Smena Station (travel): 492% ROMI, 2,604 leads at $9.28, $143,125 revenue

The task

Smena Station helps people who work remotely travel and find a community anywhere in the world. Its stations/hubs are in Russia, Georgia, Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia and Thailand.

Project goals:

1. Build a client acquisition system for the business.
2. Understand how fast a client can be closed to payment after a lead comes in.
3. Scale the system and use it for every station.

What we did

1. Landing page. Built a separate landing page and sent traffic there, since the pages on the website did not fully explain what the project is. Kept improving the landing page — one simple decision helped cut the sales cycle from 3 months to 1. We carry this experience over to current clients.

2. Ad creatives. Tested many creative variants and found the best solution, one that fits any travel niche.

   

3. Fast feedback from the sales team. As soon as we see something going wrong with the ads, we work on fixing it right away.

Results

• Ad budget: $24,159
• Leads: 2,604
• Cost per lead: $9.28
• Clients: 229
• Cost per client: $105.54
• Revenue: $143,125
• ROMI — 492% ($143,125 ÷ $24,159)

We are still working with the project. To date, more than $25,000 has been spent.

Insights

• A separate landing page for paid traffic (instead of website pages) explains a complex product more fully and directly affects the sales cycle — here it went from 3 months to 1.
• The creative combo we found is universal for the whole travel niche and scales to every new station.
• A fast feedback loop between traffic and the sales team lets us catch and fix ad dips quickly.