testTag: summer travel campaigns

Soak Up the Sun and Plan a Great Travel Campaign

Posted on May 31, 2024 by - Trends

As the days get longer and the sun shines brighter, we’re ready to make waves this summer at Dstillery. 2024 is expected to see a record-breaking 4.7 billion air travelers globally, up from the previous record of 4.5 billion in 2019. This uptick represents an opportunity for programmatic advertisers. Summer 2024 is not only a great time to capitalize on the traveling trend but also adapt and reorient your campaigns for a new adventure in the coming cookieless advertising landscape.

According to Google’s latest cookie deprecation timeline, cookies will go away in the first half of 2025. Brands and their agencies should consider expanding test budgets for solutions to reach travelers now and in the future as the cookie is retired. What’s out there? Fear not, explorer. We’ve identified a few solutions to help your summer travel campaigns run wild and free.

ID-free® Targeting. Okay, you’re right. We’re a bit biased in bringing this up, but let’s face it – we’ve got the only behavioral targeting solution without IDs on the market, and we’re proud to promote it. Our ID-free technology represents a paradigm shift in programmatic advertising by prioritizing performance and user privacy. Predicting the best impressions for a brand without knowing the user’s identity reshapes the landscape for advertisers seeking effective, privacy-safe targeting. It’s a vital tool for marketers looking to maximize their reach across inventory regardless of whether an ID is present.

First-party data. First-party data is more relevant than ever as the ability to target with cookies phases out, and it’s crucial for mid to lower-funnel campaigns. Embrace your first-party data and weave it into your campaign! Use it to seed your Dstillery Custom AI model, targeting inventory with ID-free technology or targeting users with 24-hour User Scoring technology, letting you expand beyond your known audience.

Use all available targeting solutions in your campaigns. Travelers who opt out of user tracking, today with cookies or in the future with alternative IDs, are just as valuable to your brand. Use all the tools available to reach your best customers. Your portfolio of solutions should include alternative IDs, contextual and ID-free, giving you a diversified, complete approach. 

Seeking the Perfect Solution

All great journeys have a destination. Whether you’re traveling to Italy this summer or trying to get your best customers to go, there’s no shortage of searching for the best routes, places, and pit stops along the way. We know that identifying the best keywords for search-powered models is a significant pain point for travel marketers.  Often, this is due to the general, often vague nature of single or common search keywords or phrases. The basic idea is that seeding your model with brand-centric search terms and long-tail search keywords and phrases allows you to understand a potential customer’s intent without identifying them with cookies. Simple, brand-specific search keywords, usually single words, are great for starting a campaign by casting a broad net. 

One major benefit to utilizing Custom Search Lookalikes is that they help to identify the search terms and phrases that are the most relevant for your brand and campaign goals. Custom Search Lookalikes aren’t strictly built to target individual keywords; they can be utilized to discover and action on the phrases that people use when searching for, discovering, and making decisions about your brand. Painting the picture using precise numbers, 41% of business and 60% of leisure travelers steer their decision compass based on information unearthed from online research built on a mixture of basic search terms and phrases.

For example, suppose you are promoting tours and activities in Tokyo. In that case, you will most likely try to rank for keywords like “tours in Tokyo” or “best tours in Tokyo” to drive as much traffic as possible to your website. Those keywords will be pretty common compared to a phrase, such as “best sushi tours in Shibuya, Tokyo,” which will draw more relevant visitors and be easier to rank for, resulting in higher conversions. 

Leveraging our advanced ID-free technology and data from a 2 million+ opted-in panel, our Custom Search Lookalikes gain unparalleled visibility into the digital behaviors of millions of users. We can determine where these users frequently visit online when searching for specific keywords. Our patented ID-free technology extends this user understanding to all websites. It assesses and ranks every ad impression based on its likelihood of reaching individuals actively searching for brand-specific keywords.

Your Destination Awaits

Custom Search Lookalikes specifically tune to your audience’s intent. This includes devices within our de-identified opt-in panel actively searching for your brand’s keywords. The solution effectively targets them to guide them further down the marketing funnel and brings the value of search keyword-based targeting to your summer travel campaigns. Using OpenAI embeddings for search queries from the largest search engines in the world in our panel data, we can identify the most relevant search keywords and phrases tailored to each audience brief. This allows us to create brand-specific keyword and search phrase clusters tailored to your brand and campaign goals. 

