Benefits of First Party Data for the Travel Industry Marketing Campaigns

What is it?

First-party data is information which is collected directly from a website owner’s site which relates to people’s behaviour on that website. This data includes information such as what people do on a site. This may include things like pages people visit, products they review and the time they spend. It is a real-time record of their engagement with a site and the site owner’s products and services.

This data for example can be used on a transactional site to segment site visitors into browsers, shoppers and buyers. First party data can be further enriched when publisher registration data is overlaid on site behaviour. Offline Advertiser data such as CRM data can also be imported to add further value to this data. The combination of these data inputs allows site owners and marketing partners to begin to identify patterns of correlation between site behaviour, registration and crucially important event data such as sales. This data can be used to pinpoint different customer groups providing the means for greater segmentation and target audience engagement. The richer the data, the greater the predictive accuracy as to how people will behave on site and indeed across sites and how they should be best communicated with.

First party data from multiple sources as opposed to a single site source can also be harnessed from vertical data specialists. In the case of travel we work with companies like this who source first party data from large booking platforms and travel planning sites. These platforms can be online travel agents, global travel distributors, airline and hotel booking engines and travel planning sites. This data allows us to differentiate between browsers and actual buyers. Because we can tap this data in real time and can cross-refer data from multiple world class brand sources, we are well placed to put ads in front of the right people when they are in-market. Some simple applications may include advertising hotel rooms to people who have just booked a flight to a particular city, suggesting car hire or pitching high end cars to people who only ever fly business class.

These tactics can be relied upon to deliver superior ROI.

Key Benefits:

• Maximise the Return on your Ad Spend: By concentrating your efforts on those who travel intenders or who have booked flights/hotels, you are more likely to win new customers more quickly and at a lower cost.
• Reach your prospects at the post browse, search and purchase stages on vertical search engines.
• Boost your ad response: Increase your site engagement and brand awareness.

How does it work?

This data is obtained by placing a small piece of code on your website, also known as pixel, every time a new visitor goes to the site. This pixel installs a non-intrusive browser cookie and the cookie will tell your retargeting provider when to display the ad, hence, your ads are shown only to people who have previously visited your site. The result: New customers whilst saving money!

Who should it help?

“One in five marketers have a dedicated budget for retargeting: Taking control of this first-party data should be a priority for any company today.” – cmo.com, November 2013.

How has it worked?

Case Study 1: Property

Industry: Travel/Hotel

Objective:

A hotel’s goal was to increase occupancy, as well as convert a higher percentage of website visits into bookings.

Solution:

They placed a retargeting pixel on their booking engine page as well as their homepage in order to capture information about the user who visited but did not book. This information was used to serve targeted ads to guests who were already interested in this property and were looking to plan a trip. This process helped convert potentially lost bookings into direct conversions.

Results:

• Total Revenue: $69,014.90
• Total Cost: $5456.83
• ROAS: 1265%
• Rooms Booked: 157
• Total Impressions: 890,184

 

Case Study 2: Golf Break Campaign

Industry: Travel/Golf

Objective:

One of Europe’s largest golf-focused travel companies was looking for an advertising strategy to drive more qualified traffic to its website and improve online ROI.

Solution:

The solution combines paid search to generate qualified traffic to the advertiser’s website and Retargeting Ads to target users with customised display messaging based on their entry point to the site. Advertisers created and served multiple ad versions tailored to the user by geo-location, behaviour, demographic and even position in the trip planning process. Each visitor was targeted with a tailored banner message related to the landing page content they had seen previously.

Results:

• The performance goal for this campaign was to drive additional enquiries at the target CPA of £15-20.
• Dynamic creative optimisation results were used to improve efficiency of existing paid search activity.
• The campaign delivered and average of 11% uplift in conversions for keywords.
• The campaign’s CTR 0.08% was in line with the benchmark rate.

 

Case Study 3: SuperShuttle

Industry: Travel/Transport

Objective:

SuperShuttle needed a sophisticated marketing platform to reach their specific travel audiences and boost booking volume. Lower SuperShuttle’s target cost per reservation and increase brand awareness. Reach SuperShuttle’s optimal audience.

Solution:

By partnering with Sojern, SuperShuttle’s message reached large relevant audiences in key markets: Travellers who just booked their flight and travellers who checked in but had not confirmed their transportation to and from the airport.

Results:

• Campaign Goal Exceeded SuperShuttle’s eCPA goals by 54%.
• Click-Through Rate Increased target volume of reservations by 20%.
• Valuable Audience Reached key segments of high-value audiences: leisure travellers and groups with four or more in a party.

Further Reading: 

http://www.sojern.com/success-stories.php#supershuttle