How booking engine personalization can increase your metasearch performance by 118%

And what makes a good website? We all know the basics: fast loading time, relevant content, intuitive interface, uncluttered structure. But it’s dynamic personalization that really takes a website to the next level.

When our data science team ran a full-scale A/B test across more than 10,000 hotels, they scientifically confirmed that personalized content delivered by Targeted Messages drives at least 16% conversion rate uplift for small hotel groups and independents.

 

Triptease's suite of Targeted Messages offers thousands of ways to message guests

And that’s just the baseline. When we look at the impact of Targeted Messages in the context of a full, interconnected direct booking strategy - one that includes smart traffic acquisition and proactive parity management - we see that dynamic personalization delivers the highest impact when it’s used to tie the entire guest journey together.

In fact, potential guests who see multiple message types after arriving on the booking engine from meta convert at twice the rate of guests who see no personalization at all.

The impact of Targeted Messages

To kick off 2021, we ran the numbers on each part of the Triptease Platform to take a fresh look at how we’re delivering value to our partner hoteliers.

Over 2020, when we weren’t working to help hotels adapt to COVID, we were working away behind the scenes to strengthen the data connections between each of our products.

Why? Because we truly believe that the coming months are an opportunity for hotels to re-assert their direct channel as the best place for guests to book - and that can’t be done with a complicated and disjointed tech stack.

Conversion rate by combination of products, indexed against the baseline meta conversion rate.

The results speak for themselves: combining your acquisition and conversion strategies leads to higher conversion.

Firstly, when we compare users who interact with both Price Check (our original message type, which compares the direct rate against competing OTAs) and Triptease Meta along their path to booking with users who only interact with a meta listing, we can see that conversion rates increase by a third.

In other words, visitors from metasearch who see a Price Check message are 33% more likely to book than those who don’t.

It’s worth noting here too that this uplift isn’t purely down to the message itself. Price Check only displays when the hotel’s rates are in parity, and in turn our metasearch algorithm is more likely to increase its bid when the hotel has the most attractive rate. Strong, consistent performance is achieved when every element of your marketing & revenue strategy works in harmony with the others.

But Price Check alone only scratches the surface of what can be achieved with the Triptease Platform.

Visitors from metasearch who are shown both Price Check and another message from the Triptease Platform are 118% more likely to book than visitors from metasearch who don’t see any messages at all.

Examples of such a booking journey might include:

• Clicks metasearch listing -> Arrives on booking engine and changes dates of search -> Sees Price Check with the best available rate -> Considers leaving site -> Sees exit message with discount for early booking -> Books.

• Clicks metasearch listing -> Arrives on booking engine and sees Price Check -> Goes back to website homepage to explore photo gallery -> Sees Nudge message offering free upgrade for local guests -> Runs a rooms & rate search -> Sees Price Check -> Books.

• Clicks metasearch listing -> Arrives on booking engine and sees Price Check -> Sees notification telling them 10 people have booked in the last hour -> Sees location message explaining local COVID-19 status -> Books.

So why are these combinations so effective?

It’s because they’re taking a unified approach to converting the guest, showing them messages that work together rather than contradicting each other. Each message has a clear purpose at each point of the journey, and uses data unique to the user to show them the content most likely to convert them.

The Triptease Platform makes these user journeys easy to create, thanks to its integrated approach that applies the same data across both traffic acquisition and conversion. But the same principle applies no matter what you use: you need to maximize the value of your paid traffic with a customized, relevant conversion experience. Without this, you'll pay more to achieve the same results.

Power up your conversion rate

So, want to find out how you can power up your traffic acquisition campaigns?

Get in touch using the form below to hear more about the combined Triptease Platform featuring smart metasearch bidding, market-leading parity monitoring and effective personalized messaging.

What’s more, you can improve the direct channel even further with Triptease’s Retargeting. For guests who leave without booking, our Retargeting algorithm calculates their propensity to convert and targets them appropriately with dynamic display ads around the web - and if they return to complete their booking, we automatically de-dupe the attribution for that booking against our metasearch tracking.

Get in touch today to find out what Triptease can deliver for your hotel.