So now that you’ve found the missing piece of your campaign solution, kick back and enjoy the summer breeze, maybe even a cool beverage. Forget the guesswork and rest easy knowing that your campaign uses cutting-edge AI to find your best prospects with the best key terms and phrases. Custom Search Lookalikes gain privacy-safe visibility into the digital behaviors of millions of users, including their search and site visitation behaviors. The best travel campaigns will use all of the tools at a programmatic buyer’s fingertips. Building a campaign that powers programmatic inventory solutions with search behavior data is a strategic and savvy way to maximize your campaign budget. Who knew it could be so easy?

A Data-Driven Dive into Summer Travel Trends

Posted on July 6, 2023 by - Trends

summer travel data

The Sun hangs high in the sky. You’re working from home. You’re working in the office. You’re daydreaming about being on a beach in Greece or maybe you’re keeping it simple and considering a summer camping trip in Wisconsin. Do people still camp? Are domestic flights more expensive than international? What does the data tell us about the way Americans are spending their summers? We’re going to find out in this summer travel-themed blog that uncovers the web of data that links us all and expands with every passing moment.

2023 Travel Data

In the summer of 2023, 40% of Americans have intentions to travel and 44% are willing to travel more than once. 61% of travelers are keeping their travel plans within the United States, 16% going domestic and international, and 6% solely international. That’s a huge segment of Americans just waiting to pack their bags and jump on a jet or into a minivan and head toward their final destination. On average, 40% of travelers are most often taking trips for outdoor recreation like hiking or snorkeling, a family-related event, or exploring U.S. national parks. It’s important to get ahead of the curve with your marketing plans and look to capture these seasonal travelers with strong awareness and consideration campaigns built around the globetrotting mindset. Curious about what that looks like? Let’s explore some ideas together.

Crafting a Targeting Travel Campaign Strategy

Travelers have one main thing in mind when starting the ideation process of where to go: getting out of the house. Every journey begins with a destination. You can best capture your targets by considering the places they’re likely to go and then accenting your campaign strategy around the adjacent components to their destination. Nearly 39% of American adults say they intend to road trip more than 250 miles from their home this summer. For example, if a family is looking to travel to the beach, it’s best to start with broad strokes like Beach Vacation Enthusiasts, Waterfront Activity Participants, Luxury Hotel Guests, and Boat Enthusiasts to lay the groundwork for your audience optimization. These larger scale audiences are the backbone to a successful campaign because they represent the pillars of your audience’s initial identity and what it will come to be. In the early stages of your travel campaign planning, don’t be afraid to take big swings to bring interested parties with big tentpole audiences.

Leveraging Data to Enhance Consideration Campaigns

As you start to develop more insights into the characteristics of these sunbathing, wave surfing, and beverage-drinking targets, if it’s available, blend in your first-party data to begin to watch these broad stroke audiences evolve and learn more about their intentions. This is a vital part of any consideration campaign as it allows for your campaign to take a defined stance against your direct response goal. By working closely with our data partners and utilizing partnerships with opt-in data providers, Dstillery can weave domain data into our Consideration Solutions and help further map customers not solely based on assumed interest but also by their digital journey and online intentions. Consideration campaigns are where you begin to explore intention – where do these people exist online? What and where are they researching topics based around your brand?

Optimizing Consideration Campaigns for Maximum Results

We may know that they are Beach Vacation Enthusiasts, but perhaps they’re already local to an area like the American Southeast, so we can sharpen by adding in audiences like Myrtle Beach Trip Planners, Florida Atlantic Coast Planners, Beach House Second Home Owners, and Beach Supply Shoppers audiences to hone the signal in your consideration campaign to focus on users with the highest intention to deliver results. Their adjacency to the subject of your campaign based on their internet habits is that it improves Dstillery Considerations Solutions’ effectiveness. It thereby creates a microcosm based on your customers and their digital experiences and serves them ads that will ideally push them toward a real-world action.

This is all to say that campaign planning begins similarly to planning a vacation – with broad strokes that become more and more defined over time until you reach your destination. Nearly 42% of American adults say they intend to travel more this summer than last, so you’ve got to be ready to capture their attention and craft around it with turnkey targeting solutions. Reach out to Dstillery and build tactical, intuitive campaigns and strategies with our data experts today.