Case Study: ixigo

Launched in 2007, ixigo is an AI-based travel app based in Gurugram, India. ixigo empowers Indian travelers and solves their travel utility, planning and booking problems using technology and artificial intelligence. Offering train, flight and bus utility & bookings, the company applies AI for deal discovery, personalized recommendations, airfare predictions & alerts, train delay prediction, PNR confirmation prediction and fully automated customer service.

The global travel and tourism industry has suffered immensely as a result of closed borders, canceled business trips and holidays, and fewer flights. Following the first nationwide lockdown in India in March 2020, ixigo saw a massive decrease in the number of bookings matched by a huge increase in the number of uninstalls. Acquiring new users is essential for scaling any mobile app, but with zero bookings and declining installs, they had to rethink their entire marketing strategy.

ixigo decided to focus on user engagement campaigns to help balance user acquisition (UA) with re-engagement. However, marketers can spend more than half a day optimizing re-engagement and UA campaigns, and the team at ixigo were spending huge amounts of time manually entering data and pulling reports, which didn’t provide a clear picture of all metrics needed to make well-informed business decisions in real-time. This is why they switched their mobile measurement partner (MMP) to Adjust.

Creating an engaging app requires marketers to understand the evolving needs of the target audience. During lockdowns, ixigo put a live COVID tracker in the app and sent out push notifications, recognizing that their users wanted to stay informed. They provided updates on the number of cases, shared creative videos on making masks at home, and recommended precautions to take.

In response to widespread flight cancellations and the difficulties that consumers had acquiring refunds, ixigo worked on a product update called ixigo Assured. This enables customers to access full refunds for cancellations up to 24 hours before the scheduled flight time by paying an extra $4-$6. ixigo also worked on an internal discounting model, giving users personalized deals on flights.

In June 2020, when lockdown restrictions in India were eased, searches for travel apps steadily increased. At this time, while many of their competitors limited their ad spend, ixigo took advantage and invested in the right digital channels to increase installs. Since the cost per mille (CPM) and cost per install (CPI) were significantly lower than before the pandemic, they were able to buy more traffic for the same budget.

Using Adjust’s Measure, they can now drill down into the most granular levels of campaigns, easily and efficiently optimizing them based on their performance goals. They can map the entire user journey and track how users interact in-app to create data-driven and UX-focused strategies.

Since switching to Adjust, they’ve been able to automate a lot of their reporting, no longer need to manually enter cost data, and have a complete overview of campaigns. They now benefit from a single, streamlined dashboard with a detailed and complete overview of all their marketing data, enabling them to determine the best performing campaigns and identify the ads bringing the highest LTV users. They can easily make changes to their campaign bids and budget and customize reports based on the KPIs that matter most, such as return on investment (ROI). As they save time on manually changing settings and calculating metrics, they can work more on creative strategies and campaign optimization across multiple channels.

Despite the effects of the pandemic on the global travel industry, ixigo successfully grew its app by quickly identifying what its users needed. Their campaigns, including the live COVID tracker and the release of product updates like ixigo Assured show how it’s vital to keep existing users engaged. By taking advantage of low CPI when competitors pulled the brake on UA, they also showed the importance of using the right strategy at the right time.

By working with Adjust and implementing key user engagement strategies, ixigo’s efforts have resulted in:

• Freed-up time for campaign optimisation
• Positive increase in bookings and revenue
• 100% recovery of installs numbers