As every marketer knows, driving revenue takes more than just being there when someone is ready to book. Rather, you want your brand to stay top of mind for consumers as they browse the web. And people are doing more web browsing now than ever before. It can be challenging for brands to rise above the noise. Add to that all the other types of websites consumers are visiting. For example, the average American visits 140 travel sites and an additional 150 non-travel sites before booking their trip. This web browsing behavior presents a huge opportunity for brands to engage with travel shoppers throughout the consumer journey, reaching them wherever they are online.
One way we help marketing partners do this is through our audience extension solution: Passport Ads. Powered by Expedia Group Media Solutions’ exclusive, first party, travel intent data, Passport Ads includes billions of data points on shoppers, and includes search behavior on everything from destinations and activities researched to whether or not the travel shopper is traveling with children. We create audience segments that are defined by travel shopper behaviors by leveraging look-alike modeling technology, which finds other online consumers that demonstrate the same behaviors and intentions. Not to be confused with retargeting, these audience segments have not necessarily visited Expedia Group’s sites.
In a nutshell, hundreds of millions of travel shoppers search for trips across our global portfolio of over two hundred travel sites every day. The billions of data points that those travel shoppers generate spans the whole path to purchase. With this data, we are able to build and scale powerful custom audience segments; we work with advertisers to engage those custom audiences (and attract new customers with similar behaviors) across the web.
Here are three things for marketers to consider when thinking about using an audience extension solution.
1) Learn from the successes of others
Korean Air partnered with us to increase bookings from the U.S., and chose to include Passport Ads, expand their reach beyond the traditional campaigns they had been running. Korean Air was able to reach shoppers who might book with the air carrier but who had not necessarily shopped for tickets with Korean Air on Expedia Group sites. The audience extension approach enabled Korean Air to engage and stay top of mind with shoppers throughout their web browsing journey. Ultimately, their campaign earned a 10:1 return on ad spend.
2) Consistency is the key.
It’s all about reaching the right audience at the right time. With this in mind, it’s important to ensure that the core of your campaign is consistent across campaign efforts. Consistency will increase the retention and therefore the effectiveness of your message. As marketers, you have heard that messaging is most effective on the audience when it is repeated – the audience extension tool works because of this fundamental truth. For a someone browsing the web seeing the same message repeated across the internet improves the likelihood of making a purchase sometime in the future.
3) Improve optimization by staying open to possibilities
While it’s important to enter into marketing efforts with specified campaign goals, it’s wise to keep constraints around targeting, creative implementation, and set-up relatively broad. This allows for more flexibility in ongoing optimizations. After all, you may find that your messaging resonates more with a specific audience than you anticipated. By building in flexibility, you have the opportunity to go after that audience and maximize your results. We work with our partners to monitor results throughout a campaign and optimize the campaign to reach the partner’s specific goals.
We are committed to running effective campaigns that help advertisers reach and engage the right audiences. Learn more about Passport Ads.
