Holiday Preparation Series: Travel PPC Insights and Optimization Tips (U.S. Market)

With summer coming to a close and the cool fall air rolling in, it’s a reminder that the holidays are just around the corner.  Yet, before people start shopping for gifts and gadgets they will be looking to book their travel back home for the holidays. If you are a travel advertiser, now is the time to start expanding your keyword lists to ensure you capture this influx of seasonal traffic. To do this successfully, I recommend the following strategic tactics:

Add Additional Destination Keywords

• Go beyond the typical big city keywords; add the surrounding large metro areas as well. For example, if you are currently bidding on the keyword “travel to Seattle” try adding “travel to Bellevue” or “travel to Everett,” which are both popular suburbs fifteen to thirty minutes away from Seattle.

• Another tactic you can use to expand your list of destination keywords is modifying city names to airport codes. Staying with the Seattle example, if you had the keyword “flights to Seattle” you’d want to also include “flights to SEA.” You can even take it a step farther and only use airport codes. For instance, “SEA to BOS” or “SEA to BOS travel.” You can find a list of all US airport codes on the Orbitz website here.

• While this may seem like a small and assumed idea, always remember to use “to” and “from” in between two travel destinations, or terms like “flights” and the destination city. It is actually a tactic commonly missed by a lot of advertiser who may have “flights to Seattle” but are forgetting “flights from Seattle”.

• Additionally, it’s smart to flip the order of the destination cities. Not only should you have “SEA to BOS travel,” but also “BOS to SEA travel” and “BOS from SEA travel”.

 Add Long-Tail Keywords Using Seasonal Terms

The holiday season is a peak time of year for advertisers in all different types of verticals.  This often leads to increased competition and cost.  To help prevent an increase in CPCs, add long-tailed keywords to your campaigns by taking your existing keyword set and adding on seasonal terms.  For example, if you're currently bidding on "travel deals", add a seasonal modifier like "thanksgiving" or "holiday" to the front or back of the existing term to create new keywords like "thanksgiving travel deals" or "holiday travel deals".  You can also add destinations to the actual holiday terms, like "Christmas in New York".  With less competition on these longer keywords it could help keep your CPCs at a reasonable price.

 Add Popular Holiday Event Keywords 

Don’t forget about the popularity of certain activities and events during the holidays. Year after year we see a spike in keywords like “festival of lights,” “polar express,” and “Christmas train rides” in November and December. Use these to your advantage! People will need to travel to or stay the night near these activities so add terms like “accommodations,” “hotels,” “transportation,” etc. to the event names. This will create new keywords such as “polar express hotels” or “transportation to festival of lights.” By adding these terms and tailoring the ad copy appropriately to the event(s) you’ll be set up to capture an entirely new audience.

 The holiday travel keyword expansion recommendations outlined are all aimed to increase your traffic while maintaining a reasonable CPC. That said, it’s important to remember that the auction environment changes more rapidly than normal during the peak holiday season due to increased focus and competition from other advertisers. To ensure your account doesn’t experience any drastic performance changes monitor your account on a more frequent basis. If you see your performance starting to slip, adjust your bids as necessary to remain competitive.

The holiday travel season starts this month. Reap the full benefits of these keyword expansion recommendations this season by implementing them soon.

Best of luck and happy holiday optimizing!

Erin

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