You are visiting a hotel website via your PC and leave it without completing a transaction. Soon you open Facebook via your smartphone and see an ad from the same hotel brand, enticing you to click and get closer to booking a room or a package.
This concept of remarketing, where relevant ads are shown to users as they browse the web, mobile apps, or even as they search on Google after leaving a website has been around for a while. But how efficiently can a marketer target a user who has uninstalled a brand’s app or retarget users who have visited competitor’s website? In fact, hotels are improving upon their conversion rate.
“Retargeting has been around for three or four years, and it is contributing to improving the conversion rate by 15% to 35% on an annual basis,” said Chetan Patel, vice president, Strategic Marketing & eCommerce, Onyx Hospitality Group, Bangkok. “Overall, the conversion rate on digital channels hovers around 4%, so effort is made to optimize websites or sharpen targeting capabilities to not let go the traffic that is being generated. Rather personalizing content and offers are areas that are being worked upon to hike the conversion rate.”
Recognition or intrusion?
If consumers come across an ad that reconnects them with their trip planning or booking, then it means retargeting is clicking. On the other hand, brands also need to be wary of the number of ads that are served. “Personalization is all about aiding consumers’ decision-making, and not annoying them,” Patel said.
Citing an example, Patel said he himself is annoyed with a brand that has constantly pursued him over the last two to three months. “Such level of messaging is annoying, and we definitely aren’t looking at such persistent targeting,” he added.
For its part, the team at Onyx identifies a group of customers based on certain criteria, sends them messages only for pre-decided number of times. Patel said the criteria could be a set for customers who only check rates, for another set who abandon after being on the booking engine’s three-step process or ones who only clicked on room pages or photo gallery and had a low level of interest.
Improving retargeting
Re-targeting generally done with display ads and email marketing is getting refined. “Already, the industry is sending content pertaining to what a booker was searching for, and eventually take them closer to booking,” Patel said. “The plans in the pipeline are focused on enticing consumers back on to the booking path with just one click. With technical amendments, one may get to see a screen shot of where the booking was abandoned. So with apt package or content, one may be incentivized to complete a booking.”
The world of mobile apps is also making way for interesting developments such as “deeplinking.”
Lam You Teck, head of performance marketing for last-minute booking app HotelQuickly, mentioned that the industry as a whole is working toward a more refined mobile retargeting experience through the use of deeplinks. It means consumers are booking a hotel room via an app, and a message pops that offers an option to book a restaurant that they previously came across. It’s not necessary that the app specific to that restaurant needs to be on the users smartphone.
What counts
Going forward, it is expected that capabilities to track a user would gradually improve with developments in device fingerprinting, device IDs, evaluation of browsers/apps, cross-domain tracking set-up and more.
But as an advertiser Patel said suppliers are more keen on knowing the efficacy of ad formats chosen that eventually contribute to better ROI. “We neither have the requisite resources nor budget to individually track each user. It is for the likes of ad tech specialists to craft details of a digital user. We finalize the digital media mix, and it should result in higher conversion,” Patel said.
A hotel industry source said working on unified user identity across multiple platforms and devices is an interesting challenge because it involves external data. “Our aim is to reproduce a user’s real behaviors, thoughts and preference in travel with complicated data. External data refers to the data provided by third parties through technology with protection of users’ privacy,” the source said.
So, essentially, even as the ad tech world promises to track each and every user, and serve them personalized ads/content based on machine learning techniques, hotel marketers are mainly keen on knowing how all of this is paving way for better targeting capabilities across various phases of a traveller’s journey. And in doing so advertisers wouldn’t like to come in the bad books of the guest with unreasonable number or meaningless ads.
Contributed by By Ritesh Gupta