Do you do any sort of pay-per-click management for the online travel vertical? I recently attended a Google AdWords Webinar about online travel trends which they based on a ComScore study of 50,000 UK web users. Our Google rep sent me a copy of the ComScore study which I have used to bring you my top ten useful tips for running a travel PPC campaign.
- Nearly half of all travel searches are brand related; can you afford to miss out on all this traffic? 36% of people who buy holidays use a brand search first and use a brand search immediately before purchasing so bid on branded keywords in your PPC campaigns
- Use day parting for PPC; people are 30% more likely to purchase a holiday on a Monday or Tuesday. Increase your bids then to capture this traffic and lower them at the weekend. Only 7% of purchasers buy a holiday on a Saturday.
- Get them early; 15.9% of purchasers buy their holiday from the first site they visit. Only 1.6% will buy immediately, but around 14.3% will return at some point for a conversion. Forget what you’ve learnt about the buying cycle; bidding on keywords that customers use in the research phase can get you a 15.9% conversion rate!
- Make sure your URL’s are memorable; 35% of transactions occur without a search on the same day. These people must’ve seen something they liked then gone away to think about it. Make sure they can remember where they were.
- Destinations aren’t as important as you think. 45% of online travel purchases are made without a destination search. Of course this means that 55% do use a destination related search term but I used to think that just about everybody would search for their destination at some point.
- Save some money for January. For the last few years there has been a massive peak in travel searches every January. Look on Google Trends with the travel query of your choice. Or don’t; trust me, there will be a peak in January.
- Ad variations are always a bit of a mystery. Test everything. Once I misspelled “hotels” as “hotsel” is an ad which turned out to have a (statistically) significantly better CTR. I thought I’d found something great so I rolled similar variations out across other ad groups. A few weeks later I checked to see what was going on, using splittester to judge which results were significant. Some ad groups it was better, some ad groups it was worse. I have no idea why. Test everything all the time.
- Most purchasers will visit your site at least twice before purchasing; make repeat visits more likely by including new and interesting content for them.
- Be patient. You’ve made all these changes, but on average it takes 29 days between first search and transaction for a holiday buyer. 30% of purchases occur more than 6 weeks after the initial search.
- Don’t want to be patient? Want to get the 17% of users who purchase after only one search? Then ideally you’re from easyjet, ryanair or some other well known airline. Branded searches tend to convert quicker (63% of single search transactions are branded) so build your brand if you want the shortest gap between click and conversion
I only got to look at the study this week so there hasn’t been time to see if all of these tips really work. I’ll let you know if any big surprises come along as I collect more data.
Update: We have now published a travel SEO article which looks at how to target searchers at the right stage of the buying cycle.
can i ask what do you mean by branded keywords ? such as destination or travel company ?
thanks a lot for all the great info you post here
Where does this data come from?
Very Informative tips.
Thank u
Hi Adi,
The data comes from a ComScore study. ComScore monitor 50,000 UK surfers. For this study they tracked the progress of all of them who made a travel related search.
Hi Razvan,
For the study keywords were divided into three types: brands, products and destinations. Destinations is pretty self explanatory, a product search would be one for something like “cheap flights,” and a branded one would be for something like “easyjet.” Classes can overlap, for example “hotels in London” or “BA flights to New York.”
I hope this answers your question
Some good data here that is consistent with what I’ve presented to tourism businesses over the past five years. Searchers use all the W’s – Who, What, When, Why and How, in addition to “Where” when it comes to online travel research and purchasing. There are all kinds of travelers who know what they want, and will go where they need to in order to get it. It’s really nice to have some numbers to back up that thinking.
Thanks Richard.
Thank you for your great recommendation. I have already implemented your ideas on my site….hoping to have great results. Best wishes & thanks a lot for your tips. http://www.roatanhotels.travel
The lifecycle suprised me. I expected a hiatus but much shorter than 29 days. Very interesting and useful numbers.
Brilliant stat bites. Thanks for sharing.
Will be an interesting Christmas for online retail what with the current gloomy economic climate.
Great recommendations!
I don’t fully agree with point 2 “Use day parting”. It’s true that people buy more on Monday, but do you know that they don’t search Sunday and buy Monday?
“35% of transactions occur without a search on the same day”
So I guess the 65% search and buy different days.
Are there any information on the research about this?
gsim, that’s a fair point about the research being made before the transaction on a Monday. Although it has to be worth allocating (or at least testing) extra budget to the days where most conversions are made.
I would also take this statistic to mean that 65% of transactions are via searches both on the same day and different days combined.
Google has a travel section of their website which you may find useful:
http://www.google.com/ads/metrics_trav.html
Thank you for the link.
Unfortunately Google are right, 80% of my customers say they find us on Google, I would prefer more competition.
In the last three year adwords has became more expencive and less effective.
Interesting read – esp regarding the payment cycle. Thanks.
Hi Richard
Thanks for sharing the numbers.
My experience is that January is the peak-booking season once Xmas is out of the way, as peoples thoughts turn to holidays.
July/August also picks up when users are searching for last minute deals (to escape the UK rain).
Hi Richard,
Thanks for sharing great ideas. Can you tell me which keyword tool you have found effective so far?
For initial keyword research I normally just use the Google Keyword Tool. Once the account is set up I add keywords based on what seems to be working well using the My Brain Keyword Tool (beta version) or Google again if I get stuck
Hi Richard, i want an advise that at the very first beggining can i proceed with one or 2 best keyowrds or more than that? I am going to start seo work for my blog. i need this information soon. Can you help me on this?
thanks a lot Richard for the explanations…it is a bit late but a really do appreciate the time you take to help us all.
just to clarify..by late I meant that my thank you comment is late
your information was very helpful for people with travel websites but, how can i get the same satistical information for my consumer product website? i’d like to know the trends, habits, and stats on how and when customers decide to buy a product….thank you!
In PPC campaigns, would using brands be considered a copyright infringement and if so, wouldn’t Google be sure to disapprove the ad?
The Information you are posting is very new and thinkable, your statistics makes me to think a lot in my PPC platforms.
Keep Rock On.
Thanks,
Niyaz
Hi Sharon,
Google allows bidding on branded keywords. However, they won’t always let you include them in the ad. It is sometimes possible to include a trademarked term by using dynamic keyword insertion but this won’t always work.
Very useful and informative post.Thanks for sharing.Look forward to read more on you blog.Do you know about twitter?
excellent work, have you ever though of making three copy of each keywords (most popular one), and bid differently for them…High bid for Exact keyowrds, bit low for phrase and lower than all for broad keywords….?
Do these numbers generally stay true throughout the busy Holiday season?