Best Travel ad campaigns of Q1 2023: Online Travel brand comparison

As consumers emerged from the first non-Covid Christmas after lock down, thoughts turned to planning Easter and summer holidays. After 2 years of restrictions and stay at home vacations, it was reasonable to expect some pent up demand finally being released.

However, the cost-of-living crisis was still very much with us and this would have caused many families to be quite conservative in their spending

This first quarter of 2023 was critical for the travel brands after a prolonged period of low demand. Historic data was of little value as a ‘post covid’ behaviour was literally unprecedented.    So, it was vital that brands understood the effectiveness of their TV campaigns as early as possible in order to make adjustments to future media investments.

Who adapted the best to this new environment?   We took a look at the Q1 TV campaigns of several online travel brands to see how they performed. In this case we chose sessions on the brand’s app and website as the response metric to the TV campaign.

What were the results:

The data suggests that longer campaigns, in general, give a higher uplift.  This is illustrated most clearly in the short, 4 week campaign of Booking.com delivering the lowest uplift per 10M impacts. However, there were some results that bucked the trends. See below for the results.

• Onthebeach had the most effective campaign with an average uplift of 6.93% per 10M impacts over a 12-week campaign. Their sponsorship of The Masked Singer was highly effective in boosting the performance of their regular campaign.
• Tui and Jet2 had similar campaign durations (10 weeks) and similar uplifts in 3.37% and 3.69% respectively.
• Booking.com had the lowest performance with 1.64% which may be related to the campaign short duration: 4 weeks.
• Expedia was the outlier. The 2^nd lowest uplift per 10M Impacts yet the longest campaign 13 weeks. Our data suggests that this was due to starting quite early in mid-December  where they got little early traction.

Methodology – How did we do it?

We used a natural test and control methodology based on our Single-Source data. Single-Source data is the measurement of TV and other media exposure, purchase behaviour and location data over time on the same individual. ViewersLogic gathers its passively collected Single-Source data from the first of its kind consumer panel in the UK.

Control Group: Individuals who were not exposed to TV activity from the brand in question during the campaign period or in the 2 weeks prior.

Test Group: Individuals who were exposed to TV activity from the brand in question during the campaign period but not in the 2 weeks prior.

A response is a session on the app and visits to the website for the brand in question, de-duplicated so that we can only have a maximum of one response per user per week. The response rate is the number of responses as a percentage of the entire group.

We compared the response rate of each group before and during the campaign and calculated the uplift of the test group that was over and above the control group. For example: for every 10M impacts the chance of the test group to visit the Jet2 website or app grew by 3.69 % over the control group.

Monitoring period: 12/12/22 – 06/03/23

Below you can see the graphs with the purchase rates of the exposed vs. the non-exposed group:

We can see some correlation between the length of the campaign and its effectiveness