The Challenge
LiveAboard.com, a successful online travel agency for luxury dive experiences, built Scubago.com as a new online travel agency for all other dive experiences.
Despite their expertise in building OTA platforms in a similar experience vertical, Scubago V1 delivered a Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) of only 0.05% (meaning they’d receive only €5 back for €100 of ad spend). Something was going horribly wrong, and they didn’t understand what.
The Solution
They reached out to xCelery to salvage the project. xCelery’s approach involved diagnosing the core issues, understanding user pain points, consulting with experts, and devising a plan to turn the platform around one increment at a time.
We started with an analysis of the underlying numbers. We analysed data from Google Ads, Google Analytics and actual bookings to see what the conversion rates were between the different stages of the flow, and identified which stages were underperforming. We also had discussions with key members of the client team to understand their choices to date.
User testing revealed that the checkout process was confusing, and that fixing this alone could yield a 5x increase in ROAS. We also learnt that beginner divers - the highest priority segment - found the content and booking flow unintuitive, and addressing their pain points could yield a further 2x improvement. We advised LiveAboard.com to redesign Scubago for beginner divers, and to only offer courses by suppliers that could be booked instantly.
Follow on work and results
LiveAboard.com felt that xCelery was well placed to deliver the redesign and the rebuild. We followed an agile process to incrementally build, test, improve and grow Scubago to eventually release an MVP of a redesign that performed 15x better than the original, and it was delivered in half the time and an eighth of the budget…
“It's been a true pleasure working with you, and I'm grateful and proud for what you did.” - Martijn Duchatteau, CEO of LiveAboard.com