The New York Times Partners With Expedia
Written by Allison Lee (contact - e-mail) -- February 2nd, 2007 |
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The New York Times is one of the most well-known news sources available offline and online, attracting nearly 7.5 million people to its website in December 2006. With the launch of the new Travel section, the NYTimes.com entered a partnership with Expedia, making this online agency the exclusive booking engine for the NY Times.
Given the affluent demographic of the NY Times audience, its online travel section is a prime property for Expedia to have struck up a promotional partnership. The travel section attracts just a small slice of the overall pie, however, pulling in 210K visitors per month, or slightly under 3% of NYTimes.com total visitors.
Of the travel section visitors in December, 46K (22%) clicked through as referrals to Expedia.com. Once on the Expedia site, however, booking levels were not as high for the NYTimes referred individuals than the average Expedia.com prospect.
Quite obviously, there are 3 key actions that need to take place in order to make the Expedia–New York Times partnership a promotional success:
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1) Effectively channel more NY Times visitors into the travel section
2) Drive more travel section visitors to use the Expedia content module
3) Effectively convert NY Times referrals who land on the Expedia site
Steps 1 and 3 seem to need the most improvement. If acted upon, the relationship between Expedia and the New York Times would evolve into a highly effective lead-generation vehicle.
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February 28th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
well, EXPEDIA is having bad reputation lately . THis is a search for EXPEDIAcomplaints in Google.
I think that in that partnership EXPEDIA might ruin the NY Times reputation.
March 1st, 2007 at 12:06 am
You need to validate your assumptions before you can form the conclusion you did.
You are assuming that the conversion rate SHOULD be the same from direct vs. indirect traffic which is an assumption that does not make sense. If you go to Expedia directly then you would appear more likely to be looking for travel - more committed for example. If you are reading the NY Times online and you happen to click on the Expedia portion of the site, are these users perhaps less committed? more likely to be browsing?
Does your data from travel and other sites suggest that direct and indirect traffic converts at the same rate?
Do travel links on other content sites convert at the same rates as they do on the travel sites themselves?
would love to see the answers to the above both for Travel and other industries…
thanks.
Jay
March 30th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
While it will increase the visitors to Expedia, the NY Times might check the best prices for tours and cruises for their readers. There are some lessor known sites which have better tour and cruise prices than Expedia. Check out cheapertravel.com
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