Is Google Poaching Clicks From Travel Advertisers? Spend Trends Down Even As Advertisers Increase (Study)

On the cusp of the summer travel season, AdGooroo has taken a look at the state of paid search in the travel sector in the U.S. The company has found that, on the whole, paid search expenditures have been trending down since 2011. Spend fell 19% from January through April of this year compared to last […]

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On the cusp of the summer travel season, AdGooroo has taken a look at the state of paid search in the travel sector in the U.S. The company has found that, on the whole, paid search expenditures have been trending down since 2011. Spend fell 19% from January through April of this year compared to last year. That follows an 11% drop during the same period from 2012 to 2011. The downward trends hold through the summer months.

Travel Paid Search Spend TrendAdGooroo suspects the decline in ad spend since 2011 is due in large part to the launches of Google Flight Search and Google Hotel Finder that year. The actual number of advertisers in the travel category on AdWords in the U.S. increased from 217 in Q1 2012 to 228 in Q1 2013. However, AdGooroo believes that the presence of Google Flight Search and Google Hotel Finder has led to a cannibalization of clicks and ad spend from those AdWords advertisers.

Google Flight Search Google Hotel FinderGoogle Flight Search and Google Hotel Search tend to appear on SERPs for generic search terms like “cheap flights” and “hotels” which also trigger ads from multiple advertisers. As AdGooroo’s keyword cloud from Q1 below illustrates, there are huge number of ad impressions (tens of millions) generated on these generic searches. Yet it seems Google’s paid inclusion verticals are eating into paid search ad traffic on these searches.

Adgooroo Travel Search Keyword CloudTravel Keywords Trends

Looking at keyword clickthroughs, “Southwest” and “Southwest Airlines” both saw drops in Click Rank in Q1 2013 compared to last year. The keyword “Disney” fell 12 positions to number 20 on the list of top clickthrough keywords.

top travel related ppc keywordsEnterprise rental car’s branded keyword jumped four spots to the claim the top position on the list. AdGooroo found that “enterprise” has a strong clickthrough rate of 12.1%. Expedia had the highest clickthrough rate on its branded keyword at 29.5%.

The average clickthrough rate was 8.1%, with directional and branded searches showing much higher CTRs than generic terms. The term “vacation packages” had the highest number of bidders with a whopping 259 advertisers appearing on the first page of results during Q1 2013.

Top Travel Sites on U.S. AdWords

Kayak.com has come to lead the competitive travel category on AdWords in 2012. The top ten travel advertisers on AdWords last year were:

top 10 travel sites

Cheapoair, Booking.com and Bookingbuddy have come on strong this year to compete with travel industry heavy weights like Orbitz and Priceline.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Ginny Marvin
Contributor
Ginny Marvin was Third Door Media’s former Editor-in-Chief (October 2018 to December 2020), running the day-to-day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin wrote about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, MarTech and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

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