Digital advertising is like print and other media except that it offers so much more in terms of monitoring, testing and optimizing for desired results. No wonder it has become the preferred media for travel marketers looking to promote direct responses from their audience.
Digital advertising is the perfect complement to your online booking engine. It can drive up lookers and turn them into bookers. But delivering online ads is one thing, and the ad content is another. Its easy to reach your target audience, but what do you say? What creative elements work best? I just read a report (Rocket Fuel) that monitored thousands of responses from online shoppers and you might find the results enlightening.
The digital advertising report talked about the travel vertical and came up with 6 curious tweaks that affected conversions.
Here is the list:
- Background colour – blue worked best, by quite a great degree to improve conversions
- Length of trip stated – ads with days shown increased conversions by 227% compared to those that did not
- Showing pricing with a special offer improved conversions, except for hotel and lodging products
- Special offers with no pricing – this was not effective for anything but hotel and lodging products (eg Special 25% off)
- Humans – humans shown in the ad increased conversions by 152%, except for air travel
- The call to action – animating the button improved clicks and the text on the button had various effects. “Book Now” held up well, but it is worth testing against other phrases like “Build Vacation”, or “Find Yours” or “Find Out More” . Phrases that were poor converters were those like “Get Offer” or “Sale Event”.
Fine and dandy, but here is another tidbit. If you are not using your website to Book tours or packages or whatever your programs you have, you are probably leaving money on the table. We have run ROI’s on against a huge range of price points and even with a minimal incremental uptick in bookings, your ROI improves. Want to learn more?
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