Mixing tailored messages
with innovative
ads at trivago

The fast-growing global hotel search business, trivago, is driven by a distinct working culture: a melting pot of passionate, creative people coming together in an environment where they feel comfortable and confident using their skills. It’s difficult to drive engagement around such a culture through standard job ads and ‘we are hiring’ posts, which is why trivago’s employer branding team started to explore different ways to build a pipeline of the right talented people on LinkedIn.

“We found that a generic approach didn’t really fit our style and strategy – and our ads and posts ended up getting lost,” says Creative Copywriter Lee Jones. “We decided to get creative and start exploring some more out-of-the-box concepts.”

LinkedIn’s Pipeline Builder ecosystem provided Lee and the team with the versatility they needed to take a more tailored approach to talent. It started with PHP developers: a recruitment priority for the business. Targeting LinkedIn members with the relevant skills through Sponsored Updates and tailored landing pages gave Lee the opportunity to show that trivago was a business that spoke their language – and had fun doing it.

“Before we started developing the creative itself, we wanted to invest some time in getting to know our audience, so we put together focus groups of our existing employees who fit the profile of the PHP developers we were targeting,” he explains. “This helped us to learn the language of our audience – and understand what made them tick.”

This process helped Lee to create three different Sponsored Update executions, each addressing PHP developers in a style that was immediately relevant to them – and reflective of the way that trivago embraces different forms of talent. An extract of PHP code could be translated, by those with a working knowledge of the programming language, into “if you’re not excited, apply at trivago and then you’re excited again.” A shot of a trivago developer brandishing an old ZX Spectrum made a self-effacing reference to the business updating to PHP 3.0. An ‘endangered species’ execution focused on that rare beast, the Elephant.

With their quirky humour, immediate stand-out and inherent relevance, trivago’s Sponsored Content delivered an initial click-through rate of 5.3%, which rose to 7.9% when the campaign was targeted specifically at developers in Leipzig. The effect on the pipeline was immediate, with 1,076 clicks driving 97 leads at a conversion rate of 9% and a cost per lead (CPL) of €24.

Beyond the numbers, the data generated through Pipeline Builder’s landing pages gave the employer branding team a new perspective on the type of talent they were engaging – and the creative approach most effective at engaging them.

“When you’re running broad campaigns, click-through rate can be a bit of a vanity metric,” says Lee. “However, with our granular targeting, it was a real indicator that our creative was connecting with the right people. With the demographic analytics in Pipeline Builder, we could see that most clicks were coming from people with the exact job titles we wanted to engage.”

Lee and the team could also see that the Sponsored Update execution featuring a retro-styled trivago employee was the most powerful driver of relevant clicks. The fact that the target audience responded to a human being with whom they could identify informed the creative approach, as trivago expanded its use of Pipeline Builder. When the employer branding team switched their focus to other hard-to-fill positions, they expanded their approach to testing as well.

“We were finding the process really intuitive and easy to use, and so we decided to ramp up the number of executions and move from A/B testing to a multi-variate approach,” says Lee. “For our next campaign, we ran more than 30 versions of Sponsored Updates to see which connected best.”

That next campaign was tasked with building a pipeline for Data Engineering roles. With the tagline “I eat data for breakfast”, it featured cereal boxes with brands drawn from relevant data-related keywords: Hadoop Clusters, Number Krunch and Peta-bytes. The campaign generated a click-through rate of 3.9%, with 25 leads moving through to the interview stage. It also generated another key learning: that trivago’s Pipeline Builder landing pages improved their conversion rate by 50% when the headline featured a specific job title. People were more likely to click “I’m interested” when presented with the role of ‘Hadoop Software Engineer’ than when presented with the concept of ‘Data Engineering at trivago.’

More campaigns for specific roles and skills followed, each drawing inspiration from the culture and sensibilities of trivago’s existing IT team. Brainstorms for an IT Operations campaign came up with the concept of the all-too-familiar ‘blue screen of death’ and images from old 8-bit computer games. A throw-away line from one focus group turned out to be one of the campaign’s most effective executions: “We’re not magicians, we’re just really good at googling.”

“If 2017 was a year for proactively testing and learning, then 2018 is going to be the year we shape those insights into a consistent recruiting process using Pipeline Builder,” says Lee. “This tool is going to be our first port of call for many of our forecasted positions, and we’ll be running these campaigns before we invest time in other channels. It makes sense because Pipeline Builder yields so many more qualified leads per application.”