REAL-TIME ADVERTISING BEST PRACTICES FOR TRAVEL ADVERTISERS

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CONTENTS

2 INTRODUCTION

3 CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

3 CHALLENGE: REACHING THE RIGHT INTERNET BROWSERS

3 SOLUTION: QUANTCAST CUSTOM AUDIENCE PROFILING AND PROSPECTING

4 CHALLENGE: UNDERSTANDING ROI

4 SOLUTION: MULTI-CHANNEL ATTRIBUTION, WITH SPLIT FUNNEL ATTRIBUTION FOR DISPLAY

5 CHALLENGE: EFFICIENT RETARGETING

6 SOLUTION: MULTI-VENDOR SPLIT FUNNEL ATTRIBUTION INSIGHTS

7 SUCCESS STORIES

7 SUMMARY

REAL-TIME ADVERTISING

BEST PRACTICES

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INTRODUCTION

The travel vertical is arguably the most saturated when it comes to the number of advertisers competing for consumers’ attention and striving to drive incremental sales online. Tour operators such as Thomas Cook and Kuoni offering end-to-end holidays compete with hotel and flight providers, such as Marriott and easyJet. Furthermore, all providers compete with comparison and booking engines such as Skyscanner and Hotels.com. In today’s fragile economic climate, value for money is often the most important consideration for consumers when making travel arrangements. A survey by ABTA revealed that 53% rate lowest prices as essential or important when booking a holiday (Source: http://abta.com/news-and-views/press-zone/abta-reveals-consumers-top-10-essentials-for-booking-a-holiday). Added to this is the recent surge in popularity of consumer reviews made available through websites such as TripAdvisor, which has increased the length of consumers’ research phase and diversified the mix of websites visited to conduct research. The image below depicts the online resources used by typical couple Dan and Sarah when researching a holiday.

AIRLINES

Check price of booking direct

TOUR OPERATOR

Research destinations and cost

HOTEL

COMPARISON

ENGINE

Find best price and read traveler

reviews

FLIGHT

COMPARISON

ENGINE

Find best price

TRAVEL REVIEW

WEBSITE

Read reviews of destination, accomodation and tour operator

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For travel companies this means that they need a multi-channel marketing approach, with an always-on component focused on reaching the consumers who are most likely to convert in order to avoid wasting budget on window-shoppers or those researching a destination to which they have already planned to travel. Finally, we know from a study by IBM Institute for business value that the most important measure to gauge marketing success for CMOs is return-on-investment (ROI) (Source: IBM, From Stretched to Strengthened, Insights from the Global Chief Marketing Officer Study, 2011).

This best practices guide will discuss the unique challenges facing travel advertisers looking to drive incremental sales through online advertising and present opportunities for savvy marketers to get ahead of the game with advanced tactics.

CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

CHALLENGE: REACHING THE RIGHT INTERNET BROWSERS

Understanding the need for an always-on strategy begins with understanding when consumers are researching travel services. TNS consumer research for Travel Weekly late last year found just over half of family households planning a holiday over the next 12 months (51%) would go away between July and September. However, 27% of adults without children were planning holidays this winter, and 29% were planning a holiday this summer. Close to one in four (23%) were planning a holiday this spring. One in five (21%) of those without children were not sure when they would go away compared with nearer one in 10 (13%) with children, presumably because the latter feel compelled to book holidays within certain time periods (Source: http://www.travelweekly.co.uk/articles/2014/02/07/46898/analysis-outlook-for-family-bookings-in-2014.html). For advertisers this means they need an online presence all year round in order to capture all available holidaymakers and travellers.

However, we know that holidaymakers and travellers go through a research phase before booking. Then comes the purchase, and very often they will research the area again closer to departure to find things to do. Therefore, it is important for advertisers to reach consumers in the pre-booking research phase but not waste advertising budget targeting those who have already booked and are conducting pre-holiday destination research.

