The travel industry saw the most troublesome period on record in 2020, with the global sector reporting a loss of $4.5 trillion. From the entire collapse of all travel at the start of the pandemic to the uncertainty of its return, customers’ attitudes are more dubious than ever. Now the travel industry is back to where it once was, businesses must build an effective investment strategy to scale digital activity and profitability.
Attribution modelling is one of the biggest challenges in building an effective investment strategy. With the growing changes across technology, government regulation and consumer privacy awareness, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to track a user. This issue is intrinsically linked with the travel industry where a user may take up to six months to consider booking a holiday.
Without visibility of results beyond the bottom funnel of activity, businesses are unable to effectively scale activity beyond the lower funnel and must rely on hunches and hard-to-defend soft KPIs to justify their digital investment strategy. Ultimately, many businesses optimise their channels running at a negative ROI because of an assumed uplift that has not been calculated.
Most considered purchases of a sizeable value require multiple visits from a customer before a decision is made. It is very common that this decision is not made in isolation and may involve other stakeholders, such as a partner, which makes for a tracking nightmare.
You will almost certainly find the process extends beyond the lifetime of a cookie and likely transpires over multiple people using multiple devices. It’s clear when you take a step back that no conventional approach to attribution modelling, will solve this issue.
Building a data strategy to collect identifiable information and begin tying up touchpoints is key to moving closer to your audience and evolving your digital marketing strategy.
Adopting a clear and patient approach is key to climbing the maturity curve. The potential and depth of machine learning can be daunting and it’s important to start small and steadily scale in complexity.
A lot can be accomplished by a singular extraction of CRM data. It is then about putting automated processes in place to allow machine learning to do the hard work for you as your capabilities evolve.
In this whitepaper, we walk through a data-driven alternative, outlining the significantly more efficient step-by-step process of evolving your marketing to the next level, allowing you to see true value from your top of funnel campaigns.
Keen to tie your upper-funnel data together?Contact us and learn how our data science team can make it happen