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The travel industry & advertising in the long tail

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13-05-2009 The travel industry & advertising in the long tail

How can travel companies advertise in the long tail using Google AdWords? Mark van Werven talked about this topic during the symposium at the RMC Automatiseringsdag. A short summary follows below.

Advertising a complete travel offering

Many small ones make a big one. That is the principle behind the long tail theory. This also applies to selecting keywords in Google AdWords.

Travel companies can advertise on keywords like 'holiday' or 'flight'. These are keywords with a large search volume, but they are expensive. Moreover, these keywords are mostly used by people who are in the orientation phase rather than the buying phase.

A travel agency that offers a large number of accommodations and organizes trips to many different destinations, will want to be present in Google on his complete offering. And he will want to be found on many different keywords. When offering vacations in Bodrum in Turkey, the following combinations are relevant: vacation Bodrum, vacations Bodrum, travel Bodrum, cheap vacation Bodrum, etc. etc.

The obstacles

When advertising in this way in the long tail, some issues may arise:

1. How do I generate my keywords

The product feed offers the solution, since it contains all accommodations and destinations. Combinations for Google AdWords can be generated based on this input.

2. Keywords with alternative meanings

Accommodation names are often not suited as keywords. An accommodation named ' barbie' will attract a lot of visitors, but not very relevant visitors. Most people who  search for 'barbie' are looking for the doll. Advertising 'barbie' will not only lead to unnecessary campaign costs, but also affects the Google AdWords quality score.

3. Creating relevant ad texts

Google AdWords offers the possibility of keyword insertion. However, this only enables inserting the keyword as variable in the ad text, while ad texts become more relevant if also variables like price are used. This requires a large number of specific ads, which is hard to manage in practice.

4. Availability

Preferable only vacations that have sufficient availability are advertised. An availability index would help and enable further automation of the advertising process by only advertising available accommodations.

Automating AdWords campaign

All the above-mentioned issues can be solved to a large extend by automation. To achieve this Tribal Internet Marketing has developed AdChieve. The main challenge in the travel industry is to keep track of accommodations' availability. The automation can then be lifted to a higher level. In combination with human insight and creativity, smart campaigns can be developed with lower costs and higher sales.

Below is the presentation by Mark van Werven.

The travel industry & advertising in the long tail

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