Ep 209: Data and growth - Reaching new heights with Skyscanner

Daniel Lupu is the Senior Marketing Manager at Skyscanner, a search engine for deals on flights, hotels, and car rentals serving 110 million users monthly. In this episode, Daniel shares learnings and results from the tests he’s run. He also discusses how his team is navigating SKAN, the creative strategies they’ve implemented and what he’s observed about the relationship between paid and organic search ads on Apple.

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• What is Skyscanner, and what do you do for them?
• How did your background shape your growth at Skyscanner?
• What prompted your move into the app marketing space?
• Can you walk us through your app growth strategy?
• How do you evaluate success in UA campaigns?
• What are you optimizing for?
• What are some tips for getting the best flight?
• What’s been your approach to navigating SKAN and ATT on iOS?
• Have you made any creative or strategic shifts to improve performance there?
• How do paid and organic search on Apple Search Ads influence each other?
• How do you manage budget allocation and campaign planning for peak travel times?
• What recommendations do you have for visiting London?

• 0:54 Intro to Skyscanner and Daniel’s role
• 1:27 Daniel’s background
• 4:41 Driving user acquisition in the travel industry
• 8:05 How to find flight deals
• 9:35 Data points beyond SKAN
• 12:23 Insights from their ASA test on paid and organic
• 13:55 Creative testing
• 17:16 Adjusting for seasonality
• 18:20 Lessons learned and solid advice
• 20:50 What to do in London

(18:20-18:41) “I have learned not to make assumptions based on previous learnings. Just because something worked in a certain manner at some point in the past, it doesn’t mean that we’ll see similar behavior from that particular audience or from that particular campaign the next time we run it.”

(19:00-19:30) “Don’t try to have the perfect measurement framework. If you think about it, tracking was different back in the day; now it has a lot of challenges, and I don’t think that’s going to improve anytime soon. So if you want to scale, you have to have some solid, valid assumptions and go ahead without having full visibility of your performance.”