As consumers search for last-minute bargains during the peak summer holiday season, it is essential that travel brands use search to its full potential.
According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, 55% of UK internet users now book their holidays online, and we are seeing the lates market getting later this year.
That’s why pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns need to work throughout the buying cycle – reaching consumers at both the research and the purchase stages.
Operators such as lowcostholidays.com have increased revenues dramatically over the past six months through aggressive search marketing.
So how can travel brands ensure their search budget works harder for them over the peak booking period?
Follow these five PPC principles:
1. Choose the right keywords
Don’t rely on broad match and generic search terms if you want to keep your cost per acquisition low.
Instead, ensure your PPC campaign covers an extensive mix of the resort- and destination-specific keywords that consumers are searching on.
Include ‘long tail’ search terms such as ‘family holidays in Majorca in August’ as well as the groups of keywords around actual hotel or resort names.
Continuously add negative search terms to refine the relevancy of your campaign. This saves costs by controlling when your ads appear and, importantly, when they don’t.
For example, to avoid having your business associated with high prices or disasters, you might add ‘expensive’ or ‘plane crash’ to your negative search terms.
2. Tailor advertising copy
Ensuring that advertisement copy is tailored to search keywords is critical to drive clickthrough and aid Quality Score.
Copy should contain competitive prices, offers, dates and a strong call to action, for example, ‘all-inclusive Ibiza holidays £189 per week – book by August 3 for free transfers’.
Keep testing copy variations to push up click-through and conversion rates.
To create trust, make sure your trade body memberships, such as ABTA or ATOL, are prominent in advertising copy and on landing pages.
3. Work on your landing pages
Search is an acquisition channel, so it’s your site’s job to turn visitors into customers.
Reports from travelsupermarket.com show that, while traffic to travel brand sites is rising, conversions have dropped 20%.
It is imperative that your landing pages reflect the keywords and the ad copy message. Don’t offer holidays in Turkey from £199 in your ad and then have £250 on the landing page. Consumers will feel duped.
4. Optimise the booking process
Be explicit about any credit card and booking charges early in the booking process. If not, you will have high shopping cart abandonment.
Your booking process should be simple and fast to hold the booker’s attention. Get urgent usability advice if traffic is high but conversions are poor.
5. Mix natural and paid listings
A successful search campaign will include both paid and natural search, ideally closely integrated to maximise the opportunity from the search channel.
Optimise your natural listings around the converting keywords that are too expensive to compete on via PPC, and around the high-volume terms that will deliver consumers early in the buying cycle.
Do not think about search in silo. Ensure it integrates across the marketing mix. Research by Yahoo! has revealed that online users exposed to both search and display campaigns purchased the advertiser’s products and services a massive 244% more online and 89% more offline compared with users not shown the ads, as well as increasing their number of page views by 68%.
Links
- adcenterfortravel.co.uk – Microsoft Knowledge Centre for travel advertisers.
- hitwise.co.uk – can be expensive, but lets you see what share of traffic you receive and gives insight into your competitors’ traffic and keywords.
- techrigy.com/index.php – use to monitor PR and social media around advertisers’ website (positive v negative mention).
- google.com/insights/search – shows seasonal trends, geographic distribution of audience, top and rising searches around particular products/terms.
- google.com/analytics – you need to know what your site visitors are doing, which pages they visit, how long they spend and where they abandon your site.
Nigel Muir founded DBD Media, a specialist search engine marketing agency, in 2000. DBD Media specialises in pay-per-click and search engine optimisation for companies.