Google Analytics Becomes Enterprise Ready

The travel industry have long been known as digitally advanced, as consumers embraced online planning, research, and shopping from an early stage. Many Internet users’ first transaction online was booking a flight or hotel room. As travel planning now occurs across myriad devices and social interactions online, understanding how users find and engage with your site is essential to optimising both customer experience and marketing investment.

It’s a challenge which the Google Analytics team have been addressing through Multi-Channel Funnels - a set of reports enabling site owners and analysts to see how multiple marketing channels and online touchpoints contribute to bookings. The travel industry have embraced these reports - uncovering insights about path length, time to convert and channel contribution - even prompting them to re-evaluate long-held attribution assumptions.

Though many of our partners across travel base marketing and design decisions on insights drawn from Google Analytics, they've asked for ongoing additions to the product, to enable fuller adoption within their companies. We’re happy to share that today we’re launching Google Analytics Premium - everything customers currently enjoy about Google Analytics, with the addition of guarantees, support and extra processing power.

We’ve worked closely with a select group of partners through the development phase, and Travelocity was one of our first customers to benefit from access to the premium team. Learn more about how Travelocity and other partners are using Google Analytics Premium today by visiting www.google.com/analytics/premium.

Google Analytics Premium is available for a fixed annual cost in the United States, Canada, and the UK directly from Google, or through Google Analytics Premium Authorized Resellers. To learn more about Premium, you can contact the Google team or find our authorized resellers here.

Travel has embraced the mantra that decisions made using data trump those based on opinion. We’re confident that Google Analytics Premium will encourage more data-driven decisions throughout the industry, ultimately resulting in a better experience for travelers and marketers alike.

Nicolas Tully - Industry Analyst, Travel, United States

GDN Solutions

"GDN Solutions" was a half day event for Travel and Finance advertisers, held at our new Soho offices on Sept 19th. With unmatched reach across UK audiences, the GDN offers performance at scale, whatever your marketing goals and solutions. Missed out and want to read more? You can find the presentation at this link!

Posted by Ellie England, Account Strategist

Think Mobile with ebookers

Watch Robert Define, Director of Product Strategy give insight into the transactional and brand aspects of ebooker's mobile strategy, July 2011:

Posted by Ellie England, Account Strategist

Summer 2011 Whitepaper

We are pleased to announce the release of our latest whitepaper, entitled Summer 2011. The paper looks at the potential development of a challenging and value-driven lates market for holiday suppliers. Throughout the paper, we've highlighted insights on the latest query trends and have provided data which will hopefully help travel advertisers plan for the summer ahead. We welcome any feedback as well as questions on the paper and hope that it proves insightful.

Please find the paper here.

Posted by Matt Kala, Industry Analyst

What's your video strategy?

81% of internet users in the UK watch online videos.

On average, each user watches 173 videos every month.

Not only are people watching loads of videos, they are searching for videos related to travel information. As such, many travel brands have adopted YouTube as an engaging communication platform to speak with their audience. For example, Air New Zealand has been really great at keeping their YouTube brand channel fresh and fun, and in doing so have generated over 6 million views of their videos and more than 1 million visits to their brand channel.

No matter what you've chosen as your video strategy, we'll show you 10 steps to doing the basics brilliantly. Please check out our slideshow below:

Your Brand on YouTube

View more presentations from YouTube UK

Posted by Cristy Aragon, YouTube & Display Sales Manager, UK.

The Champions League Final

The Champions League Final is on the 28th of May in Wembley. One English team, Manchester Utd., are definitely in the running to be Finalists. In previous years when English teams have been in the Final, we've seen huge query volumes for the city hosting the Final. This represents a unique opportunity this year, with the final taking place in Wembley, London. The usual queries are for Flights/Accommodation, but this year we can expect volume across Flights, Rail, Bus and even Ferries due to Irish fans travelling to the final.

We expect traffic to spike just after Easter, and the period will be very short (approximately one week). To help you prepare and capitalise on this unique opportunity, we have created a report and also a pre-recorded Webinar discussing the report.

Webinar Link:https://googleemea.connectsolutions.com/p55242231/

Stephen Cunningham, Industry Analyst

Destination Analysis Week 12

Please see the destination analysis below for the usual 5 industries. We've started to see some uplift in many areas, most notably in Car Hire, with double figure growth week on week across many of the top destinations. This is reflected in other areas, but is most pronounced in Car Hire.

Version 3.0 is on the way - this will include updated destination lists, a more comprehensive keyword bucket for the analysis, and Q1 2011 statistics for ad depth and CPCs.

Hostels

Holidays

Flights

Car Hire

Hotels

Stephen Cunningham, Industry Analyst