Travel aficionados, who care about such things, still get their Northwest Airlines frequent flyer miles or Hilton points for purchases. Customers who arrive on a supplier website after searching meta- engines tend to enroll in loyalty programs and become long term customers, so suppliers love it. Airlines find that international travelers who purchase tickets by this method yield high profit margins.

Heading Mainstream
While today’s travel specific meta-search engines appeal primarily to US users who are already Internet savvy, it is probable the concept will grow more mainstream in a significant way. Mobissimo, one of the smaller niche players, boasts over 6 million unique monthly users and Farecast entertains 20 million searches each month.

Better Tools
Each travel meta-search engine sports unique features that transcend the “search box & 10 blue links” roots of Google and Yahoo. For instance, “Baked in” Farecast features help craft itineraries by “filtering” out red eyes, long connection times, or avoiding airports like O’Hare. They’ve learned that price is only one variable of a consumer’s purchase decision and the delineation between players in this arena is all about which meta-search engine provides users more intuitive tools for research and booking.

Social Media Matters
Farecast created a Facebook application called “Fly by Farecast,” which has not yielded massive downloads but converts well. Sidestep built a Facebook application “Trips,” which generated over 300,000 downloads and found great success in tool usage and as a traffic driver. As with other Facebook apps’, the demographic skews somewhat younger which portends future success as today’s 18-24 year olds come of age. Krista Pappas shared that Farecast was launched from beta from the blogosphere and that the “long tail’ comes from “influencers” in the blog world communicating the value of the meta-search engine products.

Ad Platforms
Kayak enables advertisers to find very specific travel patterns to target customers, by way of a self-serve ad platform, and is their primary revenue driver. Though the CPCs are slightly higher than traditional search engines, the conversion rates tend to be greater. The conversion ratio for air and car click-throughs can exceed 15%. Drew Patterson noted that “Consumers are actually buying above average ticket prices, buying earlier.”

This SMX Travel@PhoCusWright session, Meet the Travel Meta Search Engines, was moderated by Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land. The speakers were Krista Pappas, VP Business Development, Farecast, Drew Patterson, Vice President Marketing, Kayak, Sam Shank, Vice President, Sidestep, and Beatrice Tarka Co-founder and CEO, Mobissimo.

The king is dead, long live the king. The old SEO is new again. This session, “Those Who Do…Tell: Effective Travel SEM Case Studies, “reinforced what we all know to be true: There are NO shortcuts.

Effective travel search marketing means researching and testing available channels with optimized content. Test some more, measure conversion with modern analytics, and don’t be afraid to try something else.

In case study after case study, each travel SEM guru explained measured programs of analytics, good ol’ fashioned optimized content pumped out many channels, (yes many) and a fanatical devotion to dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s. Essentially these travel ninja warriors USE universal search, verticals, major search engines, available paid-ad platforms, robust search engine optimization objectives, post search retargeting (OK that’s new) and an unflagging devotion to scaling ROI for the better as evidenced by actionable DATA.

Trent Blizzard, President, Blizzard Internet
Trent case-studied hotels (“bed products”) with an average of 500 unites each. Each was an east coast beach destination. The unique visitor to return visitor ratio was about 3:1. The bounce rate was 30-50 35%. There were 60,000 visitors on average and each property paid about $8.00 per unit marketing budget per month. The PPC budget was $7K to $8K. One site was active internationally and some dappled in mobile.

Direct Traffic (type the URL directly in the browser): The approximate traffic breakdown was 25% direct, PPC, 15%, SEO and quality links at 25% each. Direct type-in and bookmarks had the largest source of traffic, high conversion, high return visitor, low bounce rates and did not include high rate of search by-name (direct brand search).

SEO: Google was responsible for 65-70% of SEO traffic. Local search DOMINATED with long-tail accounting for 35% of search engine traffic.

Quality Links: Local websites about town, area or state, were top performers. Niche verticles like pet, wedding, and golf sites did especially well. These were labor intensive channels with lower conversion and a noticeable higher bounce.

PPC: The average was 15% of traffic and had the largest variation in traffic. The bounce rates were low and conversion rates high. The returns decreased over time at greater expense. Map/local/mobile showed the lowest CPC which is promising.

Email Marketing: accounted for only 1-2% of traffic with the lowest bounce rates and highest conversion rate

Social Internet and blogs accounted for some traffic and was strong for the purpose of reputation management. Yahoo Travel! GoogleLocal, CommunityWalk, and Craislist performed very well along with video/photo sharing sites like Flickr.

The Conclusion: Corporate commitment using blogs, email, quality link building, and PPC long-tail is a potent blend. Local /Maps are here to stay.. Mobile is not prevalent yet but the samplings are still relatively small.

Vic Dabricky, Account Director & Client Development, Range Online Media, Inc
Range Online focuses on brand terms, non-brand tail terms, non-brand head terms, and amenity terms (your differentiates), and locater-terms. This mix increased Motel 6 search revenue by 46% and served to raise non brand conversion keyword conversion rates.

