On August 12th, JetBlue announced an All-You-Can-Jet promotion which allows travelers to fly anywhere JetBlue flies as often as they would like within a month for $599. JetBlue ended the program sooner than expected as response was stronger than anticipated. The program had a number of quirks that make it challenging to track the drivers of its success. For example, you could enroll and book only via phone. The phone-based system may have also facilitated enrollment in JetBlue’s frequent flyer program—required if you were not a member already.

While enrollment and booking was limited to phone, consumers could still visit JetBlue.com to learn more. Compete measured the potential interest by trending daily reach of JetBlue.com before, during, and after the promotion. Reach equals the share of all US Internet users that visited a website.

Reach results corroborate the overall success. In the period, JetBlue captured the highest percentage of all internet users on the two days immediately following the launch of AYCJ (August 12th and August 13th). Reach drops quickly thereafter, but traffic to JetBlue.com may have been supplanted by consumers reading news and other sites that explained the program and included the phone number.

Compete also evaluated reach success over the past year. On average, JetBlue’s reach is 0.09% over the past year. The impact of AYCJ is still evident, but pales in comparison to the March 4, 2009 event. Compete leveraged its archive of homepage screenshots and historical clickstream data to identify this event as a one-day only sample sale, with fares starting at $29. On March 4th, JetBlue reach hit 0.39%, 322% over the yearly average. The All-You-Can-Jet promotion drove reach to 0.29%, or 215% over the yearly average. The results suggest that overall JetBlue may have been more aggressive (or more successful) with promotions in 2009 (several big spikes) than in 2008, again limited to traffic to JetBlue.

Reach is only part of the story, and in many cases with online promotions—travel and otherwise—more traffic is not always high-quality traffic. Because of the integral telephone element of AYCJ, the online impacts may not be immediately obvious. For example, the more the AYCJ bookings were incremental, the lower the corresponding drop in online bookings when the program was active. Longer term impacts could be evident by more travelers engaging with the TrueBlue® loyalty member areas, without a pre-cursor increase in online enrollments (that is, those that enrolled via telephone as part of AYCJ but who later check status and redeem awards online).

But the bottom line question is to what extent any incremental revenue from the program was offset recently and over time by the higher price of telephone-based reservations vs. online reservations, today and longer-term. That’s something only JetBlue may know.

Twitter continues to capture the attention and imagination of marketers; the site has posted twenty consecutive months of all time highs in site traffic. Its 23M+ monthly user base (as of July) provides a huge opportunity for brand marketers to directly engage customers, drive brand awareness, and drive revenue. Jetblue, Southwest and United are the most active airline brands on Twitter with approximately 1M, 460K & 30K ‘followers’ respectively (at the time of writing). Leveraging its ability to track consumer behavior across the internet, Compete measured the directional potential for twitter traffic to drive airline business by quantifying the extent to which shoppers of these airlines also visited Twitter.

At a high level:

• Airline site visitors’ propensity to visit Twitter is up nearly six-fold year-over-year
• Moreover, there is a positive correlation between airlines on Twitter than promote low rates and airlines’ booking success

Visitors to Twitter

Approximately 1 in 5 visitors to each of the three airline websites in July 2009 also visited Twitter.com that month (not accounting for those using mobile clients or other software applications). That figure is up a staggering 562% on average from a year ago. The gains are relatively consistent across the three airlines assessed.

Connecting Twitter to Revenue

Overlap is only part of the story however; the real end-game is evaluating the impact on business. A key challenge for marketers is to employ the right metrics to measure progress. To do that, Compete indexed the July conversion rate of airline supplier shoppers who visited Twitter against those who did not (conversion meaning visiting the airline site and booking a trip on-site). The higher the index, the higher the relationship between Twitter and revenue.

While all three airline sites have similar Twitter.com visitation rates (first chart), there are clear differences in the Twitter conversion lift experienced.

• United & JetBlue visitors who also visited Twitter in July 2009 were more likely to complete a booking than visitors who did not visit Twitter (10% and 35% more likely, respectively)
• Southwest visitors who also visited Twitter were 7% less likely to complete a booking that those who did not

Findings could indicate that Twitter played an important role in driving business for United and Jet Blue, but had a negative effect on Southwest bookings. But there is more to the story: United and JetBlue use Twitter not primarily to engage and inform customers (as Southwest & other brands do) but to heavily promote very low airfares. In fact, JetBlue launched a Twitter page dedicated to these low fare promotions or “Cheeps” on July 6th, while United has been promoting Twitter-only “Twares” since May 20th. Given that each airline’s visitors posted a similar growth in Twitter overlap and given the difference in the index results, it is possible that some Southwest visitors booked on JetBlue or United after seeing the low-fare Twitter promotions.

Implications

Travel industry insiders agree that Twitter holds transformative potential for deal publishers, big and small. And given Twitter’s explosive growth, airline & other travel marketers will undoubtedly be lured into using it to engage current customers, influence prospects and execute promotions. As with any media, the richest success comes from employing the soundest strategy and the best intelligence, but at the same time implementing quickly and dynamically. Given social media’s widespread reach, missteps will become public quickly, and a sound strategy is needed to mitigate blowback from well-publicized consumer complaints.

