Insights From eTourism Summit's First Timer Attendees Lunch

While at the eTourism Summit 2024 in Las Vegas, Semcasting had the honor of hosting The First Timers’ Lunch, led by Mike Skladony, GM of Consumer Services.

First Time attendees gathered to listen to Mike, a travel marketing expert, discuss the importance of first-party data, post-cookie marketing and the importance of selecting the correct media channels for your campaigns. In an attempt to gain a better understanding of what the attendees knew, Mike put together a discussion based game using various envelope questions. 

During our Table Envelope game, attendees were asked to brainstorm some ideas and thoughts related to the various questions. Below is a summary of some of the highlights from the discussions:

What criteria do you consider when selecting media channels for your travel marketing campaigns?

• Quality cost effective channels are critical, especially when on a tight budget. We want to be in as many places as our audience is, but we realize that we need to maximize our dollars where we see return.
• Target Audience – With the deprecation of 3^rd party cookies, we’re putting more emphasis on the quality of our audiences and questioning our partners on the viability of their solutions going forward.
• Post campaign analytics is critical as we’re required to report on the success of our campaigns. Clicks, impressions and CTR are no longer cutting it.
• Easily accessible dashboards, so we can monitor the performance of our campaigns in as real time as possible
• Audience Reach and engagement are valuable in justifying our media spends.

Can you share any best practices or tools you use for measuring and optimizing media channel effectiveness?

• Balancing utilizing past data and staying up to date on current events to make qualified decisions on where our audience is engaging. 
• Monitoring reach and frequency across channels is challenging, but for the channels where we can do it, it allows us to better optimize our media dollars.

What key performance indicators (KPIs) do you prioritize when measuring the effectiveness of your media channels?

• Depends on the media channel and the overall goal we’ve assigned. 
  • Website visitation for awareness plays. 
  • Increased spending amount for visitation on the weekend of the event
  • Video completion rates on our CTV and Video placements
  • Time on site for targeted ad placements. 
  • Email signups for our meeting and event planner activities. 
• Overall Reach and Frequency when running across multiple channels. 

How do you track and analyze the attribution of conversions across different channels in your marketing mix?

• There’s no one size fits all!
• When we’re working on getting people to sign up for our newsletter it’s straightforward conversions on our site. 
• “Conversions” are tough to track for us, because they’re typically equitable to people booking rooms in our area hotels or buying tickets to our attractions and there is often a large data sharing gap here. 
• Geo-location visits, but we understand that a lot of this data is modeled out due to privacy settings on iOS devices.
• Visitor Spending, but similar to the above, it’s not always a deterministic match to our direct digital channels.

How can Semcasting make a difference with your travel marketing campaigns? 

Semcasting offers a cookieless solution that serves as the cornerstone of our cutting-edge targeting and measurement capabilities. Our approach includes precise geo-targeting, high onboarding match rates, site visitor tracking, as well as access to over 750 demographic traits for targeting purposes. Collaborating with Semcasting provides travel marketers with valuable insights into households discretionary income and family composition, two pivotal factors that greatly impact trip bookings.

Following the insightful conversations held at the eTourism Summit, it is evident that there is a widespread industry demand for transparent measurement. Our technology now enables advertisers to monitor campaign performance through our real-time measurement that provides proof of campaign performance. This includes cross-platform measurement capabilities that detail reach effectiveness, audience engagement, and message resonance, providing advertisers with the insights needed for immediate campaign optimization.

Our solution supports advertisers in tracking critical KPIs, including impressions and conversions, across all selected media channels. This capability is invaluable for executing comprehensive media strategies, particularly for multi-channel campaigns that require agility and precision.

Our real-time measurement allows for quick campaign optimizations and adjustments. Not only does this increase overall campaign success, but it reduces budget waste on poorly targeted ads. This is crucial for campaigns with tight budgets as every dollar spent counts.

Interested in boosting the success of your digital travel campaigns? We offer both Managed Services and a self-serve platform- AudienceDesigner (ADS), tailored to fit your needs.

Contact Semcasting today to get started.