Last June, in our interview with analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik, he touched upon a point that is dear to our hearts – “segmentation is key to truly finding any insights from… web data.” Indeed, marketers can use segmentation to better understand their consumer base, identify valuable customer groups and develop strategies to proactively target these groups individually.

As the web has become more social, the importance of behavioral segmentation has increased. Still, demographic segmentation can often yield powerful insights. Take as an example, the online travel industry. Many consumers shop for flights and hotels in tandem and one might expect similar age profiles for airline and hotel websites. Excepting for a slight skew toward older consumers among airline websites, this is in fact what we find.

However, these groups convert, or complete online transactions, at different rates. By normalizing the conversion rate of each age segment against the average conversion rate of hotel and air websites in general, we discover how these age groups perform relative to the performance of the average site visitor.


Read as: In January 2009, hotel shoppers in age segment 18-34 were
9% less likely to convert than the average hotel website shopper.

Key Findings:

  • On the one hand, airline websites, in aggregate, display relatively homogeneous conversion performance. That is, no group significantly over- or under-performs against average airline shoppers.
  • On the other hand, hotel websites display marked differences among age groups – hotel shoppers between ages 18-34 convert at significantly lower rates and hotel shoppers over 55 convert at significantly higher rates than average hotel shoppers.

While airline and hotel websites have a similar mix of shoppers by age bracket, demographic segmentation leads us very clearly to the discovery that the two categories have striking differences in their conversion performance by age. In fact, we find that older consumers are hotel websites’ best customer group. This insight would lead savvy hotel marketers to craft marketing campaigns that drive more traffic specifically from qualified older consumers. (One tool that can be used to this end is Compete’s Behavior Match product suite).

In the final analysis, while demographic segmentation should not be discounted, it is worthwhile to note here that behavioral segmentation (i.e. segmenting users based on traffic sources, level of engagement with a website, search keyword types, etc.) frequently leads to more immediately actionable, higher ROI findings. Nevertheless, all marketers would benefit from the insights generated by not only tracking segmented performance at the market level, but also by benchmarking this group-by-group performance against competitors at the brand-level. For more information, see Compete’s webinar on Segment-Driven Marketing.

Share - Save - E-mail


Analyze more domains: + +

Done reading? subscribe: To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email enter your email address in the box in the right column.

Link to This Post:     


Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.
  1. Ling

    So the age group in the middle is most likely to shop for hotels and flights in tandem. Then air+hotel vacation packages should be targeted at this group. I’m surprised, though, that the people in the 55+ group don’t do it more often.

  2. Donna Pohl

    How are people getting jobs when the computer has taken so many.

  3. Donna Pohl

    Senate and Congress is how we got into our deficit Who is checking on them. Are we done paying for trips, lunch & dinners. Make them pay for things out of their pockets, they may get an ideal of what we are going through.

  4. ELD DANISMANLIK

    Great article, thanks

  5. AYDINISI

    Thank you, very nice blog

  6. venali

    thank you

  7. venali

    nice job thank you

  8. AYDINISI

    yes I was a surprise

  9. TURKMENLER

    Maybe so, but that

  10. bassan

    hi, msj 15 wonderful blog 15 share

  11. bassan

    hi, my name is bassan.your wonderful 27 blog. tnx. Msj number . 27

  12. bassan

    hi, my name is bassan.your wonderful blog, 27 blog. tnx. Msj number . 27

  13. merdiven

    Hi, We have been manufacturing stair. 26 merdivenci 26

  14. Internet Marketing Company

    Great data as always. I’m curious though .. do you have income levels that you could assign to these age ranges? I think that would add a valuable additional metric to compare against. Better yet, do you have these average broken down by engine?

  15. Tourist

    Very nice article. Helpful for me.

  16. merdiven-fiyatlari

    hello webm. ver nice blog page. 26 merdiven fiyatları ve merdiven modelleri

  17. STAIR

    hi, blog vey nice stair and trappen26 merdivenler ahsap merdiven


Have something to say? Leave a Comment

Get the comments RSS feed, instant notification of new comments

Latest Blog Posts:


Mar 12: Automotive Leads Are Not Always a Leading Sales Indicator
Mar 12: Smartphone Owners: A Ready and Willing Audience
Mar 10: Lost Bookings Where Are You?
Mar 10: Do You Groupon?
Mar 8: Join Compete and CTIA at Mobile Marketing & Advertising special session during CTIA Wireless 2010
Mar 5: House of Blues Boston: Traffic Analysis of the World’s Most Popular Club
Mar 4: There’s a Plan for That
Mar 3: Four Reasons Marketers Need a Panel to do Attribution Modeling
Mar 3: Compete Meets Omniture – New Integration Announced
Mar 2: Even Brand Marketers Need to Take Behavioral Data into Account
Mar 1: Who Else Wants Free Pancakes?
Feb 25: Race to the Finish: NBC Stakes its Claim to the Olympics Online
Feb 24: Compete Ranks Top Sites for January 2010
Feb 24: Newcomers up for Tough Competition in the Agent Space
Feb 22: Online Shopper Intelligence Study Released
Feb 19: Sears: Leading Retailer, Brand or Both?
Feb 18: People Love Free Pants!
Feb 17: We’re Number Two! Facebook moves up one big spot in the charts
Feb 16: January Fast Movers
Feb 15: Study Finds Link Between Brand Building and Search