Exposure: Featured Placement by the numbers
Every day the travel industry gets more competitive…
and travelers have more options to choose from. After organizing travel plans and booking flights and hotels, travelers can begin to feel decision fatigue trying to find and book activities. Standing out amongst your competitors in this increasingly noisy landscape is more important than ever. Additionally, access to mobile phones has opened up an entirely new path to the research and booking of activities, and the average smartphone users’ attention span is decreasing as the desire for immediate gratification is growing.
TripShock is at the forefront of mobile technology and is constantly testing and refining ways to attract and retain travelers’ attention. Coupled with our strength in targeted marketing and world class customer service our platform generates incredible value for our partners. As a TripShock partner, we’re confident you see the benefits of these endeavors but you may be wondering if you can further leverage the platform. The answer is yes!
In late 2018, TripShock created the Partner Solutions department with the goal of generating additional value for partners. Throughout late 2018 and early 2019, the department designed and developed new sections within the TripShock website to maximize activity exposure to travelers. We rolled out the new sections, dubbed ‘Featured Placement’, in the bottom of the third quarter and we’ve been tracking the data surrounding this new offering. This short white paper outlines our findings.
Seeing is believing.
Visibility is one of the key components to earning a traveler’s business. If they do not see your activity, they cannot book your activity. Additionally, the more eyeballs that come across your activity the more chances you have to gain a sale: simple math.
TripShock tracks visibility via ‘impressions’, which are logged each time an activity is shown on the screen to an individual user. A Featured Placement activity is shown in additional sections throughout the website beyond its organic placement within its location and category. After gathering a full month’s worth of data, this is what we’ve found:
Featured Placement activities are getting up to 50% more visibility.
The example below shows an Orange Beach, AL dolphin cruise getting approximately 32,000 monthly impressions organically and an additional 16,000 impressions from its Featured Placement sections.
The Dolphin Cruise activity in the above example is getting 50% more visibility than the same activity without Featured Placement. That’s 50% more chances to convert a traveler into a customer!
Attention to engagement.
Clicks, you’re all familiar with the term and how important it is. A ‘click’ is defined as a user clicking on an activity in order to be directed to that specific activitiy’s page. This is the all-important first step of a traveler drilling down into your activity to initiate a purchase. A multitude of factors go into why and how a user chooses to click on a specific activity, and we believe that two of them come into play in relation to Featured Placement.
The first being placement, an activity that is front and center is going to be clicked more as it’s more visible to the traveler. Additionally, an activity that is placed in more locations throughout the site will be viewed more and thus clicked more.
The second is trust, specific attributes of Featured Placement activities make the traveler more inclined to trust those activities and click on them more. We’ve observed that featured activities across the board have a higher ‘click-through-rate’, or the percentage of users who see an activity (impression) and choose to click on it. In some instances, we’ve seen a 100% increase in click-through rates for featured activities.
Featured Placement activities are gaining an up to 100% increase in click-through-rate.
The example below shows a charter boat in Destin, FL with a normal CTR of 1.27% and a featured CTR of 3.46%.
To expand on that example, over twice the amount of travelers clicked into the Featured activity as they did into the normal activity. Each click is a potential sale, and the more clicks the better.
Leverage Value
In conclusion, the data for Featured Placements has been overwhelmingly positive so far. Due to increased traveler visibility and the ability to generate a higher click-through-rate, we’ve seen sales increase across the board for partners involved in the program. If you are actively seeking to leverage additional value from the TripShock platform, this is just one of the ways the Partner Solutions department can help boost your business!