More than half of marketing professionals report that they have limited visibility of their customers as they move across devices and touchpoints
Attribution continues to be an issue for the travel and
tourism industry as travellers hop across devices and sites during their
journey according to EyeforTravel’s State of Data and Analytics in TravelReport 2017. Of the marketing professionals surveyed, 54.3% reporting that they
could either track users to a limited degree (24.5%), just on their own domains
(16%) or not at all (13.8%).
For those companies that report that they can track users in
some detail, a quarter say they can track them across most devices and touchpoints.
A further 20.7% report that they can track users across touchpoints but not
across devices, illustrating that it is the cross-device behaviours prevalent
in travel that are the main challenge.
“I think attribution will be one of the big focuses for
travel brands over the medium-term,” said Alex Hadwick, Head of Research at
EyeforTravel. “Our consumer-focused research shows that travellers are
increasing their usage of mobile, especially in Asia-Pacific markets, but huge
numbers of consumers switch devices during their journey with desktop still the
main channel globally in terms of spending. With personalisation the primary
stated goal of the industry, brands will need to be able to track users more
effectively as they switch across sites but particularly across devices if they
want to truly understand the journey.”
The survey also found that out of the more than 450 travel
data professionals surveyed, just 30.9% are gathering geo-spatial and
geographic data and 30.6% are looking at mobile app data to get insight into
customers. This further supports the need for the industry to expand its
efforts into multi-channel data gathering. Investment into systems and skills
to do this should be forthcoming, as the report notes that three quarters
believe that their department will receive budget increases in 2017 against 4%
who expect a decrease.
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