Travolution Summit: Successful marketers will ditch ‘last click’ and target audiences, says Kenshoo

Travel marketers need to stop thinking about channels in isolation and should target audiences, regardless of which channel they are using.

Travel marketers need to stop thinking about channels in isolation and should target audiences, regardless of which channel they are using.

Presenting a Kenshoo workshop at this week’s Travolution Summit, the digital marketing software developer’s head of social, David Gilbert, said older siloed marketing approaches were dying out.

He said although 93% to 94% of advertisers are still using a last click wins attribution model, which works for search but not for social, new technologies were opening up alternative strategies.

Gilbert said: “We believe marketers should be thinking about audience not dealing with channels in isolation.

“In the future the marketers who do best will be those who consider activities of audiences and how best to reach them with the right message at the right time, rather than just looking at the last click wins rules of PPC marketing which inevitably steers you towards search.

“Over time as technology has advanced you find that by looking at the search activity and trying to see the impact that has on other channels, there is an affinity across these channels.

“It has been hard to work out what impact one channel has over another. Technology wasn’t effectively able to monitor the impact of one channel across another but now all that’s changed.

“We should be able to figure out what mix of adverts will generate the best results for our clients and then automate that.

“Our vision is that there should be a system available that can automate the process of digital marketing optimisation.”

Gilbert said using any other attribution model other than last click sees Facebook’s attribution credit rise, with values ranging between 12% and 30%.

He said the fairest model for Facebook advertising was probably divide equally and he said running Facebook ads alongside PPC campaigns offers a halo effect where returns and average order values are higher, due to the increased affinity and trust this generates with customers.

Kenshoo has developed a social marketing platform that takes insights from search marketing and applies that to Facebook and automates the process of generating social ads on the network.

Gilbert said a major US client with 40,000 products adopted this and saw a 200% increase in conversion rates, while cost of conversion was 40% lower than search.

“If you can take the best performance from search and then apply that into other channels you can find the ROI is more attributable,” said Gilbert.The most recent innovation from Kenshoo is Intent-Driven Audiences (IDA) which it has developed with Facebook.

This takes insight about who has clicked on a search campaign and applies that to custom audiences on Facebook, so the right kinds of people can be targeted.

Gilbert said the match rate was high at 40% and that this has been seen to boost return on investment was up to 110%.

He also said one unexpected positive of this was that marketers could use the data it generated on customers to drive better insight into what kind of people are clicking on paid search ads.

“It can throw up new targeting tactics you can use in PPC search ads,” he said. “For marketers It could potentially change all of the bidding structures they are looking at.

“In a competitive market like travel it might be you are bidding really aggressively just to try to maintain the status quo.

“Using this you might unlock options to bid on less expensive keywords and still get good returns.”

Gilbert advised delegates to adopt a mix of social approaches, as something like IDA although highly targeted and good for conversion, tended to drive lower volumes.