Knowing your customer is critical but complex journeys
across multiple devices present travel brands with huge challenges. A new
report investigates how travel brands can conquer attribution.
Travel brands should attack the issue of attribution from
multiple angles says EyeforTravel’s new Understanding the Customer report, a
completely free report, which can be downloaded now. Approaches range from
tracking through cookies, data-driven attribution and encouraging customers to
log-in to own brand sites and apps, all of which needs to be underpinned by a
strong data program that measures changes over time.
Travel
brands need to undertake an extensive and multi-faceted approach because
attribution requires capturing interactions at so many touchpoints over
extended periods and with different devices.
Mobile
bookings in particular have additional complexity in terms of attribution, as
mobile remains a last-minute channel, with short leads times leaving limited
room to build up tracking data. In EyeforTravel’s Mobile Industry Survey 2018,
80% of accommodation business surveyed reported that mobile lead times were
shorter, with 58.7% saying that they were much shorter. Just 1.3% found that
mobile lead times were longer.
This can
leave brands reliant on just last touch attribution, particularly when it comes
to mobile bookings, and often looking at an incomplete view of their customer’s
journey.
Maria Gómez Bada, analytics expert at HomeAway.com, argues
that travel firms should fight the tendency to analyse just the last click, and
see the whole picture. She believes that Google Analytics default attribution
model, which will show you your customer’s last known direct click, gives an
incomplete picture. Instead, she proposes data-driven attribution models for
most online, complex companies.
“Data-driven attribution understands the value of the whole
path, not only considering clicks but also impressions,” she explained. “[For
example], a customer has seen your ad in Facebook, doesn’t click on it but
recalls your brand, and might come in later through SEO [search engine
optimisation] or SEM [search engine marketing]. Data-driven attribution gives a
value to each medium and channel, considering clicks and impressions. Not only
that, it works with predictive models to try to understand how you can invest
in better marketing channels and ultimately get more conversions.”
To do this
however, you need a strong foundation of data around your customers. “We’ve
implemented a data management platform that basically enables us to very much
look at our audience,” says Alessandra
di Lorenzo, chief commercial officer, media and partnerships at lastminute.com
group. Core to this is tracking, particularly cookies: “We call our
cookies essentially unique users who come to our site [and when] altogether,
make up our audience. What we do is look at this audience and combine segments…
that we then use to personalize all of the messages that pop up on the website.
This information enables us to make the customer journey more intelligent and
more profiled, and therefore more relevant, we hope, to the unique users coming
to browse our pages.”
Combining
data from your sites cookies with third-party tracking enhances the potential to
build out profiling and increases the accuracy of data-driven attribution.
“Access to a person’s behaviour from retargeting sites and affiliates helps us,
with a breadth of exposure,” says Steven Consiglio, product performance manager
at Booking.com. “A map site, a luxury vacation site, it goes on-and-on.
[Through these] you learn increasingly more, because your learning platform is
not your own page: it’s wider.”
However, Lorenzo argues that even when armed with a host of
information, “Unique identification is pretty much impossible from one device
to another. Our solution to this is giving customers a value that brings them
to log in… [for] a more tailored experience.… We have implemented all of the
social log ins to make it very seamless. It’s about exchanging value and
creating something special for our users.”
“Who can argue if a probability-based algorithm is right or
wrong unless you benchmark it against another probability-based algorithm or a
deterministic approach – which is what you have with a log-in base? This is the
power of the Googles and Amazons, Facebooks and eBays who have a massive amount
of logged-in customers and can deterministically tell if you are the same
person.”
Del Ross, senior advisor at McKinsey & Co and a travel
distribution and digital marketing expert, adds that the most important thing
is to ensure that your data methods stay the same over time, so you can
understand trends. “Behavioral insights have much more commercial and strategic
value than transactional data,” he believes. “Transactional attribution is
useful, but it is more important that the attribution method be consistent so
that changes over time can be understood.
The absolute data is less important than pattern changes, which can
reveal shifts in customer preferences and needs.”
Click here
to download the Understanding the
Customer report, part of EyeforTravel’s Behavioural Analytics Report
Series. This report features insights from:
- Booking.com
- HomeAway.com
- Hyatt
- Hertz
- Expedia
- Lastminute.com Group
- McKinsey & Co
- Stena Line