Time to Fasten Your Seatbelts

Written by
Marcus Startzel, Chief Revenue Officer

For our July S.M.A.R.T.™ report, we decided to book a ticket with the travel industry and take a special deep-dive on mobile advertising trends in this growing vertical.

Travel advertisers make up a diverse group, including hotel chains, airlines, booking sites, regional transit and more, and these advertisers have collectively grown their mobile advertising spend 200 percent year-over-year.

One travel advertiser who we had a chance to spotlight earlier this year was Westin, who used rich media creative to engage consumers and let them directly book hotel reservations from their mobile device.

Driving bookings and registrations was not the only goal for travel advertisers though, and when we looked at the campaign goals of travel advertisers on our platform, we found that 62 percent of all campaigns were focused on Sustained In-Market Presence.

Here are a couple other key highlights from this month’s report:

  • Travel was the number three vertical on our platform, ranked by ad spend.
  • “Booking Agents and Sites” was the leading subvertical for travel, and made up 57 percent of all travel campaigns. “Hotels, Resorts and Cruise Lines” was second, followed by “Airlines.”
  • When targeting specific audiences on our platform, advertisers were 3X more likely to target business travelers than vacationers.
  • 59 percent of all travel campaigns gave consumers the option to download an app as a post-click action. This was significantly higher than the overall average among all Millennial Media advertisers.
  • According to data from eMarketer, vacationers use their phones for a variety of activities, and over 60 percent of survey respondents said they use their mobile device for accessing GPS/Maps, searching for local restaurants/attractions, and keeping in touch with friends/family back home.

Click here to download the free full report. For a quick snapshot of the top trends, view our Mobile Travel Trends infographic on the right.

If you have any questions or suggestions for future reports, please send them our way.