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

Think Quarterly

While we always think "travel first" on the Google UK Travel Blog, sometimes we would like to share with you information and ideas that are applicable to the wider community and all industries. Matt Brittin, Managing Director of UK & Ireland Operations for Google today kicked off Think Quarterly. Think Quarterly contains advice and wisdom from some of the brightest minds and leaders from Google and the UK business sector. In Matt's words, "Think Quarterly is a breathing space in a busy world. It's a place to take time out and consider what's happening and why it matters." We hope you find it both enjoyable and useful.

Posted by Nate Bucholz, Industry Manager

Easter & Royal Bank Holiday Whitepaper

2011 is a great year for Easter bank holidays! To help advertisers plan for the coming season, we have analysed trends in 2010 and 2011 (to date) and have written our findings in the latest whitepaper, which you can download here.

Travel query growth year-to-date suggests that demand from the online travel consumer continues to grow (29% year-to-date), and we expect this to carry through the Easter weekend. The upcoming Royal Wedding may increase tourism within the UK. Sweden had the last major European Royal Wedding in July 2010. During this month, queries for hotels in Sweden originating from the USA grew 40% year-on-year. More impressively, hotel queries within Sweden rose 124% Year-on-year.

We have also noticed more interest for short haul destinations when compared to long haul, the former growing 20% vs.7% year-on-year in January 2011.

For a more detailed analysis, please download the whitepaper. We hope you find the insights and recommendations helpful.

Jonny Cranmer, Industry Analyst

Destination Analysis: Week 8, 2011

Attached is the destination analysis for the same 5 products:

Hotels
Hostels
Holidays
Car Hire
Flights

It's interesting to note the start of the summer curve; some destinations have been experiencing traffic increases over the past few weeks.

We are working on a revised set of destinations in order to capture the highest ranking destinations searched for in the UK. We will publish this revised list in the next iteration of our reports (in two weeks time).

Stephen Cunningham, Industry Analyst.

Destination Analysis: Week 6, 2011

We've made a few small tweaks to the Destination Analysis Report this week:

1.We've added a new report for the UK Hostels Market - the set of destinations is different to the other 4 reports as there seems to be a different set of users searching for hostels than hotels/car hire etc.

2. We've included the Week Number and Source Market on the first sheet to ensure you know what market we've analysed and how up-to-date the report is.

3. In the previous version, there was an issue with one or two graphs not showing - this has been fixed.

Please find the analysis here:
Hostels

Holidays

*Please note: The Holidays report uploaded this morning (21st Feb) contained an issue around 2011's data. This has now been corrected and re-posted. Apologies for any inconveniences this may have caused.

Flights

Car Hire

Hotels

Posted by Stephen Cunningham, Industry Analyst UK and Ireland.

InterContintental Hotels Group sees monthly mobile site traffic increase by 20%

InterContinental Hotels Group’s sophisticated mobile strategy is having a demonstrable impact on their business in Europe. The business operates seven hotel brands: InterContinental, Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Staybridge Suites and Candlewood Suites, and is the largest hotel group in the world by number of rooms.

We caught up with Marco De Rosa, IHG’s Mobile & Interactive Marketing Manager for EMEA, who’s been using Google AdWords mobile ads to reach new customers on their mobile devices. Recently, IHG began creating mobile-optimised websites and creating AdWords campaigns with messaging specifically targeted to users on their phones.

“By using text specifically aimed at mobile users, we saw revenue from our mobile search activity increase by 91% YoY,” says De Rosa. “Thanks to our current activity with Google, traffic to our mobile site is increasing by 20% MoM.”

Watch the full interview with Marco in the below video or visit the Google Mobile Ads Youtube Channel.



To read the full case study, please download this PDF.

Posted by Michael Schipper, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team.