“Semantic search will be incredibly difficult to get right”
Published: 24 Dec 2009
Attribution modelling is very important in understanding how customers consume media and how this consumption affects bookings on a site.
Based on these attribution models, travel companies decide upon the best search, bidding, and messaging strategies to meet their overall goals.
It is definitely too simple and very misleading to have a ‘first click’ or ‘last click’ model, says Gareth Gaston, managing director, OctopusTravel.com.
“First of all you have to have good enough tracking that allows you to see all of your advertising traffic and how it interacts across the entire customer journey. There is a compounding effect of multiple online channels (often referred to as the halo effect) that can absolutely be tracked with the right tools in place. Then you need to thoroughly examine the customer journey and run multiple models and ‘what if scenarios’. It is easy to analyse quickly and convince yourself that a particular activity doesn’t work. The goal is to find out what does make or will make a piece of online marketing work,” Gaston told EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta in an interview.
Gaston also spoke about CPA and CPC advertising. Excerpts:
What should companies do to ensure that their campaign result in higher click through rates and subsequently higher quality score and lower CPC (cost per click)? What should they be wary of?
Gareth Gaston: There is no rocket science here, a few basic principles that are a hard to get right due to level of focus required and quantity. Click through is a derived from the awareness of your brand and the quality of your ad copy. Quality score is then the relevance of the content once you land on the page. Quality of the landing page is not only crucial in getting your quality score up (and therefore your ad cost down) – it should be no surprise that the higher the quality and relevance of the landing page, they higher the conversion. The higher the conversion the lower the CPA. I do think that focusing on CPC in itself is a red herring in a transactional site – its important to understand your cost of sale. So if you get your conversion up then you can sustain higher CPCs because you are getting more sales.
What are the pros and cons of CPA and CPC advertising in terms of cost and the ability to track?
Gareth Gaston: I think the bigger issue is volume. You can indeed argue to pros and cons of the cost – its very easy to justify CPA as it is ‘pay on performance’. However you are potentially giving up a volume because neither you nor the advertising medium are going to take a risk. In terms of tracking – if you pick the right tool then either should be just as easy to track. The only complexity is when you are thinking about display advertising or any form of advertising where you want to track ‘post impression’. Then the tracking tool you pick will potentially be a different.
Landing pages are essential for a successful campaign. The most important element of a PPC landing page is to convince the visitor that they have landed on the right page and this page has the information they were looking for. What factors should one take into consideration for the same?
Gareth Gaston: Again this is all about the detail. Its not rocket science – the page needs to represent what the advert stated. So if you are talking about 3* hotels in Prague, then their needs to be a good list of 3* hotels in Prague. However the ability to search for real availability from this page is very important to drive the sale. The difficult bit is not what to put on the page – its how many of these pages you need to get volume and also the ideal structure and layout of the page.
Do you think predicting user preferences is the biggest unsolved problem in online travel? How do you assess the integration of social search into online travel?
Gareth Gaston: I do think understanding consumer buying criteria is the first unsolved problem – but not the greatest. The bigger problem is designing a user experience to match this potentially very complex criteria. But the most complex of all is categorising hotels so that a user experience allows a customer to contrast and compare. Think about busying any other product online – there are comparatively few variable. A wardrobe: type of material, colour, size, configuration. With hotels and holidays its potentially unlimited.
It remains to be seen how the semantic web is going to shape up, but do you think it should make SEM a lot easier and more transparent to administer?
Gareth Gaston: It has long been talked about that onsite search is a good guideline to offline search. Semantic search has a long way to go, but getting it right on the site will definitely have massive SEM (and probably SEO more so). Not sure if it will make it easier – semantic search will be incredibly difficult to get right. Just getting the various different ways of a simple destination or landmark is hard enough never mind phrases. But if you have a database of semantic search terms on your site, this will definitely be a great input to your SEM keyword pool.
Today Google's algorithms are still quite a bit of a black box for professional search marketers. The semantic web should make it more efficient to create and manage online campaigns, because there will be less left to algorithmic interpretation. How do you assess this viewpoint?
Gareth Gaston: I think the Semantic web as defined by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is a long way off and we have a lot to understand before we can get to how this will impact SEM.
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