Adam’s Blog

SUMMARY:

Point-of-sale advertising is a well-established tactic in retail stores. Now, some ecommerce sites are bringing this strategy to the digital world.

See how Expedia Inc. uses its Web reach to offer several display ad options to brands that want to target Expedia site visitors when they’re researching a trip or booking a hotel.

When shoppers visit supermarkets and large retailers, they’re bound to see in-store displays featuring certain brands. The brand hopes to stand out from the competition, and the store owner receives another revenue stream beyond transactions.

Why not apply this concept to ecommerce websites and offer online ad space to brands looking to target the same demographic?

That’s just what Doug Miller, Global VP, Media Solutions, Expedia Inc., and his team have done with several Expedia Inc. properties, including Expedia.com, Hotels.com and Hotwire.com. When Miller joined five years ago, the team began developing ad programs that made the most of the company’s reach into the consumer travel market.

To quantify this reach, Miller cites a few stats from a study his team conducted last year:

• In the U.S., about 188 million unique users visited a travel-oriented site between April 2008 and March 2009, representing approximately 85% of the total Internet population.
• About 114 million, or 61%, of those users visited an Expedia property.

“They are very few places – probably nowhere else – where you’re going to be able to reach an online travel audience in such a concentrated way,” Miller says.

The team felt brands would want an opportunity to advertise to this high-volume, highly-qualified audience at the point of sale. In response, they designed several advertising solutions that account for 10% of Expedia Inc. revenues. On-site advertising is now one of the company’s fastest growing segments.

Here are four of the team’s advertising programs:

StorePoint Ads

The team’s first program offered display ads that reached several Expedia Inc. sites.

The banners are shown:

• Adjacent to search results
• On the homepage
• On browsing pages
• On content pages for various destinations

“This is where Hawaii or Mexico or American Airlines will call out to you and say they have a special opportunity for you at the point of sale,” Miller says.

Impact

The team recently compiled research showing that display advertising on their sites improved performance for hotel brands.

For example, one national hotel chain noticed that about 7% of Expedia visitors visit the hotel’s site within 30 days of a visit to an Expedia Inc. property.

Adding display ads to Expedia.com lifted this number to 12.8% — an 82.8% increase in visits. And conversions lifted 191%, Miller says.

Expandable StorePoint Ads

The team later updated the StorePoint technology to offer marketers interactive, rich-media ads.

The Flash-based ads expand over content on the site when clicked, and retract to their normal size when visitors move away.

Once expanded, the ads can offer a range of functionality, including:

• Audio and video
• Data capture fields
• Interactive animation
• RSS feeds
• Calendar
• Slideshow
• Send to a friend

Miller has seen these ads perform very well for marketers. This year, his team worked with marketers for a San Diego location to host expandable ads emphasizing a 24-hour sale offered through Expedia.com.

The sale was planned for a Wednesday. The team created a benchmark by tracking six weeks of Wednesday sales, and noticed that on the day they advertised, there was a 159% lift in bookings over the benchmark, Miller says.

TravelAds

The team also offers marketers a bid-for-placement, sponsored listings program specifically designed for hotels.

Many hotels operate without large budgets. By bidding for sponsored listings in their specific regions, smaller hotels can buy affordable placement on Expedia for only the most relevant site visitors. These ads are sold on a cost-per-click basis.

The ads are featured at the top of search results pages on Expedia.com and Hotels.com for location-based searches bid on by marketers. These marketers can bid on specific locations and time periods, and set a maximum budget to control their spending.

Passport Ads

This year, the team launched a behaviorally-targeted ad format that reaches Web users after they’ve left an Expedia site.

For example, an Expedia.com visitor might search and browse for hotels in Venice, leave the site, and later see ads for Italian vacations elsewhere on the Web.

Many visitors to Expedia.com do not purchase directly from the site, Miller says. This program is about targeting advertising to visitors who’ve shown interest in travel information.

The team works with several ad networks and companies to make the program work across a wide range of websites – some in the comScore top 100, Miller says.

For this program, the team does not limit itself to only working with travel-oriented sites.

“It’s less about the context and more about the audience and reaching them no matter where they are on the web,” Miller says.

Doug Miller spoke at ad:tech New York 2009 in November.

USEFUL LINKS RELATED TO THIS ARTICLE:

Email 2.0: Travelocity Takes It Up a Notch — Improvements & Results
https://www.marketingsherpa.com/barrier.html?ident=29912

comScore Media Metrix Ranks Top 50 U.S. Web Properties for July 2009
http://ir.comscore.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=404321

ad:tech
http://www.ad-tech.com/

Expedia.com
http://www.expedia.com/default.asp

Hotels.com
http://www.hotels.com/

Hotwire.com
http://www.hotwire.com/

Expedia Inc.
http://www.expediainc.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=190013&p=home