The travel industry has seen the most troublesome period on record throughout the past two years with the global sector reporting a loss of $4.5 trillion in 2020. 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.
As the industry returns to its feet and travel is back on the radar, businesses must build an effective investment strategy to scale digital activity profitability as demand increases.
Attribution modeling 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 and the nature of considered purchases where a user may take upwards of six months to book a vacation.
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 optimize their channels running at a negative ROI because of an assumed uplift that has not been calculated.
Topics covered in this whitepaper include:
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 modeling, such as switching to first-click attribution, 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.
Implementing a data-driven strategy and utilizing your audience data will naturally direct your business down a path of digital maturity. The travel industry has a big weapon up its sleeve with the ability to easily gate valuable vacation information in exchange for user-identifiable information, such as exchanging an email address for a travel brochure or a phone call to a travel advisor.
This makes it possible to gather essential information at the start of the user journey, the middle and the end transaction. Each stage gated behind identifiable information allows us to join users together across multiple devices and often many months via soft login solutions and centralization of data. This is a key process that you will continue to develop over time and in stages.
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 will 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.
In this whitepaper, you will find out how to build an effective investment strategy to scale digital activity profitability, covering topics such as: