Google Advertising Great For Travel Industry
With the global recession showing no apparent signs of slowing down soon travel agents are being forced to make their advertising work harder. Traditional high street travel agents are dissapearing as the publics holiday budgets are slashed and as increasingly Google et al increasingly is where holiday makers are researching and buying their holidays and flights. Because of this many travel agents increasingly are turning to their website and online marketing as an important way of generating new business.
Pay per click is fantastic for holiday and accommodation providers as the search engines are by far and away where most holiday/hotel bookings originate from.
Moreover as very often the keywords to be used are very targeted e.g. ‘holiday villa rental in nerja’ the conversion (lead/enquiry) rate can be very high and therefore cost per conversion low. Advertisers can typically expect conversion rates of between 3% and 10%. Pay per click enables advertisers to target specific locations and types of holidays based on their changing requirements. For example i October advertisers could spend 50% of budget on targeting, for example, Costa Brava villa holidays and 50% on Javea villa holidays and in June 30% Southern Spain 30% diving 40% Northern Spain. Similarly pay per click advertisers could promote last minute deals if they hadsurplus inventory or packages they may be looking to sell quickly. An additional benefit is that a pay per click campaign allows the advertiser the flexibility to turn up or down depending on demand.
Other key pay per click benefits to the holiday/travel industry include:
- Can target specific countries or regions
- Enormous exposure on the worlds biggest search engines and content sites
- Detailed reporting tools such as Google Analytics help with measuring performance
- Helps build database for other marketing efforts (mailshots etc)
The most important Google pay per click advertising consideration to work on is the most influential variable affecting conversion (enquiry/sale) i.e. the web site. Figures indicate the bookings online are much less in volume than sales via web based enquiries. The site should therefore be tweaked to make it more enticing and likely for the enquiries to happen. Also if a strong call to action can be made applicable e.g. “fill in your details for free Spain holiday guide” (this can be an automated PDF or similar to keep costs down) it is a great way of capturing more potential buyers.
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