visibility and the visual awareness of the offer. That is the side that works upstream: it speaks to someone who has not yet opened a comparison site, and whose trip is still only an intention.

Being there when they do look

Google Search catches intent at the moment it is expressed; Display keeps the presence alive between the two. An advance fare needs both: the one that reminds you it exists, and the one that answers when you go looking for it.

Tight targeting, managed continuously

Audiences were refined and performance followed throughout the campaign. That is what links the stages together — visibility, visual awareness, search intent, booking — instead of leaving each to work on its own.

The results

The campaign put the airline in first position against the competition, and daily sales rose by 20 %.

The click-through rate came in at 16 % — which measures the targeting more than the message: at that level, the ad is reaching people who were waiting for it.

What it changes

An advance promotion is not won on price but on timing. The work was less about making a fare known than about making it known early enough — and about bringing the booking back to where the airline controls it, on its own channel.

In figures

What the campaign produced

1st
Position against the competition
+20 %
More daily sales
16 %
Click-through rate

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