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Steve Donzella is the chief growth officer at SearchKings Africa, a digital marketing agency focused on Search marketing for brands across sub-Saharan Africa. Donzella is responsible for driving sustainable, long-term business expansion by aligning marketing, sales, product development, and customer success teams.
Agencies, like ours, are tackling a common challenge for their clients across sub-Saharan Africa: proving marketing ROI with a rigid budget. But what happens when your clients’ marketing obstacles can’t be fixed with a simple budget increase?
When we, at SearchKings Africa, signed on Avis South Africa as a client, we had a chance to show that skill is just as integral to ROI as ad spend. And, for Avis, the shift to an AI-driven strategy meant leveling up their technical knowledge and proving the effectiveness of their marketing efforts to the business.
As the 2025-2026 peak season for travel within South Africa reared its head, we knew this would be the perfect time to showcase how a limited budget can yield marketing ROI.
See how car hire reservations for Avis increased by 2.5X in just one month.
The challenge: Breaking through fragmentation
Prior to partnering with us, both Avis and Budget — their sub-brand for more cost-conscious customers — faced significant marketing hurdles. The ad accounts for both brands were managed in silos, leading to conflicting strategies and incomplete measurement. Additionally, the keyword strategies lacked keyword hygiene: this meant that irrelevant, low-performing, and competing terms cannibalised the rankings for both brands and each site struggled to capture high-intent search queries.
This snowballed into wasted ad spend, inaccurate measurement, and a ceiling on long-term growth.
“From targeting to conversion tracking to reporting, the effectiveness of our campaigns was not living up to its potential,” said Anda Peter, general manager of marketing and communications for Avis Southern Africa. “We were flying blind and our competitors were starting to eat our lunch.”
After conducting an audit with Avis, we knew that increasing the budget would not solve anything.
In creating our marketing goals for Avis, we first asked the questions: ‘What does success look like?’ And: ‘What moves the needle towards profit?’
Peter explained: “We were conscious of the fact that we had budget constraints. At the same time, we understood that throwing more money at a problem we didn’t fully understand was not going to help.”
Instead, this was going to be a test of finesse over finance.
The execution: Moving out of first gear with centralisation and AI-driven precision
In creating our marketing goals for Avis, we first asked the questions: ‘What does success look like?’ And: ‘What moves the needle towards profit?’ The crux of their ROI was confirmed bookings for car hire. This meant we could now create a marketing and measurement framework to achieve this goal.
The second step involved getting our hands dirty by rebuilding the ad accounts to move everything towards maximising reservations:
- We centralised management for both the Avis and Budget brands. This allowed for dynamic budget allocation and the elimination of wasteful campaigns that simultaneously overlapped but operated incongruently.
- We introduced a new keyword strategy. We focused specifically on high-intent brand and geographic keywords and search queries. We also removed campaign cross-pollination to avoid the same keyword competing for customers in different campaigns, which would send mixed audience signals back to the campaigns. Lastly, we curated our in-market and affinity audiences to ensure the right traveller profiles — both to and within South Africa — were captured by our campaigns.
- We levelled up their strategy with AI. We chose Performance Max (PMax), knowing that this AI-powered tool would utilise our new keyword strategy to drive high-intent search campaigns. By focusing on traffic quality, we ensured that AI-driven automation could learn and optimise faster; significantly increasing conversion probability.
- We set up a workshop with Avis’ internal marketing team. This helped to improve and widen their technical knowledge of the changes we made so that they could measure the effectiveness of the new marketing strategy.
SearchKing Africa’s CEO and founder, Brett Perlstein, added why the workshop was necessary in building a strong agency-client relationship: “Based on the experience Avis had with a previous agency, we learnt that they were in the dark about many aspects of their marketing strategies. Very little time had been taken to boost their ability to make effective marketing decisions.”
The results of this workshop, in tandem with the other aspects of our execution, were evident: “SearchKing Africa’s approach — working to improve our technical knowledge, as well as leading the new strategy with AI — gave us the confidence to go back to the business to share and justify the changes being made,” Peter added.
The results: Full-throttle growth via efficiency
The results redefine doing more with the same budget. Without increasing the advertising ad spend, we achieved a 146% increase in confirmed car hire bookings.
- Key events: Car hire reservations increased approximately 2.5X, jumping from 8,964 to 22,033 in November 2025.
- Efficiency gains: The Session Key Event Rate, which is the percentage of website visits that resulted in a conversion action, improved by 34%, proving that traffic was not just higher in volume, but also higher in quality.
- Cost-effectiveness: The campaigns for Avis maintained a cost-per-conversion (CPC) of R807 per reservation, which is a highly affordable CPC for car hire reservations in South Africa.
Peter confirmed this: “Among our various above-the-line and below-the-line marketing channels and activities, our search campaigns with SearchKings Africa continue to be our most affordable marketing channel.”
Our directive for brands and agencies looking to renovate their search campaigns, and may feel limited by a tight budget, return to the golden question: what does success look like? What moves the needle towards profit? Every aspect of your measurement and marketing blueprint must answer to this.
Peter closed with advice for other agencies, too: “For marketing firms looking to provide a great service to their clients, when it comes to initiating any new strategy or concept; giving the client the time to understand and level-up their technical knowledge will go a long way in creating a strong customer relationship.”