SOLUTION: QUANTCAST CUSTOM AUDIENCE PROFILING AND PROSPECTING

Quantcast’s unique measurement observes millions of customer behaviours in the moment, directly measuring audiences spanning hundreds of millions of web destinations. Quantcast Advertise then acts on real-time custom audience profiles. We identify people who have the most data points in common with your current customers. We act on these insights to influence their journey with tailored ad delivery, to generate higher conversions from new customers and optimal revenue growth.

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CHALLENGE: UNDERSTANDING ROI

The majority of CMOs believe connecting with customers through digital channels and ROI-drive will impact

marketing most, and CMOs believe ROI on marketing spend will be the number one method for determining success by 2015, concluded a study by IBM (Source: IBM, From Stretched to Strengthened, Insights from the Global Chief Marketing Officer Study, 2011). Today, many advertisers and agencies struggle to accurately report ROI for a number of reasons; inaccurate measurement and disparate use of technology are the main culprits. Travel advertisers in particular can struggle with measuring the ROI from their digital advertising as the path-to-conversion can be longer than the average cookie window, and the final package bought by a consumer is often the result of the initial sale plus cross-sold products such as travel insurance, car hire and flight upgrades.

Inaccurate measurement in digital media is very common and can be caused by many different mistakes. Firstly, not all advertising is tracked through a central system of record such as an omnipresent adserver or tag management system. The result is that clicks on ads from different channels or campaigns are counted by different systems, and if more than one channel or campaign click is involved in a path-to-conversion then each system will count and assign credit for that conversion. When reports from each system are brought together, the total number of conversions is too high, and the ROI is artificially inflated for those channels or campaigns with independent or decentralised tracking.

The most widely used model today is still the basic last-touch model, which is used by 54% of advertisers and agencies (Source: “Marketing Attribution: Valuing the Customer Journey, eConsultancy, 2012). Everyone is motivated by incentives, and algorithms are no different. The harsh reality is that last touch is outdated and very easily abused by retargeting vendors. All upper-funnel activity (prospecting) goes without credit for conversions, and partners on the plan fight to get the last touch. This ultimately creates the wrong incentive and a lose-lose-lose situation for all parties involved. The consumer loses because they are oversaturated with retargeting ads to the point of annoyance. The marketer loses because their budgets are over allocated to those partners or channels. Finally, ad targeting vendors lose because they are forced to optimise to an inferior attribution model, which significantly dulls their targeting toolset and potential.

SOLUTION: MULTI-CHANNEL ATTRIBUTION, WITH SPLIT FUNNEL ATTRIBUTION FOR DISPLAY

Ad servers and tag management solutions such as DoubleClick, MediaMind, TagMan and Qubit, to name but a few, offer solutions that track all forms of advertising and provide marketers with tools to allocate credit across the path-to-conversion as they see fit for their business model and objectives. For travel advertisers, this may mean assigning significant credit to the first touch, as that was the ad that made the brand part of the consumer path-to-purchase; however, travel advertisers may also need to assign a large portion of the credit to the last ad, as this was the ad that closed the sale, so to speak, in the highly competitive, price-sensitive travel market.

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Recently, Quantcast announced a fundamentally new way of looking at attribution within display advertising. We call it Split funnel Attribution. This solution is not exclusive to Quantcast. It is an

open-source solution that we are actively using and sharing with attribution platforms, adservers and other vendors. We set about creating this solution because despite today’s plethora of measurement options for display advertising, we believe that many advertisers are not making the most of their advertising budget because they are measuring the wrong thing. In order to keep filling the top of the funnel, advertisers need to work with vendors who are capable of effectively prospecting, finding new customers who have not been to a brand’s website before. However, this is harder than simply retargeting previous website visitors and is often neglected by display advertising partners. Quantcast’s Split Funnel Attribution introduces a second point of measurement, the touch point immediately before the first website visit. One of the most beneficial aspects of being able to distinguish between who contributed to a conversion from both the prospecting and retargeting phases is that now you’ve created a partnership between the two efforts.

