NEW YORK—With the hotel room distribution process becoming more complex, an increased importance is being placed on “attribution,” or tracing the channels and influences that ultimately led a traveler to book a room.
It’s no easy task, especially as advertisements on print and digital mediums could influence travelers’ decisions as much as a year before the actual booking is made. But experts at the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International’s Digital Marketing Conference in New York said there is a complex data collection process that can help determine what value to place on marketing efforts.
Attribution is “the value add of what we’re paying for, so we know what we need to do more of and—more importantly—what to do less of,” said Jason Harper, VP of analytics and marketing for Organic, a digital marketing company that works with companies to measure the awareness and consideration impacts of marketing campaigns.
Harper said Organic is moving to a model called “cross-platform attribution,” where the company can analyze influences on multiple platforms, including PC and mobile. He said attribution across the board is getting much more granular, which becomes a real benefit to marketing departments analyzing where to spend their dollars.
“We have the tools to be really sharp now,” he said. “Even though search might be scoring the best, we can determine who should get credit for passing the ball.”
Harper outlined three main steps to building an attribution system at a hotel:
1) Define the attribution window. How far back do you want to measure influence on a booking? A complex attribution system can display impression advertising as far back as one year.
Harper recommended hoteliers start to think about influences that didn’t directly drive the booking. He said it might feel like a big leap for hotel marketers because, for a long time, analysis has placed so much weight on “last click,” or what the consumer last clicked on before the conversion.
“The good thing is there are new ways to attribute this out,” he said. “How far back are we willing to allow credit to be given? For (consumer-packaged goods), that window is typically a week. But for our automotive clients (where the consumer does extensive planning before purchase), it can be a month or two months.”
2) Identify the shape of attribution model. Attribution data is often read on a timeline and—depending on the product and other various factors—the influences can be strong at the beginning, middle or end of that timeline. Harper recommends letting the shape of that line graph “be flexible.”
“As you go through the journey, there are things you see that are still adding value, but they’re not as important as the first sight or the close,” he said.
However, Harper said the most emphasis should be placed on the end of that timeline to ensure the booking can be closed. “This isn’t about shifting from all display to search; that search is still really important,” he said. “But be there at the end to capture them. If I only have a dollar to spend and I have to pick between beginning, middle and end, pick the beginning or the end.”
3) Build the data system. When beginning to capture and analyze data, Harper suggested doing a good amount of work up front. Ask important questions, such as how often a marketing campaign will be measured and how much success is expected.
Then, when the data begins to come in, “Look at every conversion and go back and identify a path and the consumer touch points,” he said. “Rather than doing the individual consumer view, do it on a more macro level and begin assessing weights to each touch point. Add up the value of the touch points and those are the values that you calculate your (return on investment) from.”
Hospitality experience
Attribution plays a large part in hotel channel management, and consultant Cindy Estis Green, co-founder and CEO of Kalibri Labs, said every hotel has an optimal channel mix.
“You have to determine what that hotel’s quality and position is and manage to that optimal channel mix,” she said. “Allocate your resources accordingly. Each hotel has to find that mix that’s right and fund all of the marketing resources accordingly.”
And there are more touch points today that can be attributed to a hotel booking than ever before. For example, Green said YouTube recently launched a transactions platform, and “one day in the near future we’ll have booking widgets on YouTube.”
Also, an increased importance is being placed on search, experts said, and customers will have different points of entry in the travel shopping process.
Nick Graham, director of market management for Expedia, predicted that eventually consumers will begin limiting the amount of places they research before buying. The amount of research won’t decrease, he said, but the number of sites visited will. “Consumers in the future will limit the amount of applications through which they research and shop,” he said.
But online travel agents won’t go away, and Room Key CEO John Davis said sites like his will continue to offer an alternative.
“What we wouldn’t give to have that kind of money to advertise your product,” Davis said of the major OTAs. “They’ve done a great job at convincing the consumer that (the hotel industry) has overbuilt, which just isn’t true. In the future, I think there will some alternatives to the OTAs, and hopefully my company will be one of them.”
“We’re at a point where the innovation is incredibly exciting. OTAs are adjusting and evolving very quickly to this new environment,” Graham added. “More competition is better for all of us in this industry.”