How running 1,000+ SEO A/B tests delivered 27% organic growth
Skyscanner is a global leader in travel, with more than 100 million people worldwide using its app and website every month.
By the end of 2020, with lockdowns in effect worldwide due to COVID-19, Skyscanner’s organic traffic was down 35 percent year-on-year. As travel restrictions began to lift, Skyscanner knew that restoring revenue meant getting customers back on its website. But they had an even bolder aim. They didn’t just want to return to pre-pandemic traffic levels — they wanted to exceed them.
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customer success story
The challenge
With travel demand well below its pre-pandemic peak, driving up search visibility was key. The Skyscanner team needed an aggressive SEO strategy to improve their rankings and secure a larger share of organic traffic. They doubled down on their marketing efforts, but recovery was slow. By 2021, Skyscanner’s organic traffic was still down 30 percent on 2019 levels.
But with a substantial global web presence across many domains, they faced unique challenges. Site-wide changes were time-consuming, resource-intensive, and posed significant risks. If the changes had a negative impact, the consequences could be devastating.
To identify the most impactful changes and avoid costly errors, they needed a quick and risk-free way to test their SEO initiatives across multiple domains. SearchPilot was on hand to help deliver an aggressive SEO testing strategy — with award-winning results.
The solution
With SearchPilot, Skyscanner’s SEO team could test proposed changes and demonstrate their impact to senior leadership before making site-wide updates.
SearchPilot’s neural network model used over 46 million data points to support Skyscanner’s tests, alongside the advanced analyses from SearchPilot’s professional services team. This handled the noise in Skyscanner’s data caused by changing travel restrictions.
Deploying SearchPilot to Skyscanner's 20 most strategically important domains allowed its SEO team to test experiments across multiple markets and implement changes to the global template if it proved successful in some markets and showed no harm in others.
SearchPilot enabled Skyscanner to deliver a large-scale testing program while maximizing internal resources by providing copy-and-paste changes across domains, autonomous bucketing and modelling, and an experienced professional services team.
Using our server-side platform, Skyscanner could test anything from title tag changes and adding schema to full template redesigns.
SearchPilot’s engineers built an API endpoint that automatically updated Skyscanner's custom Google Sheets test tracker, so the team had the latest data on demand.
Award-winning program
Our collaboration with Skyscanner, which included rolling out a global testing program of 1,100 tests in three years, even won Best Use of Data (SEO – large enterprise) award at the 2023 European Search Awards.
