[ Industry case study — Paid Media ]
AI bidding cuts cost per flight search 36%
Impression A/B tested Google's AI-powered custom bidding in DV360 for Wizz Air, cutting cost per flight search in the UK and Italy.
Original project by Impression ↗Industry reference — not a NexSum Labs engagement.
- Client
- Wizz Air
- Industry
- Travel / airline
- Services
- Programmatic (DV360), Bid strategy testing, Conversion tracking
- Year
- 2025
- Timeline
- 4-week test
- Location
- United Kingdom and Italy
The client
Wizz Air operates a young fleet of more than 200 aircraft on nearly 1,000 routes to almost 200 destinations in over 50 countries. It was named EMEA's most environmentally sustainable airline at the CAPA Awards for Excellence 2024.
The challenge
Wizz Air targets high-value new users so they can be remarketed once in-market, and measures quality with cost per flight search (CPS). Its mid-funnel DV360 activity used Google's automated bidding toward a minimum CPA. That strategy blended searches and bookings as conversion signals, which likely pushed CPS up. Wizz Air still needed to report on both searches and bookings.
The solution
01Hypothesis and test window
Impression ran the test during Wizz Air's 'Escape the Winter' promotion, which targeted users in the UK and Italy with flights to hero destinations.
02AI-powered custom bidding
In DV360, Google's custom bidding algorithm gave the Search conversion top priority, so only searches influenced bids while bookings were still tracked.
03A fair A/B test
Settings, targeting and creative were kept identical and the in-platform A/B test ran for four weeks, giving the algorithm time to learn.
The results
Custom bidding reduced cost per flight search by 36% in the UK and 10% in Italy compared with the existing automated strategy. Wizz Air kept full visibility of both searches and bookings in its reporting. The test showed that isolating the right conversion signal can make mid-funnel programmatic spend work harder.
Tools & stack
Original project by Impression ↗ — published by the delivering agency, included here as an industry reference.
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