Many travel companies are continuing to fail to properly understand the true value of their marketing efforts by sticking to a last click wins attribution model.
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WTM 2014: Understand true marketing value by ditching last click wins, says Sojern
Many travel companies are continuing to fail to properly understand the true value of their marketing efforts by sticking to a last click wins attribution model.
Russell Young, EMEA sales director at Sojern, the big data travel specialist, said persisting with a model that links transactions to clicks is bound to disappoint.
He said that with display advertising now offering many of the targeting possibilities of search, the more advanced firms are using this to reduce their reliance on Google.
“Search engine marketing, while very effective, has become more expensive. With banner ads there has been a misconception that transactions are linked to clicks, actually 95% are not.
“If people are viewing standard displays as ways of directly driving traffic that is going to convert they are probably not understanding the benefits of what that advertising is going to do for them.”
Sojern, which announced its arrival in the UK and European markets two years ago, claims to have 200 million unique user profiles in its system, 10.5 million of which are British.
Based around this insight, it offers programmatic marketing campaigns, using data insight to optimise targeting to the right customer, therefore optimising effectiveness.
Behind this sits the issue of attribution that enables travel companies to properly assess the influence of all its marketing activities and assign a value to each.
He said Google’s acquisition of Adometry in May, bringing attribution to the search engine’s analytics platform, underlined the importance of this area.
“It suggests they are taking assessing the performance of display very seriously,” said Young. “We see this as totally complimentary to what we are doing.
“We see it as a really positive statement for the wider industry for Google to establish itself beyond its core business model.”
Cross-device attribution remains a tricky challenge, but Young said Sojern was conducting tests in two US partners on this. An 80% plus success rate is being claimed by leading specialists in this area.
“There is a lot of investment going into this area. It is the future. Mobile is what users are increasingly choosing as their preferred channel,” said Young.
Sojern has grown rapidly in Europe over the last two years and has also stated to reach out into the APAC region.
To support this growth it hopes to open offices in Dubai and Singapore in the first half of next year.
