An article from Travolution caught my eye recently.
http://www.travolution.co.uk/articles/2009/11/10/3005/online-travel-companies-shift-marketing-away-from-google-adwords-says-expert.html
Apparently there is a view that some of the online travel marketing spend is moving away from PPC (Per per click) advertising in the search giants to metasearch travel sites (e.g. Kayak).
According to Wouter Blok from European Hotel site http://www.easytobook.com/ he has seen conversions quadruple from such sites.
However, is this conversion rate standard for the rest of the industry or has Mr Blok just not used PPC correctly?
2 comments:
Hi Hayden,
Thanks, I appreciate your post.
First I would like to state that our marketing spend in SEA is still increasing. The growth in verticals however is bigger. Our conversion rates in SEA are extremely good, I dare to say (I have a background in Search Engine Marketing). We have 2 fulltime specialists and the support of Google CH to keep improving the ROI.
The point I am raising is that verticals deliver more qualified traffic, because both rates and availability are checked with all suppliers. Second, verticals get an increasing amount of visitors(of which many from Google) that will do around 10 clickouts from the vertical to the online travel agents. The revenue from this is huge, I wonder how Google is going to move into meta, if at all. Cannibalism obviously is a factor.
Wouter
Thanks for the response, its good to get the actual story from the people concerned and great that you’re continuing to improve your site effectiveness.
Getting 4 times the conversion rate via a meta search site is good, but site managers who get this conversion need to make sure that these leads do not cost them more than 4 times the price of a normal PPC link (obviously this should be average costs, as the long tail of keywords will vary in price and visits). For example I heard of one vertical travel site that try to charge about 6 times the average PPC cost for a link (plus a monthly referral charge), purely because they know their visitors converted better than average.
The future of meta search looks good, especially if they can charge high rates. However the one significant thing that may affect them is fragmentation of their market (e.g. meta travel > meta flights > meta business flights). This is where Google (or perhaps Bing) may come in, by building a bigger index of all meta sites and then making it searchable in a number of useful ways (something Bing has made a point of developing & promoting)
Hayden
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