Stepping Up Your Data Strategy & Moving Beyond The Last Click
There’s no question that the Internet has changed the way consumers shop for travel and interact with brands. Consumers have been empowered by the scale and range of search and comparison tools available to them in an instant. In fact, the popularity of these sites is expected to increase, with the comparison site market forecast to expand by a compound annual growth rate of more than 40 per cent between now and 2017.
Today’s traveller spends a considerable amount of time researching and planning a trip before taking the plunge and booking. The number of touchpoints through which consumers can interact with travel brands has also increased, leading to a fragmented and complex digital pathway to a travel booking that spans across devices and information sources. This evolution of the consumer journey offers many opportunities and challenges for brands that now face the need to keep pace with changing consumer behaviour.
If marketing has one goal, it’s to reach consumers at those crucial moments that most influence their purchase decisions. In order to achieve this, brands must know and understand their customer and buying behaviour and big data, while by no means a silver bullet, promises to deliver that very knowledge. The same digital revolution that has brought about many challenges and an endemic fragmentation, has also created a vast pool of data which brings with it key customer insights. When this data is interpreted correctly by brands, it provides them with the opportunity to precisely target the travellers who are most likely to convert with the right message at the right time.
To compete with digital-only companies like Airbnb and HomeAway, where the absence of human interaction is a selling point, traditional travel companies must leverage data to serve customers on their terms. Travel brands must now shift to a consumer-centric model that offers a more personalised message tailored to each consumer in one specific context at the right time. While information can be gathered about past and present behaviour, the most valuable data is often what can be gleaned about actual intent. Past behaviour does not act as a good indicator of future actions. Understanding how, when and where your customers are searching can put marketers at a clear advantage. Knowing that someone is actively searching for flights and/or has booked flights to Paris for a particular weekend is key for a hotel group seeking to engage new travellers. Not only does such data indicate who to engage with, it also suggests how and when to engage. Travel brands can then customise their offering to the customer’s actual needs and desires to influence their decision-making at the right moment.
In an increasingly connected world where travellers have access to endless sources of information on many different devices, it can be difficult to measure the True path to conversion. The question then becomes which piece of content finally tipped the individual over the edge to ‘buy’. What ads made a traveller decide to travel to a particular destination, or how did your marketing efforts help brand awareness of your product – it would be remiss to ascribe all of the marketing credit to the last thing the consumer did, the last item they clicked on, downplaying interactions that came higher in the funnel.
In the early days of display marketing the last click became the easiest form of measuring success in the online advertising space. However, one of the biggest downsides to last click is that it equates clickers and bookers, lumping both into the same category when research shows that clickers are not always bookers and vice-versa. Last click also fails to capture a traveller’s journey as they move towards a booking. It doesn’t take into account the multiplicity of interactions and influences (both brand-led and outside of a brand’s control) that lead to their eventual conversion. In fact, Google’s ZMOT revealed that on average, a consumer engages with 18.2 pieces of online content before making a final purchase decision.
In addition to identifying the last piece of content read before conversion, marketers should identify which touch points are most crucial to successful conversions, allowing them to plan and optimize future campaigns. These can be identified by view-through conversions. A view-through conversion occurs when a person is impressed by an ad, does not click, but searches or visits the website later and converts.
For an even deeper understanding of the impact and success of their campaigns, brands have the option of using lift studies. This is an experiment that measures the effect of an advertising campaign on an impressed experimental group compared to a control group that has not been impressed. There are many kinds of lift studies but all allow brands accurate insights into the performance of the campaign and maximise return on investment by considering the entire funnel. Lift studies help answer the key, the only question: did my marketing influence a purchase that would not have happened if I had not carried out that marketing?
It is crucial for brands to leverage data to personalise and tailor their offering to keep this new wave of empowered and informed travellers engaged. If brands can master this as well as developing a more accurate and complete picture of what led to a successful conversion, it will result in not only a more valuable experience for the customer but also a more profitable exercise for brands. Attribution needs to evolve just as the consumer path to purchase has and that means understanding that marketing is measurable at every stage, not just the last click.
For more information, visit to our site at:http://payoor.com
