Case Study: Sykes Cottages achieves dramatic CPA reduction and strong conversion growth with Marin Software

Sykes Cottages Reverse Trend of Growing Costs of Customer Acquisition

Sykes Cottages, the UK’s leading independent holiday cottage agency with over 4,000 properties, struggled to scale efficient customer acquisition. With long, multi-stage booking journeys and unreliable tracking, the in-house team relied on time-consuming manual bid changes and avoided running Bing alongside Google because they couldn’t manage two sets of campaigns effectively.

By adopting Marin Software’s Tracker and folder-based automated bidding plus cross-publisher management, Sykes Cottages automated daily bid optimisation, tracked conversions across the full funnel, and flexed bids by business goals. The result: a 171% reduction in CPA inflation, Bing CPA down 22% with conversions from Bing up 259%, and an overall 19% increase in conversion volume for only an 8% rise in spend — enabling confident additional investment in paid search.

Sykes Cottages

Tom Lowes

Online Marketing Manager