Airlines, hotel chains, search engines and other travel companies face a myriad of choices for improving online marketing campaigns.
NB: This is an analysis by Tobias Wessels, vice president of Adara Europe, based in Dublin.
Targeting or retargeting customers who have previously visited your website is often the lowest "hanging fruit" for improving website conversions.
Doing so on the basis of high-quality, first party data is the most effective efficient way to reach your customers most directly.
At the same time, attracting customers who have not considered your brand is considerably more challenging - especially in fragmented markets like Europe.
How can you tell if you are doing it effectively?
Dilemma
Many "data-exchanges" actively promote their products in what is generally called "prospecting".
The process is called "look-alike" targeting, and tries to identify people that are most likely to travel in the future.
An example of a look-alike model is to target people for travel products who have recently purchased, say, an ebook reader online.
By some metrics, it can be shown that people who have bought an ebook reader are more likely to travel in the future, than those who have not.
But while the purchase of an ebook reader might be a general travel indicator in some sense, how accurate or relevant a predictor is it, when making concrete marketing decisions?
In the end, it is not terribly helpful.
The purchase of an ebook does not tell us when a person is likely to want to travel; where she will go; and in what directions she is likely to allocate travel expenditures.
Here is where "first party data" becomes important.
Instead of relying on general data such as in the example above, why not rely on data that comes directly from the from the source = i.e. from travel companies directly?
For instance, many hotel, car rental and insurance providers have entered into agreements with airlines to advertise directly to travelers in the (airline) booking path.
Converting targets into buyers in those contexts is much higher than in other online channels, because these customers are in a sense pre-qualified – we already know they are “in the market” to purchase travel products, and have already done so.
A more an even more effective approach, is working with companies that specialize in first party audience targeting.
How they work
Travel marketers can now target exactly those travelers that have searched or booked, a specific travel segment.
They can target inside the booking path, so that ads can be shown in the midst of booking. Ads can also be decoupled from the booking path, which enables the advertiser to show an offer to a traveler not just when she is actually booking travel, but even when she is elsewhere on the net, doing other things.
In either case, first party data lets us know which travelers have searched or booked specific destinations, so we can reach a traveler at a specific moment – wherever that traveler happens to be online.
And do so with offers that are relevant, and compelling.
Only a few companies can access this kind of rich first party travel data on a large scale.
Others still employ tactics such as "cookie bombing" - an approach in which advertisers bombard websites with online ads that are often placed on the bottom of the website at very low cost, targeting "generic" users.
But this is not "targeting" at all. In fact, this kind of flooding the market with untargeted ads is a pure numbers game.
Indeed, many people who are making a travel booking will have visited a website where one of these low-cost ads was placed, but they might not have seen the ads, or if they have, may not have been activated to book as a result of them.
At the end of the day, and over time, such "throw it up against the wall" approaches have no measurable impact for an online marketing campaign’s success.
There is no substitute for quality data that can be used to improve campaign performance.
NB: This is an analysis by Tobias Wessels, vice president of Adara Europe, based in Dublin.
NB2:Gold suitcase image via Shutterstock.