On the flip side, the best social media intelligence will allow marketers to understand where to find customers and prospects, to measure success in engaging those consumers, and to connect to ROI on an ongoing basis (just as Armano alludes to in his fifth point in the Harvard Business Review). Connecting social media efforts directly to ROI, while challenging, will allow for quick identification of innovative successes (including those of rivals) and for early detection of when the space becomes so saturated with a technique that it loses its effectiveness. This will help players in the travel industry optimize their efforts to integrate with and participate meaningfully on Twitter and other social networks.

Each month roughly 22 million US consumers shop for hotel rooms online at hotel supplier sites or online travel agencies – with notable peaks and troughs in the summer and winter months respectively. In Q1 2009, hotel shopper volumes surged to an all-time high 24.5 million monthly shoppers, outpacing the seasonally-strong third quarters in 2008 and 2007.

In the fourth quarter of 2008, amidst a challenging economic environment, consumer interest in hotels slowed even after accounting for seasonality. While the previous three quarters in 2008 experienced 4% growth from a year ago on average, online hotel shopping activity in the fourth quarter was virtually unchanged from Q4 2007 levels. In Q1 2009 however, aggregate hotel shopping bounced back, growing a healthy 13% from the previous year, the best growth performance in recent history.

While current economic forces have undoubtedly played a role in shaping consumer behavior offline and online, consumer interest in hotels online has continued to grow. During each quarter in 2008 and in the first quarter of 2009, online hotel shopper volumes were up from the same period a year ago. Though this study does not take into account the discounted rates and deals that hotel marketers may be using in order to stimulate demand, it is nonetheless significant in that it shows continued and resilient consumer interest in hotels. If travel sellers put together the right combination of price and product, consumer demand will be there to snap it up.

Social networks have been quite successful in capturing the attention of consumers online. As the level of interaction consumers have with this group of sites continues to grow, the opportunity for travel marketers to leverage these sites to drive brand awareness grows as well. Moreover, social networks are becoming increasingly well-positioned to drive traffic to brands in the online travel industry. From February 2008 to February 2009, the number of total monthly visits to social networking sites jumped 60%; just over 2.5 billion visits were made to social networking sites in February 2009.

As the volume of visits to social networks grows, it is not surprising that many online travel sites are experiencing increased traffic coming from this segment. We find first that the share of referrals from social networks to hotel websites is growing rapidly (up 151% since February 2008). Indeed, a similar trend (with respect to social networks’ share of referrals) exists for many other segments within and outside of the online travel industry. The more interesting finding is that the conversion rate of the referrals from social networks to hotel websites exhibits a similar growth trend, growing 98% year over year. Taken together, these findings indicate that social networks are increasingly a source of in-market traffic for hoteliers.

To be sure, as the role of social networks as a traffic source for the online travel industry continues to rise, the opportunity for savvy marketers to tap into the potential of these sites to generate incremental business value also grows. Competitive digital intelligence is a great tool for travel marketers in this respect and can be used to analyze which social networks resonate with a particular brand and to assess the conversion performance of social network referrals at competing brands to discover unexploited opportunities. It can also be used to investigate brand shopper engagement with various social networking features to ascertain which features and functionalities would align with a brand’s own social media implementations.

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.

Traditionally the online hotel conversion process or funnel has been viewed as consisting of at least 5 basic steps:

1. A consumer visits a hotel website homepage
2. A hotel search is performed
3. A room is selected
4. Personal and credit card information is entered
5. The booking process is completed and a confirmation is viewed

In addition to these steps, under the traditional conversion funnel, consumers may choose to click through and view a hotel property page after performing a search and before selecting a room. Lately however, the structure of the hotel supplier conversion funnel has changed due to consumers’ increasing use of search engines to shop for products online, including hotel rooms. Compete finds that the total volume of search queries has steadily increased over time, led by Google.

Moreover, the percentage of referrals to the aggregate hotel supplier segment coming from Google has steadily increased since January 2007.

Aided by the work of search engine optimization and marketing specialists, hotel shoppers who input certain brand and location keywords into Google and other search engines often land on hotel property pages. These consumers bypass the top of the traditional hotel conversion funnel (the homepage and search results pages) and the marketing, loyalty, “brand experience” and core value messaging that occurs therein. Moreover, these shoppers interact first with hotel property pages that are often not optimized to serve as the brand’s point of introduction to the user.

As one measure of the prevalence of this behavior, Compete examined the percentage of Google-referred unique visitor traffic to hotel property pages at 6 hotel supplier sites since January 2007. It is first apparent that there is a relatively steep upwards trend through the 20 month period for most sites tracked. In August 2008, among these sites, 27% of hotel property page traffic came immediately from Google on average, up from 18% in January 2007. In addition, during this same time period, hotel property page traffic among these sites is up 28%. Thus, not only is the percentage of Google (and other search) referred unique visitor traffic to hotel property pages increasing but the number of unique visitors viewing hotel property pages is increasing as well.

As this trend continues to spread, the role of hotel property pages becomes an increasingly important one. Consumers reaching these pages from search are likely using branded or location-specific keywords and thus are more engaged than casual hotel shoppers. Consequently, hotel marketers would do well to focus on these consumers’ experiences and regard property pages as pivotal landing pages that contribute significantly to a brand’s online strategy.

Under the model of the traditional conversion funnel, interaction with property pages is optional (at some websites) and accordingly analysis of these pages is secondary. However as the search-influenced model becomes more common, applying detailed landing page optimization techniques to hotel property pages is vital to the conversion funnel’s success.