Travel advertisers are failing to hone their paid search activity according to customer search behaviour, according to the latest Greenlight report on the hotels sector.
Hotel paid-media campaigns out of sync with consumers, says Greenlight
Travel advertisers are failing to hone their paid search activity according to customer search behaviour, according to the latest Greenlight report on the hotels sector.
The analysis found that all the top advertisers on Google ramp up activity at the weekend when Google Insight data indicates travel searches are at their lowest.
Conversely, advertisers were failing to time their activity around the early part of the week, in particular Tuesdays, when travel searches hit their peak. The analysis was conducted over a one week period, chosen at random.
Keyword bidding strategies for the likes of hotels.com, Travel Republic, Expedia, Laterooms, Booking.com, Trivago and lastminute.com, were all found to follow a similar pattern.
In May Greenlight found none of its key hotel room advertisers achieved particularly high integrated search visibility – paid and natural combined.
Laterooms topped this chart in which TravelSupermarket was a major mover having increased its paid search share of voice increase 17% and natural search 29% since January.
Booking.com came top in terms of paid search overall and for long-haul, short-haul and domestic keywords. Trivago best it into second place for generic hotel keywords.
Overall booking.com achieved 43% share of voice ahead of Trivago with 35% and Laterooms on 24%, the latter having bid on the least number of keywords among the top 10.
In natural search Laterooms beat lastminute.com into second place as the most visible website with 71% share of voice after ranking at position one for 101 keywords.
Lastminute.com did, however, rank at position one for 133 keywords including ‘cheap flights’.
In analysing 816 keywords, Greenlight found there were 1.5 million hotel-related searches in May, 600,000 of which were for generic terms.
Searches for domestic UK hotels took 36% of the volume and May saw a decrease in searches for the term ‘hotels’, reflecting a general decline since October 2011.
Tripadvisor topped Greenlight’s social media ranking of the top 15 websites with a Klout score of 64 ahead of Expedia and Laterooms.
Trivago, in 13th place, drove three million views on its YouTube account.
To download the full Greenlight report, visit their website.
