AutomateUA


AutomateUA


AutomateUA


Hopper Paid Growth
Case Study

Setting

For a decade, the U.S. online travel industry was firmly controlled by Expedia Group and Booking Holdings, who together dominated the OTA (Online Travel Agency) market through scale, consolidation, and aggressive paid search strategies.

  • Expedia Group: $5.2 billion in 2020 revenue with approximately 14,800 employees.

  • Booking Holdings: $6.8 billion in 2020 revenue with approximately 20,300 employees.

Between 2021 and 2022, Hopper—a mobile-first online travel agency—secured roughly half a billion dollars in funding to challenge the long-standing duopoly and rise from an unranked to top 3 player. Performance marketing became the primary lever for acquiring new users and scaling revenue.



Hopper Overview

Instead of competing head-on with well-funded rivals in paid search auctions, Hopper invested in social channels like Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Influencers, achieving lower cost per install than traditional OTAs paid per click.

This approach fit Hopper’s mobile product, which was designed to nurture users over time with features like price prediction and price freeze that often encouraged waiting for better deals, sacrificing immediate conversions to build trust and drive strong retention.

Hopper Overview

Instead of competing head-on with well-funded rivals in paid search auctions, Hopper invested in social channels like Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Influencers, achieving lower cost per install than traditional OTAs paid per click.

This approach fit Hopper’s mobile product, which was designed to nurture users over time with features like price prediction and price freeze that often encouraged waiting for better deals, sacrificing immediate conversions to build trust and drive strong retention.

Hopper Overview

Instead of competing head-on with well-funded rivals in paid search auctions, Hopper invested in social channels like Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Influencers, achieving lower cost per install than traditional OTAs paid per click.

This approach fit Hopper’s mobile product, which was designed to nurture users over time with features like price prediction and price freeze that often encouraged waiting for better deals, sacrificing immediate conversions to build trust and drive strong retention.


Challenges

1. Scaling Campaigns with a Lean Team

The user acquisition team ran campaigns and creatives across three product lines (flights, hotels, and car rentals) during a chaotic period of hypergrowth, stretching resources and straining execution.

2. Driving Incremental Growth

The team had to avoid wasting spend on non-incremental channels, ensuring that marketing dollars went to net-new growth rather than cannibalization.

Challenges

1. Scaling Campaigns with a Lean Team

The user acquisition team ran campaigns and creatives across three product lines (flights, hotels, and car rentals) during a chaotic period of hypergrowth, stretching resources and straining execution.

2. Driving Incremental Growth

The team had to avoid wasting spend on non-incremental channels, ensuring that marketing dollars went to net-new growth rather than cannibalization.

Challenges

1. Scaling Campaigns with a Lean Team

The user acquisition team ran campaigns and creatives across three product lines (flights, hotels, and car rentals) during a chaotic period of hypergrowth, stretching resources and straining execution.

2. Driving Incremental Growth

The team had to avoid wasting spend on non-incremental channels, ensuring that marketing dollars went to net-new growth rather than cannibalization.




Results

Results

Results


Cultural Philosophy

Hopper prioritized executional speed through Single-Threaded Ownership (STO), empowering small teams with full control over their resources. For Paid Marketing, this meant design, engineering, and data were embedded directly into the team—eliminating bottlenecks, accelerating execution, and ensuring full accountability for both results and mistakes.

AutomateUA is built on the same principles—offering Full Stack Performance Marketing across campaign management, data analytics, and creative production to maximize velocity and results.

Cultural Philosophy

Hopper prioritized executional speed through Single-Threaded Ownership (STO), empowering small teams with full control over their resources. For Paid Marketing, this meant design, engineering, and data were embedded directly into the team—eliminating bottlenecks, accelerating execution, and ensuring full accountability for both results and mistakes.

AutomateUA is built on the same principles—offering Full Stack Performance Marketing across campaign management, data analytics, and creative production to maximize velocity and results.

Cultural Philosophy

Hopper prioritized executional speed through Single-Threaded Ownership (STO), empowering small teams with full control over their resources. For Paid Marketing, this meant design, engineering, and data were embedded directly into the team—eliminating bottlenecks, accelerating execution, and ensuring full accountability for both results and mistakes.

AutomateUA is built on the same principles—offering Full Stack Performance Marketing across campaign management, data analytics, and creative production to maximize velocity and results.

Creative Process

  • Democratized testing results through creative dashboards, creating a real-time feedback loop to level up designers/agencies and increase ownership of outcomes.

  • Conducted quarterly reviews of Best and Worst ads to identify repeatable creative patterns.

  • Maintained a creative backlog tracker to ensure at least two weeks’ worth of fresh ads were always ready to combat fatigue.

This system scaled creative testing 10x per month, reduced CPIs by 40% while significantly increasing our winning batting average, and eliminated CPA volatility caused by creative fatigue—one of the biggest drivers of rising Paid Social costs.

Marketing Automation

  • Built dashboards to rank campaign performance for efficient budget allocation and daily breakdowns to catch performance deterioration early—triggering faster creative refreshes or campaign adjustments.

  • Automated creative refreshes to flag underperformers and highlight top creative tests based on available ad slots without manual review.

  • Set up automatic bid changes & uploads based on recent Google Search web-to-app performance.

This automation stack cut manual work by 95%, made optimization decisions proactive rather than reactive, and freed up team bandwidth to focus on value-additive initiatives.

Incrementality

  • Monitored Paid vs Organic user behavior—tracking conversion rates and in-app event usage—to catch “too good to be true” performance early.

  • Flagged unusual patterns like inflated click-through rates, impression-to-install rates, and view-through attribution percentages.

  • Modeled lift by analyzing Paid channel ramp-ups against Organic declines, carefully isolating seasonality to spot real cannibalization.

This process helped prevent millions in wasted spend and ensured our budget fueled true net-new growth.

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