How Cruise Guru Captured New Audiences and Adopted New Channels With AdRoll

Travel agents are here to make travel easy. At Cruise Guru, we take that task seriously through exceptional deals, exemplary customer service, up-to-the minute availability, instant and accurate pricing, and state-of-the-art booking technology. We’re here to help our Australian customers explore destinations like Europe, the Mediterranean, Asia, and the South Pacific.

When I stepped into my role as head of marketing, managing both digital and offline marketing assets for Cruise Guru, I found a team passionate about sharing their love of cruises. I also found a situation where marketing had grown complacent, settling for “what worked before.”

Campaigns, messaging and creative assets hadn’t seen a refresh in 18 months. Over-dependence on bottom-funnel search traffic hurt our brand awareness and ability to attract new demographics. Retargeting the same audiences repeatedly isn’t a growth strategy on its own, and our performance metrics reflected that approach. Traditional paid ads performance had been steadily declining, with key metrics dropping roughly 15% month-over-month, SEO results had stalled, and direct traffic was in a multi-month decline at a staggering average of 51.7% year-over-year.

Relying on repetitive, set-and-forget retargeting felt like doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results. That wasn’t going to cut it. Balancing brand awareness with performance marketing is key. When you see diminishing returns, you need a broader reach. Upgrade your strategies, upgrade your channels, and upgrade your platforms.

My plan: modernize Cruise Guru’s digital marketing by refreshing creative, diversifying channels, improving audience targeting, and building a more sustainable full-funnel strategy. That’s how we would drive both awareness and long-term growth. To do it, I needed AdRoll.

I came to Cruise Guru from the finance industry, where I used AdRoll with great success. To reach broader audiences, I knew I needed what AdRoll offers, including:

• Segmentation, targeting and attribution capabilities
• Clear campaign tracking and performance measurement
• Access to new upper-funnel channels like Connected TV (CTV)

Unlike other platforms that required complex, highly technical website integrations, AdRoll’s onboarding was seamless. Their ongoing support is incredible, too, with close collaboration between account management and creative teams. AdRoll had the technical performance to execute what I wanted. More importantly, I was confident I could trust them. The team is always trying to see things from our perspective to find new ways to further our reach.

Simplifying CTV creative execution is just one example. AdRoll automatically creates a QR code at the end of our CTV ads. All we need to do is provide the link and assets, and the team does the rest. The visuals look amazing, with zero hustle from us.

Working with AdRoll, we built a more connected, full-funnel marketing strategy that uses display, CTV, retargeting, and search together. The impact was immediate: in January, our previous decline narrowed to just 13.2%. By March, it had swung in the other direction surging by nearly 70% year-over-year.

AdRoll CTV specifically contributed to our turnaround. Despite broad industry headwinds, Cruise Guru’s revenue remained resilient.

The breakthrough that shattered internal expectations came when we paused CTV and display campaigns in Q1, and direct traffic didn’t revert to its previous decline. Instead, it continued its steady month-over-month, year-over-year climb straight into the second quarter.

AdRoll’s measurement and reporting capabilities strongly contributed to this success. Integrations allowed us to use AdRoll reporting alongside data from Salesforce and GA4 to measure campaign influence and site behavior. The platform’s attribution tools helped us understand customer touchpoints, where customers converted, and how we could optimize our efforts.

Demographic and lifestyle audience segmentation identified untapped traveler groups, like younger families. We could then carefully target these new audiences, such as when selecting CTV inventory and programming to drive brand awareness and direct traffic. A highly localized Sydney and Brisbane campaign, for example, propelled brand awareness, direct traffic and broader website growth.

Some advice for anyone looking to duplicate our success, who hasn’t used CTV before: Don’t forget sound design. Even if audiences aren’t actively watching, they’re still listening to the brand narrative.

Cruise Guru operates in a highly competitive market where consumer demands shift quickly based on economic conditions, airfare availability, and broader global events. Despite broader market challenges, Cruise Guru continued to build market momentum.

Seeing these results firsthand has given me even more confidence in full-funnel marketing, and that our strategy is heading in the right direction. AdRoll helped us modernize our digital marketing approach, breaking the cycle of diminishing retargeting returns. Now we have a scalable awareness strategy capable of navigating broader industry challenges and moving us towards a more resilient, full-funnel future.