The ubiquity of artificial intelligence is evident in the
fact that the abbreviation “AI” is now a common and recognizable term.
A Google search for “AI” turns up more than 820 million
results, with articles from sources as diverse as The Wall Street Journal, the
Verge and Vanity Fair and topics such as AI for healthcare, astronomy and human
resources. An article in Harvard Business Review calls AI “the most important
general-purpose technology of our era…”
In travel, AI is starting to touch every business sector and
every step of a traveler’s journey, from the ideas and images in online
searches to the pricing of flights and accommodations to experiences
in-destination.
This month we’re digging into artificial intelligence to
learn how it's being used in travel and to understand its future potential.
For the final installment in our series, we look at the role
of AI in digital marketing – how it is accelerating optimization analysis and helping
brands design campaigns and content that drive conversions.
Background
According to the Salesforce’s 2017 “State of Marketing”
report, artificial intelligence is the leading technology where marketers
expect the most growth in the next two years. In a survey of 3,500 marketers,
respondents predict AI use will grow by 53% – a much higher rate than any other
type of technology.
And among marketers who already use AI, 64% said it has “greatly
or substantially increased their overall marketing efficiency.”
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Split testing – also known as A/B testing – is one of the one
of the most common tools in a marketer’s bag, enabling them to optimize
engagement via websites, emails, and advertising campaigns.
But the process of changing variables - for example the
color or size of text on a website - and testing and analyzing results can be time-consuming
and tedious.
Now – as it is with so many other tasks that can be
automated – artificial intelligence is transforming the way marketers manage
conversion rate optimization, making the process faster and smarter than ever
before.
Optimization at work
Alpharooms is a United Kingdom-based online travel agency. Established
in 1999, the company lists more than 250,000 hotels in 40,000 destinations.
As the company’s digital strategist,
Simon Kennedy is charged with building strategies to drive brand,
conversion and revenue growth through testing and optimization.
The technology has allowed us to improve our learning rate and drive growth much, much quicker than some of the traditional ways of A/B testing.
Simon Kennedy - Alpharooms
In recent months, he has been working with Sentient Technologies,
a leading artificial intelligence firm with more than $174 million in venture
investment.
Sentient’s conversion rate optimization product – Ascend – automates
the testing of multiple variables in a single experiment, lowering cost and
increasing efficiency and speed.
Kennedy has been using the system to test a variety of elements
of the alpharooms.com website, including colors, navigation bars, calls to
action and layout.
“We know that for example when you are booking a hotel,
reviews are really important to users,” he says.
“On our standard version of the page we have reviews sitting
at the bottom, with facility details and maps and other information sitting
above. Now we can test a number of versions of that layout to determine what is
most important in the hierarchy. Is what they see first making a difference to
how long they stay on the page? And we’ve found yes, it does make a difference
and in fact it makes a difference in how likely they are to make a booking as
well.”
It’s evolutionary
Ascend’s algorithms use what is known as evolutionary
computation – a branch of AI that uses principles of natural selection.
“For example you tell the AI your goal is to get people to
the checkout page,” says Jeremy Miller, vice president of marketing for
Sentient Technologies.
“The AI starts to drive traffic to different ideas you gave
it in what we call the first generation, and it starts to look at which one or
several of those ideas are actually performing well. And just like the process of
evolution, it will take the ideas that perform well and breed them together to
create a new generation to experiment with, and the ones not performing well
get pruned away. It keeps doing this, creating newer and newer generations and
better performing designs. It will even add in mutations - taking things that
may not have performed well in the past and reintroducing them to see if in
combination with a later generation does it actually increase conversions.”
In a matter of weeks, the AI can test thousands of designs.
By testing multiple variables at one time and then combining
those that are driving conversions, Kennedy says he has already seen a dramatic
uplift from the AI.
“The technology has allowed us to improve our learning rate
and drive growth much, much quicker than some of the traditional ways of A/B testing,”
Kennedy says.
AI for travel sites
Miller says this type of AI-powered optimization is ideally
suited for online travel sites vying to create engaging websites that keep
travelers coming back and clicking through to a purchase. And with some OTAs
spending big money on affiliate programs, an efficient optimization strategy
can also drive down customer acquisition costs.
“Whenever you are in a situation where you have a high amount
of transactions in a highly competitive space, where your margins are not as
big as other industries, optimization is critical, user experience is critical,”
Miller says.
Filters within Sentient’s Ascend program also allow clients
to fine-tune their analysis for deeper context.
“They can segment the traffic coming into experiment such that
it can optimize for mobile, for tablet, for web, for demographics, for whatever
audience filters you want to apply. You can start to understand what experiences
actually are ideal for that customer,” Miller says.