This week marked the summer solstice and the official beginning of the summer season. For travel brands, however, the summer travel season has been in full swing for a couple of months now. Summer means increased ice cream sales, high cooling bills and most relevant to us–lots of travel.
When planning yearly budgets, the Koddi team places a heavy emphasis on maximizing summer performance. This is because summer can either make or break a travel brand’s year. There are hundreds of things that we do to prepare, but we thought it might be helpful to share some of the most important steps we take to ensure our clients have a successful summer season.
Here are our top ten tips for maximizing summer metasearch performance:
1. Budget for Seasonality – Proper forecasting is a finely-tuned skillset made up of art and science. There are thousands of variables to consider, and no two advertisers follow the same trends. When planning summer budgets, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. We’ve invested heavily in developing technology and the expertise needed to forecast budgets for our clients accurately. That said, most travel advertisers can anticipate a significant seasonal increase in demand. To capture demand, advertisers need to make sure their budgets can keep up with it. Losing out on bookings due to poor planning marks a huge opportunity loss.
2. Focus on Summer Markets – This point is pretty intuitive but often overlooked because it can be very difficult to accomplish at scale. Hotels located in beach-adjacent locales tend to see the biggest increases in activity. Metasearch sites allow you to target these customers specifically. At a minimum, travel brands should make sure they are regularly keeping up with competition on their properties in hot markets. Best case, travel brands should implement automated bidding algorithms (like the ones used at Koddi) to react to market trends on a real-time basis and maximize activity right when users are searching.
3. Audit Your Account – We harp on this point a lot, but poor hotel data, missing rates, or overlooked mistakes can dramatically reduce campaign performance. Whether it is a wrong address, mismatched property, rouge bid, or forgotten daily spend cap, small mistakes can have a damaging impact during summer months. It is important to ensure that hotel information is correct, account settings are properly dialed in and that all placements have accurate bids. A full audit can be a time-intensive process. Luckily Koddi has a full suite of tools that automates most of this work.