CHALLENGE: EFFICIENT RETARGETING

The explosion of many, many retargeting vendors and adexchanges into the digital landscape tells us that retargeting is relatively easy to do, simply

requiring technology that can track users on a website with cookies and buy ads on publisher

websites as and when those cookied users appear online. However, just because they are retargeting users does not mean that all vendors are doing so efficiently. An article that appeared on Advertising Age in 2010 titled “The Pants That Stalked Me on the Web” describes Michael Learmonth’s experience of being bombarded with ads for a pair of shorts that he placed in an online shopping basket and subsequently abandoned. The strategy employed by the advertiser was to remain top-of-mind as Michael had not bought the shorts; however, in reality the tactics used by the retargeting vendor were too aggressive, and Michael could have ended up resenting the brand and electing to purchase his shorts from an alternative brand. Both retail and travel companies tread a very fine line with consumers valuing their relationship with the brand as well as price and should not risk alienating themselves from consumers through excessive retargeting.

Conversion

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SOLUTION: MULTI-VENDOR

SPLIT FUNNEL PROSPECTING INSIGHTS

The solution here is simple: As with attribution, there needs to be a single source of tracking. Quantcast offers advertisers and agencies creative tracking that can be deployed across activity from multiple vendors. The result is a series of insights that show the efficiency of each and every partner on plan. The graph in Figure 1 shows a report available that tells advertisers and agencies the percentage of prospecting and retargeting activity run by each partner on the plan. The simplest use for this report is to check that each partner is acting according to the brief that has been set. It is also possible to see the ad frequency for each prospecting partner on the plan. In some cases we have seen ad frequencies reach 100+, meaning that the retargeting vendor is showing more than 100 ads to consumers after they have visited a brand’s website. This is simply not a good user experience.

Prospecting Insights can also be extended to show the relative CPA of each vendor on plan, this time using the Split Funnel Attribution model described previously, shown in Figure 2.

N

FIG

2 :

RELATIVE CPA

30% 20% 10% 0% -10% -20% -30% -40% PARTNER 1 PARTNER 5 RELATIVE CPA

PARTNER 2 PARTNER 3 PARTNER 4

FIG

1 :

PROSPECTING VS RETARGETING

PARTNER 1 100% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0% PROSPECTING RETARGETING

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SUCCESS STORIES

ONLINE ACQUISITION OF NEW CUSTOMERS SOARS FOR CORSAIR THROUGH PARTNERSHIP WITH QUANTCAST Quantcast Advertise, together with the custom audience profile Quantcast have built for Corsair, allowed them to identify other ideal prospects across the web and anticipate what a customer needs or wants before they even know, to truly influence their unique journey.

RESULTS:

• Quantcast is number one partner on plan • ROAS of 25 times investment

• CPA reduced by more than 50%

“When we decided that we needed to increase our prospecting activity, Quantcast was a natural partner for us. Their

approach to real-time advertising aligns perfectly with our goal of driving new customers that have never been to our site. The results speak for themselves; Quantcast outperformed the other partner we worked with and we’ve implemented our next campaign with Quantcast already.”

Geoffrey Gouverneur, Traffic Acquisition Manager, Corsair

SMOOTHER SAILING FOR FERRY BOOKINGS

Quantcast worked with the client to build a real-time custom audience profile based on the highest-value MyFerryLink customers. Combining its big data set and Predictive Intelligence, Quantcast matched the custom profile against its real-time view of the web to find and reach the closest matches, adapting to seasonal changes in real time.

RESULTS:

• 99% of consumers reached were new prospects • ROI of 6

“Quantcast exceeded our expectations by delivering 44% below our target CPA goal.”

Laurie Glover, Head of Digital, MyFerryLink

SUMMARY

Many travel companies are embracing programmatic advertising and seeing success. Due to the nuances of the travel vertical, there are specific challenges that all travel marketers need to be aware of and have a strategy for overcoming. Careful media planning, accurate measurement and appropriate distribution of credit across media partners are key requirements for all travel marketers to realise the full potential of programmatic advertising.