Search History: Personalized Ads Remind Customers to Make the Booking

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    APEX Insight: Targeted advertising is reminding airfare window shoppers to make the purchase. In this section of the multipart feature, we look at how airlines use information collected from web browsers to create increasingly personalized ad campaigns across multiple devices.

    Here’s a scenario: A mother heads to an airline website and searches for economy-class seats on a flight from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino Airport (FCO) departing September 1 for her family of four. According to online marketing firm Vizury, she is likely among the 90 percent of users who take up to 27 days to complete the funnel – from browsing airfares to actually purchasing a ticket. In that time, the mother can search for the same flight on an airfare aggregator, get bogged down at work and forget, or see a fare alert on a competitor’s website and opt to book that instead.

    But each airline she consulted can still gather a couple of things from her visit to its website: She wants to go somewhere, at a certain time, place, price and with a specific number of people. The airline has everything it needs to create a personalized ad campaign that follows her around the web. This is called retargeting, and it’s one way marketers are using information collected by web browsers to close the sales cycle. When a user leaves a website, a cookie sends a message to the website’s retargeting platform to start rolling out ad spots. Using this method, Vizury client Virgin Australia saw a sixtyfold return on its investment.Until last year,

    “Google would only allow retargeting based on a user’s activity on a given device.”

    Retargeting isn’t actually new – it dates back to 1998, but only in the past few years has it been used across multiple devices. According to a Google study, 41 percent of millennials use a smartphone to shop for flights, while Facebook says 85 percent of respondents in a recent study used mobile devices to plan a trip, with 64 percent of respondents having planned across multiple platforms. Until last year, Google would only allow retargeting based on a user’s activity on a given device. Now, however, as long as a user is signed in to his or her Google account, an advertiser can create a targeted ad campaign that moves from desktop to smartphone to tablet, tracking a specific customer’s path to conversion.

    “Cathay reported 16 times more booking volume compared with previous campaigns it ran using Facebook’s ad platform.”

    This thinking is also behind Facebook’s dynamic ads for travel. With this tool, marketers can create personalized adverts that run across Facebook, Instagram and other apps, and mobile websites through its Audience Network. How granular can these ads get? Let’s say an airline only has single seats available on its LAX-FCO flight leaving September 1. It might not make sense to target the family of four. Rather, the airline can display its ads to people who indicated they were traveling alone. Delta Air Lines and Cathay Pacific were two early adopters of Facebook’s dynamic ads for travel. Cathay reported 16 times more booking volume compared with previous campaigns it ran using Facebook’s ad platform. And though competitors might want to use the information collected through another airline’s website to advertise their own LAX-FCO route, Facebook says that’s not happening – at least not yet

    “Search History” was originally published in the 7.4 September/October issue of APEX Experience magazine.