How Issta’s Marketing Team Found Winning Ads Faster and Cut Waste with Upspring.ai

About Issta: Issta is a leading public travel company in Israel, offering flights, vacation packages, and tourism services. With numerous campaigns promoting various destinations and deals, Issta’s marketing team operates at a fast pace. However, coordinating between creative content, media buying, and analytics was a challenge. They adopted Upspring’s creative intelligence platform to synchronize their team’s efforts and ensure their ad budget was used to maximum effect.

The Challenge

• Siloed Teams and Slower Coordination: Issta’s marketing department is multifaceted – some members focus on creative asset design (images, videos of destinations), while others handle ad spend and targeting. Previously, these teams lacked a real-time shared view of ad performance. Creative decisions were sometimes made based on hunches or delayed feedback from the media team, slowing down their campaign optimization.
• Identifying Winners Among Hundreds of Ads: In travel marketing, Issta often runs a large number of ads concurrently (e.g., different ads for flights, hotels, tours across dozens of destinations). Finding the winning creatives – those that drive bookings or lead generation – was like finding a needle in a haystack without better analytics. By the time they manually identified top performers, precious days or weeks could pass, meaning missed revenue opportunities.
• Undetected Creative Fatigue: Some ads would perform great initially (like a video of a family on a beach for summer holidays) but then see performance drop as the audience got saturated or bored – a phenomenon known as ad fatigue. Previously, Issta often realized an ad had fatigued only after conversion rates had already plummeted and budget was wasted. They needed a way to catch fatigue much faster, so they could refresh or replace ads before losing money on them.
• Ensuring Cost Efficiency: Travel is a margin-conscious industry. Issta had to make every marketing dollar count. Wasting spend on underperforming creatives or suboptimal targeting directly hurt their bottom line. The team was under pressure to improve ROAS and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) by focusing on what works and cutting out what doesn’t, in real time. Additionally, competition from other travel agencies and online travel sites meant if Issta’s ads weren’t optimized, potential customers would book elsewhere.

Why Issta Embraced Upspring.ai

Issta’s marketing leaders chose Upspring to tackle these challenges head-on, leveraging AI to bring their team and data together. Here’s why Upspring was the solution:

• One Source of Truth for Creatives: Upspring provided a unified platform where both creative designers and media performance managers could log in and see the same live campaign data. This alignment was immediate – everyone could see which ads were getting clicks, which were converting to bookings, and which were lagging. Having this shared, real-time dashboard eliminated guesswork and back-and-forth emails. For example, a designer could quickly identify that a particular carousel ad for “Paris Vacation Deals” was lagging in engagement, and proactively start designing a new variant without waiting for a meeting.
• Automated Winner Detection: The platform’s AI analyzes all active ads and flags the top performers (as “Winning” or “Scaling”) based on engagement and conversion metrics. Issta’s team began each morning by checking Upspring’s list of “Top Creatives” – a practice that replaced digging through Ads Manager spreadsheets. This meant within moments they knew which few ads out of the hundreds deserved increased budget or wider rollout. In one instance, Upspring highlighted a video ad featuring a limited-time flight discount to Bangkok that had a significantly higher click-through rate than others; the team immediately boosted that ad’s spend and saw a surge in bookings as a result.
• Real-Time Fatigue Alerts: Perhaps one of the biggest wins for Issta was Upspring’s ability to detect creative fatigue through its AI signals. The platform would mark an ad as “Fatigue” with a warning ⚠️ when engagement dropped below a healthy threshold or frequency got too high. This early warning system enabled Issta to act fast – pausing or refreshing ads before they bled the budget dry. For example, a successful ski vacation ad that ran for several weeks started showing declining click-through and increasing cost per lead. Upspring alerted the team about fatigue signs on day two of the decline, prompting them to swap in a new creative (a different ski resort video) and avoid what could have been 23% of budget wasted on a fading ad.
• Data-Driven Creative Briefs: Upspring didn’t just tell Issta which ads worked; it helped explain why. The creative intelligence identified common elements in top performers – such as “videos under 15 seconds featuring destination scenery and a clear price overlay tend to yield higher conversions” or “ads showing happy families had better engagement for family package promotions.” Issta used these insights to craft better creative briefs. When launching a new campaign for a spring travel sale, the team specifically requested footage of travelers smiling and clear on-screen discount text, because Upspring’s data showed those factors were tied to past winners. Essentially, Upspring’s AI turned into a strategic advisor for creative planning.
• Competitive Benchmarking: The travel sector is highly competitive, and Upspring’s competitor tracking gave Issta an edge. The team could peek at what ads other travel companies were running and how long those ads had been active (a clue to their success). Upspring’s insights pointed out, for instance, that a competitor’s long-running ad for “Last-Minute City Breaks” was likely performing well (since it kept running). Issta quickly responded by creating its own city-break campaign with limited-time offers, capturing interest in a similar demographic. Without Upspring, the team might have been slower to catch on to this trend in consumer interest.

