HOTELMARKETING.COM

Understanding the conversion path for an online hotel booking

August 08, 2012 | Hotel Marketing

By better understanding how different media interact and assist with securing an online booking, hotel marketers can improve efficiency and save money. The plan now is to move away from a fragmented approach to online marketing and last-click attribution.

Travellers research and make purchase decisions at different times and in different places, so measuring return solely on the last click gives an incomplete picture. Last click is widely accepted as an outdated way of measuring the effectiveness of a search campaign and can severely limit growth. The challenge, however, lies in ongoing channel optimisation and finding the right models for each campaign’s objectives.

Companies like Google now offer insight into the interaction between campaigns and channels. These reports provide valuable metrics such as assisted conversions (how and when different channels had an impact on conversion), time lag (understanding time to conversion), path length (the number of interactions before a conversion) and top conversion (the routes your customers take).

Dominic Gramatte, head of client services UK, IgnitionOne has the following advice:

- Understand that it’s a cross-channel world: Online conversions overlap across multiple online channels. Being able to dedupe these conversions across these channels is essential to best optimise your marketing efforts. Advertisers that invest more in channels that are helping to drive, or assist in driving, more conversions will maximise their results.

- Understand that customers convert at their own pace: Advertisers should be evaluating latency in consumer journey behaviour. By understanding how the combination of media influences latency, advertisers can make decisions on how to optimise messaging and timing to not only gets the user to convert, but to also get them to convert more quickly, therefore saving money.

- Channel order matters: Not only do the channel types in your conversion path matter, but their order matters as well. When setting up an attribution model, understanding how channels interact and can assist with conversion is important. Focusing on path types that are driving users to convert (or not convert) will help improve cross-channel efficiencies.

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