Travel insights from Google
Google is helping travel marketers out by providing and analyzing data gained from user’s travel search behavior. The report from Google, “A Paper of Two Halves,” analyzes CPC and user search trends from last year and the first half of 2010. Some interesting insights came out that we thought were important for travel and destination marketing on the web.
Save money, bid higher
CPC costs are down across the board for travel keywords. We agree with Google’s recommendation to up your keyword bids to attain better positioning.
- CPCs for travel ads have fallen by an average of 4% YoY for the first five months of this year.
- Hotel CPCs have fallen by the greatest amount – an average of 7% YoY.
- It is likely that CPC’s have continued to fall as fares and rates are slower to recover than capacity.
- The drop in CPCs reflects the fact that the auctions are less competitive as advertiser depth* has
- Declined by an average of 2% YoY for travel.
Fly vs. Drive
We’ve always known that the drive market and fly markets had differences in preference and budget, but the Google data shows that they also have different search habits when researching travel. Take advantage of this by running drive market campaigns earlier and fly market campaigns closer to seasonal peaks.
During this time period car queries peaked the earliest, on June 23rd. WoW this represented a 9% increase in query volumes and 4% in click volumes. As it can seen, individual travel products behaved differently during July. Both air and hotel queries peaked after the schools broke up for the summer, at the end of the month. -Jonathan Cranmer
Thanks to google for sharing this data. We spend hours and hours going over the data generated by out clients campaigns, but adding in the collective information from the global ecosystem paints a different, bigger picture. Read the whole report @ the Google Barometer Blog: Summer 2010 Whitepaper: “A Paper Of Two Halves.”
-Mike
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