Blog homeTravolution reported from the PhoCusWright ITB conference some interesting numbers on Google conversion from online advertising to booking. They are as follows:
General conversion rates from Google for Online Travel Agencies (OTA) is 1-5%; airlines 5-10%; cars 10-15%. ‘Immediate conversion’ – when a click is followed through to a booking without the user pausing for thought - is between 0.5% and 2.5% for OTAs.
These numbers came out of the mouth of Google themselves so let us trust them as real (rather than sandbagged)
I am assuming that these statistics come from when companies add the Google conversion tracking script to their booking confirmation pages….. I wonder if Google keep publishing these stats whether people will feel keen to keep using Google as their analytics partner…. it does seem that we are all, collectively, giving Google some very interesting information to play with. This information has significant commercial value…..
Some musings….
- Commodity transport - it looks like those products that are more commodified (like cars and airlines) have a higher conversion than the non commodity holiday / tour type products. This doesn’t surprise me (but see below)
- How are these companies categorised? - now we know what the Google travel advertising team do when not going to conferences. Do they spend their days categorising all their advertisers? How do they tell the difference between an airline that sells hotels on the side vs a full online travel agency?
- These numbers should concern those airlines that are evolving into online travel agencies - do they realise that by adding more product to their websites they could easily knock their conversion ratios down…… which will make it increasingly hard to remain bidding competitively for flight based keywords.
How else could Google be using this travel company category data?
If I was Google I wouldn’t spend all my day categorising every single travel advertiser just to produce some interesting statistics at a conference. In order to benefit from all of this effort there must be another reason.
As the conversion statistics are radically different depending upon the type of website you are…. I wonder whether Google are actually using these categories to assist with the ordering of the paid for results in Adwords. I wonder whether the most appropriate company for a flight based keyword is an airline rather than an OTA?
Bit of a theory at this stage as no hard evidence to back this up - except for my knowledge of how business works - you don’t spend months doing a task (like categorising every one of your advertisers) unless you are going to make some kind of automated business decision based on it.
Are the numbers credible?
It was a bit of a coincidence but today I received a support enquiry regarding TourCMS (our reservation system aimed at smaller tour operators). The question was - is the integrated tracking working for Google - because TourCMS had tracked a booking to Google - but Google hadn’t in their statistics (We have two tracking systems - our own system - and also the capability to integrate 3rd party tracking - they should come back with the same results!)
This was a bit of a problem and it took some hunting down.
The result was that we have uncovered an interesting little issue with the Google conversion statistics. Google only tracks for 30 days but we track for 1 year. The customer had fallen between the two so we had tracked them, Google hadn’t.
The Google help guide says:
In addition, remember that Google AdWords conversion tracking only reports conversions that occur within 30 days of an ad click. If a customer converts after the 30 days have passed, we do not report that conversion. When viewing conversions for a specified time period, note that conversions are assigned to the date on which the ad click occurs, not the date on which the conversion occurs. Also, we will not be able to report conversion for users who disable cookies.
This therefore makes the Google statistics pretty much meaningless for non commodity travel. With such high value purchases such as tours / holidays (rather than commodity transport) consumers can spend months thinking about their annual holiday purchase. All of this will go unseen by Google.
Therefore maybe the online travel agencies are doing better than the 1 to 5% mentioned by Google - just Google don’t know it.
To compare, here are some statistics (that I have checked can be shared) for a specialist, single destination, tour operator (Taking clicks from Google and bookings from TourCMS so this should be a fair analysis)
Jan 08: 2274 clicks, 10 bookings, 0.44%
Feb 08: 1632 clicks, 11 bookings, 0.67%
Umm….. quite different.
I am sure that Google have set the cookie at 30 days expiry for some kind of privacy reason…. (I am not an expert on privacy implications of cookie expiry dates)…… however as a result of this take the conversion statistics that Google say for travel with a serious pinch of salt. They will be under reading significantly for non-commodity travel.
If Google are serious about travel they would make the Adwords cookie expiry length longer (oh and also let travel companies sign up for Google checkout)
If you want to be notified next time something is published sign up for email alerts or subscribe to the RSS feed. Thank you for reading!
Hi,
I work for a well known french OTA and I can say that google is not that wrong, General conversion rates from Google for Online Travel Agencies is between 1 and 5%. But! between 1 and 5 there is a big gap ! So GG doesn’t take any risk with those figures. Then obviously Airlines perform better than General Travel agencies and Small Tour Operator perfom lower for many different reason (most product are sold on phone, no “live stock” online, not enough choice, etc…)
For the cookie duration : 30 days is a very standard duration, many e-business website use cookies to track their onsite trafic with 30 duration. They make analysis much efficiently with same duration between GG and their own tracking tool.
I agree that 30 days is standard for travel- even non-commodity products. Whilst it is acceptable to recognise that the orignal click occurred outside the 30 day period, it is not viable to attribute value to this click.
One method that is used would be to re-ignite the cookie if there is another click within the 30 day period. This way the original click is still attributed value, provided there has not been 30 days inactivity between clicks. The only downside to this is that a you need to decide when to stop attributing value.
I think Yahoo!/ did some interesting analysis with Comscore and determined that 90 days captures 95% of bookings but from any tests we have done, there is little change between 30-90 days.
I think the biggest point about conversion tracking is the possibility that Google will one day auction conversions in the same way it auctions CPC’s at the moment.
Hi Richard and Nico,
I am sure that 30 days is suitable for commodity travel / transport - including package holidays.
However for tailor made and very specialist holidays it is not long enough. An answer for these kinds of product is to track success on something prior to purchase - such as completing a tailor made tour request form or online contact form…. but that is not the same thing as the booking conversion statistics that Google mentioned at the conference.
Also, we have to distinguish between tracking that gives us an understanding of our business (in order to better make decisions etc) and tracking that is used for “business” such as affiliate marketing. This is why our cookies are tracking non-commodity travel at 1 year…. because the same cookies can be used to run an affiliate marketing system.
Thanks. Alex