Online Marketing in Travel Special Aer Arann has run campaigns on YouTube, MySpace, Bebo and eBay over the past few months. Overall, the airline has witnessed limited results compared to the information-based sites.

Published: 14 Aug 2008

Online Marketing in Travel Special

Aer Arann has run campaigns on YouTube, MySpace, Bebo and eBay over the past few months. Overall, the airline has witnessed limited results compared to the information-based sites.

Sharing experience of working on such campaigns, Aer Arann's head of sales and marketing Colin Lewis acknowledges that online social networking is clearly becoming the most consumed online activity.

"However, I have yet to see results that would indicate that we should invest heavily in this area; I personally feel that it has yet to deliver results. In online activities like search and reading information-based sites, users are actively looking for information or consuming information relevant to their interests, placing ads on these sites relevant to the content or search will always deliver strong results," he said.

Lewis added, "However, with social networking sites, response rates to ads are much lower as it can be more difficult to target relevant ads."

Lewis, who attended EyeforTravel's Travel Distribution Summit Europe 2008 in London in May, spoke to EyeforTravel.com's Ritesh Gupta about online marketing. Excerpts from the interview:

Ritesh Gupta: PPC is no longer the end all be all of online marketing. It is not the end, but the beginning of the development of true multi-channel online marketing. How do you assess the situation?

Colin Lewis: PPC still hasn't reached a peak in terms of the possibilities available, and in particular, its use by advertisers is really only beginning. Whilst it is dominant in travel, mainstream brands are still working things out.

However, Google themselves are showing where the future lies. One has to only examine Google's acquisitions over the past few years to see how they plan to create a multi-channel online marketing portal with PPC at its core. I feel that PPC will become an even more dominant pricing model outside of paid search and into the areas of display ads, video and online social marketing. The PPC pricing model I feel will be demanded more and more by marketers for all online spend as they become more web savvy and take greater control of online spend and expected results. At present, Aer Arann has PPC as the core of its online activities.

Ritesh Gupta: There are arguments for turning off expensive PPC keywords with a high natural ranking; however there can also be a negative impact of this: a competitor is ceded a slot in the advertising space at the top of the page, and click through rates (CTRs) on the natural search listing can decrease. According to you which is the best way to approach SEM?

Colin Lewis: Fortunately, this argument can be easily tested; one only has to analyse results with PPC on for these keywords and then off. If traffic / sales are much better with PPC on for these keywords, then one must look at the average cost per sale for these additional sales (from both paid and non paid as the statement above is correct – you get more non paid traffic when you also have more paid ads running on page). If this is above what you are willing to pay per acquisition, you simply drop these keywords and invest in other online marketing activities that can deliver better ROI.

Ritesh Gupta: In the wake of rising PPC costs, how do you see the role of PPC shaping in near future?

Colin Lewis: I feel PPC will become a more dominant pricing model for all online marketing activity due to the ability to control spend and guarantee results. However, the knock on effect will be that cost will rise. I believe that as a result more focus will have to be placed on landing pages and conversion once the visitor reaches the site. At the moment there is too much emphasis by marketers on acquisition and not enough on conversion rates. A 10-15% in PPC costs could be easily offset with a 10-15% increase in conversion rates on the website.

Ritesh Gupta: There will always be spam in any search index, whether it is paid or unpaid. Would it be right to say consumers lack trust in paid search and are turning overwhelmingly to natural search results?

Colin Lewis: I would disagree with this statement. The relevancy of paid search results are getting better all the time, AND are better than natural results in many circumstances. In the early days of paid search, advertisers could display ads cheaply across keywords that were not relevant to their product or service - as the cost was negligible. However this opportunity has disappeared as more and more advertisers began to using PPC, pushing prices up, and forcing advertisers to focus their efforts. Most paid search results are now quite relevant (at least on Google anyway!) and I feel that consumers are noticing this more and more as they become more web and search savvy.

Ritesh Gupta: Last year during our conference, an executive mentioned: "Affiliate marketers are often much better at SEO than merchants. Affiliate marketing specialists say most travel companies are in business to fill seats - but actually providing these services, or even providing booking technology, is not the same thing as creating relevant content and playing the never-ending Google game." What's your take on this?

Colin Lewis: I agree affiliate marketers are better at SEO. One only has to do a search in Google for common travel phrases to see the dominance of affiliate marketers. However as a result of having excess key word rich page content to rank highly and get visitors to their site, affiliate marketing website have much lower conversion rates as the landing pages can be poor – optimised for spiders not for visitors.

Ritesh Gupta: Would it be right to say with the constant cat and mouse race between white hat and black hat - ethical and allegedly unethical - SEO techniques, it is always going to be far easier for affiliates to take risks, than it is for large-scale corporate merchants?

Colin Lewis: It never going to be easy for any company to adopt black hat SEO as the risks are high. However I do feel it will always be a necessity for affiliates, as SEO is at the core of the entire affiliate marketing business model. Without SEO many online affiliates wouldn't be in business! In order to survive affiliates must always push the boundaries of SEO.

Sales and Marketing in Travel Europe 2008 Summit

EyeforTravel is scheduled to conduct Online Marketing Strategies in Travel conference and Social Media Strategies in Travel Europe conference, as part of Sales & Marketing in Travel Europe 2008. The two-day event will be held in Munich on 14 and 15 October.

For more information, click here http://events.eyefortravel.com/smeurope/socialmedia/agenda.asp or contact Gina Baillie at +44 (0) 207 375 7197 or gina@eyefortravel.com).