Travel ecommerce has grown rapidly since the emergence of Expedia back in 1995. With the industry now at the point of saturation, it’s time to get savvy with your digital presence to ensure a bigger piece of a diminishing pie.
The Saturation Point
For almost a decade, the air, rail, and cruise sectors had seen unrivaled growth between 3 and 5% each year. However, over the last 12 years that has changed as search interest dropped by 26%. Yet, according to Hitwise, search engines continue to be the largest driver to travel websites. Together this paints a picture of a shrinking marketplace.
Whilst we are not seeing these sectors shrink astronomically, travel booking websites such as Expedia and Lastminute.com are rapidly growing and taking larger chunks of the ecommerce market.
As the market becomes more saturated, the only option to ensure you take a bigger piece of the pie, without overstretching and overspending, is intelligent advertising.
Intelligent advertising
The scattered gun approach is no longer a viable option for marketers; you could quickly spend your entire budget with very little return. This approach guarantees you less of the market share whilst others take advantage of the numerous available targeting options.
Digital marketing today allows for such granular targeting that there is no reason any advertiser should be throwing money away on areas that are not leading to conversions. It is this campaign granularity that enables you to spend less for a bigger return.
Purchasing vs researching phase
Targeting by the purchasing or researching phase of the consumer journey may not seem like the easiest way of splitting out targeting in your campaigns as there is no audience list for this, but when you take a deeper look into the data you may find something interesting.
Whilst analysing paid search data for a leading train company, we uncovered some useful insights. On the surface, the conversion rate was only mildly affected by gender or age, but what really stood out was that mixed-use computers performed 14% worse.
