Programmatic Advertising for Travel Industry

Tourism industry had massive changes in the past 15 years. The dominance of the internet changed the way of doing business, and a lot of major actors in the industry disappeared into the dusty pages of history.

One of the most significant changes in the industry was in the field of marketing. Advertising investments within the tourism industry rapidly shifted from the traditional media to the digital in the past 15 years. In 2019, digital ad spending of the travel industry in the US increased by 21.4% to $10.86 billion. This was 8.4% of all digital ad spending in the country.

Sticking to its old media buying habits, travel industry started to invest in digital advertising, as did many other industries. Ad spaces bought at a fixed rate or on CPM – CPC campaigns were the major instruments for marketing.

Such “blind efforts” are disappearing, thanks to the increasing popularity of programmatic advertising. At the end of 2020, 90% of all mobile display ads will be sold programmatically.

From Blindness to Enlightenment

If you have a hotel and if you want to promote it, back in the old days your only option was to buy ad space on a travel website hoping that the reader of the page is looking for a hotel like yours. Naturally, it wasn’t the case most of the time. For someone reading an article about “10 Best Things to Do in New York at Christmas”, an ad of a luxury hotel in the Aegean Coast of Turkey was irrelevant.

Today programmatic advertising allows marketers to understand the audience better and makes a much more accurate targeting possible. So if you’re planning a trip to New York for Christmas, you only see ads of New York hotels or activities you can attend in New York during the Christmas holiday.

The change programmatic advertising brought was not merely in targeting. Thanks to programmatic advertising, it’s possible to fine-tune advertising messages for different target audiences. If your user is a parent who is looking for a family getaway at Christmas, you can show him/her an ad with a family concept or if your user is a young man who wants to have a good time with his girlfriend, you can show him/her an ad with a romantic concept.

Most of the players in the travel industry are small and mid-sized companies, and programmatic advertising looks complicated for them. This obstacle holds them back about making smarter investments in online advertising.

But effectiveness is the key and programmatic advertising is for everyone. If you don’t have a marketing team and thousands of dollars in your advertising budget, you can still use the power of programmatic advertising to grow your business, thanks to services like ReklamStore. The challenge is perceptional and resistance to change can be harmful to your business.

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