NB: This is a guest article by Jim Price, vice president of sales at Criteo Corp, a global leader in personalized retargeting.
Did you know that more than 95% of website visitors leave before completing a transaction?
Marketers must ask how they can efficiently recapture those consumers that stood on the doorstep, but left without booking.
Given the fact that consumers have greater access to more booking options than ever before – it’s crucial that industry marketers understand retargeting and how to generate new revenue opportunities via their engaged, yet fragmented, audience.
We all know the travel industry, perhaps more so than others, is driven by personal customer preferences – therefore, effective travel marketers must adopt strategies that accommodate personalized travel preferences to sell more – and more relevant – products, services and packages.
Enter retargeting (also referred to as remarketing), which allows marketers and advertisers to find previous website visitors across the Web, and serve the most relevant offers to drive them back to the brand’s website to complete that perfect transaction they had abandoned or only partially completed earlier.
With this background, I would like to add more context to this topic by suggesting three best practice tips to maximize the impact of online retargeting for travel marketers.
Tip 1: Convert low-return queries into profitable leads
- Look for a retargeting partner that offers a technology that can turn low-value bookings/searches into higher-value bookings. For example: target people searching for airfare to a particular location with suggested hotels and vacation packages.
- Make sure your provider implements “smart-ad technologies” to put highly personalized ads in front of your visitors, at the right time and the right place for the right products.
Tip 2: Seek maximum scale and reach to target your global audience- The travel industry is a global marketplace. Look for a retargeting partner that can offer your audience scale (the sheer depth and width of their audience, i.e. how much volume can you secure?), reach (does your partner have enough online publishers to allow you to reach a visitor often enough) and access to global online advertising inventory if operating in more than one country.
- Find a retargeting partner that operates where your company does business, and where your target customers live.
Tip 3: Choose a solution that provides flexibility to drive increased ROIMake sure you are able to:
- Adjust advertising spend (CPC) to optimize ROI based on high and low seasons, and for high- and low-margin products.
- Adjust spend based on other factors that impact profitability e.g. length of stay, destination city, class of service, etc.
- Demand transparency in advertising campaigns: self-control bid prices, real-time campaign analyses and insight.
These tips provide a baseline to guide travel advertisers’ questioning when seeking the most effective retargeting solution for their travel companies.
NB: This is a guest article by Jim Price, vice president of sales at Criteo Corp., a global leader in personalized retargeting.