Motel 6 realized a staggering 1366% in CTR, 300% decrease in acquisition cost as they broadened their “view.” Range takes good advantage of local maps, mobile feeds, classic SEO, re-messaging, widgets and mashups. Total revenue grew 92% with a 200% increase in search revenue contribution year over year. The increase in new customer revenue was 800%.

“Customers saw Motel 6 in more place and gave trust. The message was consistent whenever possible. Whenever you can piece all of this together it makes the PPC “so much more scalable.”

Begin with clear cut goals that can be accomplished across all channels. Improving the customer experience is always a goal. Establish common methods for tracking, reporting, and analytics across all channels. DATA always beats opinions. Don’t be afraid to adjust your strategy and goals as you learn more. Change them if you need to. Push your marketing team to innovate and push everyone to try new things out there. Otherwise you’re likely leaving money on the table.

Jens Thraenhart, Executive Director, Marketing Strategy and Customer Relationship Management, Canadian Tourism Commission

The optimization process starts with Identifying goals, conversion criteria, and KPI (key performance indicators). He begins by auditing the current status, resources, and organizational capabilities. “Create and overall strategy including milestones. Research, implement, and deploy.”

The analytics audit identifies existing conversions, unique and repeat visitors, time on site, referral sources, organic search, PPC, banners, and direct traffic. Take a look at traffic origins (country province, and known organizations (travel agencies). Design issue indicators should be examined included usability factors such as navigational abandonment. Don’t forget to audit technical infrastructure, media resources, and human resources.

Michael Winter, Media Director, Agency.com Ltd.
British airways launched their SEM campaign in 2003. They’re live in-market year-round and run about 12 different seasonal campaigns based on revenue and volume goals. Budgets have increased dramatically over the last couple of years. About 30% of overall spending is allocated to search which is a 42% increase from 2006. In case you’re wondering if it’s possible to market expensive luxury brands on the Internet-here’s your proof.

British Airways manages “keyword impact” by optimizing towards top converting keywords. The leverage individual campaigns by recognizing that tail-end terms also drive bookings although the conversions may be attributed to branded terms. Keep it relevant by ensuring copy is relevant to each keyword. Campaign efficiencies continue to rise. Q1 of 07 was 65% more efficient than 06. You CAN market a luxury campaign on the Internet.

The king is dead, long live the king. The old SEO is new again. There are few secrets, lots of hard work to do, and serious travel marketers need to dive deeply into traditional SEO values.

David Feldman, Director, Client Services, iProspect
“Improve your travel ROI by integrating search and offline marketing.” Television, word of mouth, and print influence a staggering 30% of searchers and is influencing 2/3 of all searches. The “offline marketing department” is creating demand with their collateral media and it’s the search marketer’s job to capture that audience and make them pay. The conversion rate of those who previously were exposed to offline ads is a humongous 39%.

Feldman suggests “walking down the hall” for a bi-directional exchange of metrics and coordinated strategies. The offline folks will seriously benefit from the precision of online analytics. The search marketing team benefits from years of experience in crafting messages and gauging sales. Pay attention to how messaging resonates between online and offline sales to totally integrate.

Cree Lawson, Founder & CEO, Travel Ad Network represents premium and long tail websites and markets to the largest travel information audience in the world (according to ComScore). “The secret to publishing in search can be summed up in three words. “Know your audience.” He says to “answer the friggen question!” Creating webpages that answer “every question one at a time” is the correct approach for building out websites.

PPC Vs. Organic
PPC and SEO bring different and essential values to any marketing campaign. PPC is immediate but has little long term value…it’s a media buy. PPC can be changed up and tested daily, there’s great control of results, is killer for sites that won’t (or can’t do) SEO, captures misspellings, and gets3-5% of all clicks.

Organic takes time, is an upfront investment (but almost free after), is evolving, but there is less control over results and costs a fortune over time. Optimize repeatedly to keep the traffic coming in. 90% of the clicks from SERPs come from organic.

Cree quipped that many say“feed the assets: starve the liabilities. Only buy what you can’t build,” with the exception of direct brand searches. He says “buy your best organic results and it’s OK to be number 3 in PPC.” Use paid to test organic to solidify. Previewing organic landing page conversion with PPC tests. He case-studied anecdotal benefits of building out thousands of landing pages to “capture the long tail.”

David Zuls, Owner, Hawaii Online Advertising spoke on “optimizing the paid and organic mix.” As always, it starts with keyword research. Use tools like Keyword Discovery, WordTracker, and pay attention to the basics of anchor text SEO. (The newbie SEOs in the house were amazed.)