The Results

By infusing Upspring’s AI into their daily operations, Issta realized substantial improvements in both efficiency and marketing outcomes:

• Faster Identification of Winning Ads: What used to take days of analysis is now done instantly by Upspring. The team reports that they can pinpoint top-performing creatives 30% faster than before. This speed means they capitalize on successful ads early and maximize their impact (for example, scaling up a winning campaign while it’s hot, leading to a spike in bookings during peak season).
• Reduced Wasted Ad Spend: Early fatigue detection and smarter allocation helped save a significant portion of budget. Over the first few months, Issta saw a reduction of roughly 25% in spend on underperforming or burnt-out ads. Those savings were redirected to high-performing ads, improving overall ROI. In effect, Upspring acted like a safety net, catching inefficiencies and plugging leaks in the ad spend.
• Improved ROAS and CPA: With more budget going to winners and less to duds, Issta’s return on ad spend improved noticeably. On social ad campaigns, they experienced an average ROAS uplift of 17% after adopting Upspring. Similarly, cost per acquisition (booking or lead) dropped – in some cases by 20% – as campaigns became more optimized. One standout example was a multi-channel campaign for summer trips that, with Upspring’s guidance, achieved a double-digit percentage increase in ROAS compared to the previous year’s similar campaign.
• Enhanced Team Coordination and Morale: The marketing team became more synchronized and agile. Daily stand-ups now revolve around Upspring’s dashboard insights, ensuring everyone from content creators to campaign managers is on the same page. This not only improved the quality of decisions but also boosted team morale – the creative team could directly see the impact of their work in the performance data, and the media team appreciated having creative folks engaged in the numbers. The data-driven culture reduced friction and subjectivity in discussions (“I feel this ad is good” turned into “the data shows this ad is good”).
• More “Winner” Creatives Produced: Over time, the insights gathered helped Issta refine what kind of ads they made. They learned what resonates with their audience (e.g. scenic videos with a clear call-to-action, or images showing people enjoying experiences vs. just landscapes). By focusing production on these high-potential concepts, the hit-rate of new creatives improved. In fact, the percentage of new ads that achieved above-average performance increased by 26%, meaning each new campaign is more likely to have at least one breakout success. This has a compounding effect on their marketing efficiency and results quarter over quarter.

"Upspring became our morning stand-up - one source of truth that creative and media both trust. Winner detection and fatigue alerts let us move budget the same day, which shows up directly in ROAS and CPA. Live reports replaced decks and long email threads - stakeholders see what’s working in real time. We waste less, learn faster, and launch more first-try winners across destinations."

Shimi Hatchuel, Head of User Acquisition

Bottom Line: Upspring.ai became the central nervous system of Issta’s creative marketing efforts. With the platform’s AI keeping a watchful eye on every ad’s health and performance, Issta’s team could move with unprecedented speed and confidence. They found and fueled the winners, cut off the underperformers, and continuously learned what makes their customers click. The result? Less waste, more bookings, and a marketing team that’s perfectly in sync – all contributing to Issta’s continued growth in the competitive travel industry.