Social Media and Marketing

Google is highly valuable as a source of traffic to key U.S. industries, according to an analysis by online competitive intelligence service Experian Hitwise. Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories and this includes the travel sector, too.

Published: 23 Aug 2010

Google is highly valuable as a source of traffic to key U.S. industries, according to an analysis by online competitive intelligence service Experian Hitwise. Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories and this includes the travel sector, too.

Google accounted for 71.43 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending August 1, 2010. Among the top three search engines, Google delivered the most visits to the four categories below year over year. Google’s percentage of upstream traffic grew for the Automotive, Shopping and Travel categories.

Bing saw double-digit growth in four categories - Automotive, Health, Shopping and Travel - including an 84 percent increase in the Shopping category.

Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask received 14.43 percent, 9.86 percent and 2.32 percent, respectively. The remaining 70 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.94 percent of U.S. searches.

Challenge

Earlier this year, in an interview with EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta, Google’s head of Travel, Retail and Automotive for South East Asia, Sajith Sivanandan, highlighted that users are expressing a preference through the queries they input while searching.

He added, “To me, delivering the best available, the most compelling offers exactly at the time of searching continues to be the biggest opportunity that both search engines and providers (suppliers and aggregators) are preoccupied with. The biggest unsolved problem therefore becomes this: how can we reduce the time to perfect fulfillment of the users’ online travel needs?”

Approach

Traditionally, online has been held to a much more stringent metric than offline channels and it is often bought with a very fragmented approach.

Barbara Pezzi, director of Web Marketing & e-Commerce, Fairmont Raffles Hotels, says she doesn’t find SEM any more complex than offline advertising.

“We do not have a blanket approach when it comes to SEM and ROI targets are set based on each property needs, budget, location, and other unique criteria. Portfolio bid management (same bid rules for a group of properties) would only be in place if the same person owns a set of properties and has requested for the campaign as a whole to have a certain ROI target,” she says.

Travel Distribution Summit North America 2010

EyeforTravel is scheduled to conduct a session about the current state of the search landscape as part of its forthcoming Travel Distribution Summit North America 2010 event, to be held in Chicago (13-14 October). Rob Torres, Managing Director of Travel Vertical, Google Inc, and Krista Pappas, Global Director & Head of Business Development, Bing Travel at Microsoft are among the speakers scheduled to take part in this session.

For more information, click here

http://www.eyefortravel.com/news/europe/%E2%80%9C-whole-last-click-attribution-debate-slightly-overhyped%E2%80%9D

http://www.hitwise.com/us/press-center/press-releases/google-searches-jul-10/