WeQ, a mobile advertising and branding company, has partnered with South Korean hotel booking app Allstay, which allows users to compare and purchase travel accommodations for destinations within Asia and North America. South Korea is a rapidly growing hotspot for travel-focused platforms, with travel apps leading the domestic app economy.

South Korea has the highest smartphone usage in the APAC region and globally, and the country saw a 58.7 per cent growth in mobile travel sales between 2011 and 2016. In South Korea, 94 per cent of the population has a smartphone, but that number is expected to grow to 100 per cent of 18-34-year-olds by the end of the year.

“We are thrilled to be working with Allstay to successfully scale their mobile user acquisition strategy in South Korea. Their collaborative approach has enabled us to deliver a first-class CPI user acquisition campaign strategy, optimized towards first installs,” said Sven Lubek, managing director of WeQ. “As seen from the great results delivered with other travel partners in Korea including DailyHotel and MyRealTrip, we have built up solid experience working with travel and hotel booking apps. We are growing stronger in this vertical and happy to build further on this experience by extending this knowledge to helping more brands in South Korea.”

During their collaboration, Allstay challenged WeQ to create a CPI campaign that would focus on new quality user acquisition that was optimized towards Search (action 1) and Purchase (action 2). The campaign resulted in an overall 817 per cent new user growth between June 2018 and May 2019. In July 2018, WeQ’s initiative went on to increase new users by almost 600 per cent more than the month before, in the Korean region during summertime. For the continuation of the partnership, Allstay changed the creatives for each following season while WeQ executed the campaigns.

Gyusup Sim, CMO of Allstay, said: “Working together with WeQ over the course of 12 months has enabled us to continuously grow our app and expand our market share locally in the competitive travel vertical. We are in daily contact with the WeQ team and trust their impressive local market knowledge. Overall, WeQ’s long-term and proactive approach to campaign management is a great fit for us, and our partnership has enabled us to deliver above and beyond our ambitious KPIs. Also, we trusted the team to lend their experience and AI-powered solution to fight fraudulent traffic.”