Adara growth in Europe sees pool of targeted travellers hit 210 million

Just 11 months having entered the European market by announcing a major deal with Ryanair, big data targeted marketing specialist Adara now has 30 new partners, taking the number of unique traveller profiles in its network to 210 million.

Just 11 months after having entered the European market by announcing a major deal with Ryanair, big data targeted marketing specialist Adara now has 30 new partners, taking the number of unique traveller profiles in its network to 210 million.

The firm says its technology is enabling its clients to track customers across multiple devices, so whether they start their search for travel product on mobile and complete it on desktop via social, advertisements can be properly targeted.

Tobias Wessels, vice president Europe, said growth outside of its US home market has “significantly exceeded expectations” in the last year and the company was also seeing growth in the Middle East and eyeing the huge potential in Asia and Russia.

He claimed the firm’s technology was unique in its ability to track across devices, something it does by attaching an anonymised identifier to every customer which touches its network. The 210 million figure relates to travellers visible through its travel partners having used one of their sites in the last 30 days. Data can be used to either re-market to them or target them with additional or complimentary product such as upgrades.

“People use different devices and what we are doing is enabling our partners to follow individual users across different devices. We may know a user may have started their research on a mobile phone and we can then later on target them on a tablet. That’s not easy to do, but if you do not do this that person looks like a totally new customer.

“With this technology you can get better attribution. It means you don’t have to start from scratch with targeting, you can pick up where the customer left off. In the past it was a little bit like a shotgun approach – now you can really go in with precision. You can say ‘we do not want to bombard this person with nebulous ads, we just want to show one or two that are very pinpointed’. It’s highly focused and that’s cheaper because there is less waste, there is less spam and performance is much higher.”

Wessels said social is becoming more important, with one example of a successful campaign coming from the US where a major airline has targeted economy seat customers with an upgrade deal on Facebook after they have booked.

“We show relevant ads not anywhere, but where people spend most of their time. In this case the airline saw an phenomenal uplift. This was all about non-frequent flyers. That’s actually very surprising. It’s great because it’s really creating a new revenue stream for the airline.”

Wessels said good growth was coming from Destination Management Organisations and airlines, some of which are sharing check-in data allowing them to monetise this through the Adara advertiser network, offering add-on product like insurance or in-transit retail offers.

“With the permission of the data owner this information can be made available to advertisers. These may be the same advertisers they are already working with as affiliates but only on their own website. With us they can target across the internet, across Facebook, across mobile.

With online marketing you can easily measure things, you can really see what the performance is. The data speaks for itself.”