SEM Best Practices for the Travel Vertical

Search advertisers in the travel vertical face many challenges: a saturated market with little to no brand loyalty, competitors with very broad/generic brand terms, several different key products with varying CPCs, and drastic seasonality changes. These complexities, coupled with the current economic downturn, have search advertisers in the travel vertical scrambling to stay in the game and ahead of the competition. In this blog post we will look at a few search engine marketing (SEM) best practices for travel advertisers to help you stay a few steps ahead of the competition and maximize your search marketing dollars.

Keyword Set:
Aggregator, Metasearch or OTA aside, keyword sets are generally similar in the travel vertical. To differentiate yourself, first of all, make sure to build out each product: Air, Hotels, Car, Cruise, etc. with all their generic variations. Secondly, include key triggers, like "discounts", "cheap" or "deals." These terms were popular searches even before the current economic downturn, so you can only imagine how popular they are now. Furthermore, top locations are also good qualifiers for generic terms.

Be sure to start with a big keyword set. While it's true that in most verticals the 80/20 rule applies (i.e., where 20% of keywords bring in 80% of volume), due to the various products in travel, the 65/35 case below is actually more common in both a "Leads" / "Revenue" business model:

The benefit of this is that "Top Keywords" are generally the more expensive (CPC-wise) broad/generic head terms that competitors are bidding on aggressively; whereas, the "Tail Keywords" are usually the less obvious drilled-down keywords that are typically a good bargain.

It's also important to bid actively and aggressively on all these terms, and to not just bid on the top terms and bucket the tail keywords against certain rules. The below graph (provided by Siddharth Shah) shows what happens when an advertiser only concentrates on top terms:

Structure/Ad Copy:
Now that we have this huge keyword set, how do we get the search engines to serve our generally cheaper tail terms over the big expensive head terms? Well, that’s where structure, ad copy and the relevance between the two come into play.

Most savvy travel advertisers already know to separate different product and location keywords into separate ad groups with specific copy. Another good practice is to separate out the big generic terms into their own ad groups and fine tune their ad copy. Since these keywords are generally more expensive, strong ad copy, superb CTR, and a nice negative list will go a long way in cutting costs.

It's also important to keep the ad copy fresh and up-to-date with marketing initiatives in other mediums. The search engines’ features of optimizing to the best ads are very helpful, but if you can take it a step further – optimizing ads based on conversion metrics and not just CTR – you can keep the sometimes overwhelming process of ad copy addition/analysis to a much more manageable load.

Landing Pages:
Testing landing pages is also a great advantage with so many different products in the travel vertical. While trying to keep a clean look and feel to the landing page is important, relevant content is more important to the search engines, and thus, to the bottom line. And, as quality score plays such a huge factor in CPC prices, it's best to adhere to the preference of those in charge..

Meta-tags are an easy way to score points with the search engines, as well as placement of top generic terms on the landing pages. A good rule of thumb is to incorporate the top 25 keywords on the landing page. This will usually provide enough variations of keyword combinations to cover most tail keywords as well. Additionally, a small blurb at the bottom of the page describing the location/hotel can go a long way!

// Karen Maciolek

Comments

[J. Lapuz]

In terms of the landing page, do you recommend the homepage or should it go to a promos and package page?

My concern about the homepage, is that it does not relate to the ad-copy, it talks more about the hotel in general.

But if you use the Promos and Package page, are we missing the opportunity to provide information of the hotel as it relates to the need of the traveler.

[Karen Maciolek]

If I were to answer this question from the Search Engines’ perspective, I would say whichever page is more relevant and better unites your keyword, ad copy, and landing page is probably the best bet. However, it sounds like both of your pages are relevant: the homepage covers the product description (information on the hotel) and the Promos and Package page is displaying the specific deal in your ad copy.

Efficient Frontier is a company driven by analytics so the suggestion from our perspective would be to setup a testing environment for these two landing pages and see which one works best given your specific account structure, keyword set, quality score, etc. I actually saw a case recently where we were expecting the more detailed/relevant landing page to win the A-B test, and instead we were surprised to find the generic homepage having the better CTR and conversion rate.

If you need any tips or tricks on good ways to set this test up, please feel free to reach out. Thanks!

[Log Cabin Holidays]

Such a nice post