Even if you’re happy with your metasearch campaign performance, you might be leaving some opportunity on the table. When onboarding new clients at Koddi, we’ve seen just about every situation imaginable–from some of the most inefficient campaigns in the world to the ones where every possible outcome is covered and proactively automated.
Through all of these scenarios, we’ve identified some common pitfalls and areas for improvement. The following is a list of thirteen signs that you might be losing in metasearch without even knowing it.
- Bid updates being made through Excel. This indicates a lack of automation and consistent decision making around what to bid, why, and when. We’ve met some of the world’s best Excel gurus and some of them have done amazing things with their campaigns, but we have yet to meet anyone that can run consistent strategies every day using Excel. Who wants to load up Excel every Saturday morning to update bids?
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Reporting has to be manually compiled. One of my most memorable pitches involved a campaign manager that described his daily management as something along the lines of “I come in, I download all the reports, I make a Pivot Table, my computer freezes, I go outside for a smoke… I refresh my Pivot Table, I go for another smoke…” Automation doesn’t just save time, it saves lives!
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Campaigns are running exclusively on CPA. Cost per acquisition (CPA) and commission programs have their place, but running on just CPA is basically trading lower volumes for more guarantees. We’ve handily beaten CPA volumes while running at the same or better average CPA time and time again.
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Using a single and rigid funding source. The most effective advertisers have fluid and flexible budgets that can move across all their digital channels, not just metasearch. If your campaigns are budgeted quarters in advance and you don’t have the flexibility to shift spend to where the opportunity is, you’re simply not driving the most efficient bookings possible.
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Single, non-localized landing page. This is an easy mistake to make and an easy one to miss because many metasearch engines localize based on where the user is regardless of which point of sale the user is trying to access. The most common conversion sin we see is where a user clicks a rate in one currency and then sees the rate in another currency on the landing page. International travelers need less complexity, not more. People like things nicely translated in their language. Localization matters, especially when users are a little higher in the conversion funnel.
