NB: This is a guest article by Chris Brinkworth, chief marketing officer for TagMan.
Travel businesses pay duplicate fees to PPC systems such as Google, display advertising providers and often vast arrays of affiliates.
This is simply because tracking systems are not connected to show the full journey of buyers/browsers, wasting up to 30% of online marketing budgets.
Furthermore they leak valuable data that is acted on by competitors and they fall over from excessive page weight and privacy challanges.
This happens simply through poor management of the tracking tags and beacons used to optimize marketing.
When the average search for a flight, hotel or car now ends up with ten or more browser tabs open at some point, each with ten tags recording some piece of data, the old way of managing tracking has to change - because it’s far too messy.
Cookies, pixels, tags and data
Travel businesses rely on tracking tags and beacons to help to show what happens on your journey as you get closer to a purchase.
Those tags store information about you and your plans/intentions. They show where you came from, what you searched for and who sent you to a website to buy something.
Tracking tags and pixels generally use cookies on your machine to say "you were here", "this is what you searched for", "this is what you bought" and more importantly "this is the channel that provided me with incremental revenue".
The little problem with tags
The industry relies on too many of these beacons, pixels & tags. It’s a mess.
- Every new affiliate, DSP, DMP, video, retargeting, tracking, social widget and analytics tool etc requires (yet) another tag/pixel to be deployed on the website code. There are just too many bits of code.
- Each supplier comes with its own agenda. It is not a holistic solution. None connect. All add page weight, privacy and failure points.
- Pixels bid from the same exchange, often against themselves.
- Advertisers are tied to suppliers/vendors, many they do not (want to) use anymore, often owned by businesses that conflict with a company's own strategic plans.
The BIG problem with when they don’t connectWithout a process that touches all known data points, there are a number of problems:
- Attribution and credit is poorly recorded, because systems do not talk to each other.
- Why do we reward only PPC, if retargeting creative, social or microsites drive the incremental engagement.
- Retargeting looks hot, but does it cannibalize a true path driving incremental sales, email and natural search.
- Businesses sometimes pay up to three separate commissions for the same conversion because the user touched three affiliates.
- If a lead didn’t send new business, why reward it?
We are starting to see single solutions that are trying to change this situation - a process that uses one single (agnostic) platform (not unlike a content management system) and focus solely on managing tags and data.
Some travel brands such as Virgin Holidays, TUI Travel, Octopus Travel and others are using such systems.
Alongside improving ROI, those adopting such systems are able to work with more vendors with less worry, identify exactly what works, pay on exactly what happened, manage privacy aspects (global opt in/out) and make better use of data selection for re-targeting criteria.
In short, tidy up what is a messy problem the industry is facing right now – by streamlining and running all tags through a single system.
NB: This is a guest article by Chris Brinkworth, chief marketing officer for TagMan.