David suggests buying your own brand name to lock out competition and solidify the message. “Many more companies bid on their brand name than not.” These “navigational “brand name searches make up a significant percentage of PPC clickthroughs

Richard Zwicky, CEO, Enquisite
Richard echoed the message: Travel customers “learn, shop, book, and fulfill. 86% of search referrals are from page 1. For sites which are on page 1, 12% of all page views (outside the secure pages) are from search engines.

Design for a better look and feel as a “path to conversion.” Richard walked the audience through an excellent overview of multivariate landing page testing fundamentals, keyword research, and ad promise testing. He’s an SEO fundamentals guy who works with tag analysis tools, analytics, and conversion tracking.

It’s clear that search marketing is no longer primarily a direct response form of media. Search marketers not factoring offline ROI in conversion tracking (at least by conjecture) are likely missing a large percentage of the calculation, especially in travel. Exacerbating the issue is that 31% of Internet users delete cookies on a regular basis. These are the offline conversion stats for the following online verticals for sales taking place within 60 days after the Initial Click: Computers 69%, Home and Garden 69%, Toys 61%, Travel 88%, Jewelry 57%, Books, 56%, and Software 55%.

For every $1 dollar sold online there’s a $1.20 latent online bump. Factor in $.40 for cookie deletion, and a whopping $4 for offline sales. “Are you linking your search activities to the offline sales metric?” It’s critical to understand the true denominator when calculating the “real” value of ROI “It’s probable that your denominator is wrong.”

Search engines provide context for every aspect of “Travel Value Chain:” learn, shop, book, fulfill. The majority of people search on very few terms but the long tail matters more and more. Chris stressed the value of marketing to “long tail effect” for search marketers. “The tail is getting longer and people are using more words in queries.” In the travel categories, especially destination-searches, queries are heading into the 5-6 word phrases. Also zip codes are becoming more prevalent and are beginning to ramp.

ComScore mines data from a massive panel comprised of over 2 million users. Lamberti stressed a focus on the individual habits of individual users. “These are people, not just words and clicks. “Online population growth is massive” and travel is the biggest vertical on the net. There were 100 billion dollars in 2007 just in US travel sales Airlines drive the vast majority of the dollar volume and there is growth in all other sectors including hotels.

Lamberti stressed “know our consumer and understand their motivations for search.” Remember that messaging and the complementary nature between online and offline campaigns result in a classic synergistic impact of branding and sales. “[In travel] Search is only one aspect of the experience and part of an overall funnel. “

Hitwise monitors the largest worldwide sample of Internet users, over 25 million. Google dominates with 21% of the pie with Yahoo! search and MSN weighing in at approximately 5% each. Maps are the number one query at 35% followed by air travel 21%, destination 10%, accommodations 10%, bus/train 2%, and car travel 5%.

Vendors Vrs. OTAs
There is a never ending battle between the OTA (online travel agencies) resellers like Travelocity and actual vendors. OTAs tend to purchase many more generic terms like “cheap flights” and generally to purchase specific brand searches like Delta and Hertz. It is likely that vendors will begin to carve into the long tail.

Be aware of what motivates your users and message them appropriately. As gas prices go up and consumer confidence wanes, people are seeking more “contained” travel in a tighter geographic area. Theme and message search marketing directly to evolving social preferences. Target new and returning visitors differently with post search retargeting.

Lorraine Sileo presented data showing that meta-search engine (engines that search groups of engines) convert at approximately 12-17% and general search engines only 1-2%. This is the heat airlines feel as meta-engines grow in popularity.

He discussed natural language processing and personalization huge puzzle pieces. Vertical search. human assistance (ChaCha), semantic search, statistical search, contextual search, new site information (feeds/bloglines, etc…) will likely play a huge role in the future. Actionable analytics are, as always in search marketing, the definitive tool for increasing click through and conversion.

This was a hell of a kickoff for SMX Travel. The information came fast and hard and show tremendous promise for what looks to be another killer Chris Sherman-sequenced show. Yay.

Good morning from the inaugural edition of SMX Travel@PhoCusWright 2007 Orlando. This conference, piggy-backed on the acclaimed series of PhCusWright conferences, promises to become the definitive annual travel-themed search marketing exposition. The sun has barely risen over the picturesque Florida palms. Still the immaculate grounds of the Omni Orlando Resort at ChampionsGate are awash in orange light and the promise of an incredible day.

The first SMX Travel@PhoCusWright sessions are all about the culture and tactics of organic and paid search. Chris Sherman, Executive Editor of Search Engine Land will moderate a top-flight panel of search marketing and travel industry luminaries. aimClear will be live blogging for the next 2 days so stay tuned.

The sun has barely risen over the picturesque Florida palms. Still the immaculate grounds of the Omni Orlando Resort at ChampionsGate are awash in orange light and the promise of an incredible day.

This first day of SMX Travel@PhoCusWright is all about the culture and tactics of organic and paid search. Chris Sherman, Executive Editor of Search Engine Land will moderate a top-flight panel of search marketing and travel industry luminaries. aimClear will be live blogging for the next 2 days so stay tuned.