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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK

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Expedia Online Marketing Success

April 13, 2006

In this, my second profile of a Hitwise Annual Online Performance Award winner, I will profile Expedia.co.uk, the #1 Travel - Agencies website in 2005 based on UK visits. Expedia.co.uk ranked #1 among Travel - Agencies based on UK visits every week in 2005 (and so far in 2006). The site also consistently ranked among the top 100 websites on the internet based on UK visits.

Expedia.co.uk also ranked #1 among Travel Agencies based on page views in March, meaning that it attracts a larger share of page views than any other travel agency. Visitors spent an average of 9 minutes 17 seconds on the site, one and a half minutes longer than average for the category. These metrics, taken together, indicate that Expedia is not only successful at drawing people to its site but also engages visitors.

Expedia's Online Marketing Mix:

Expedia.co.uk receives its visits from the sources you might expect with 36% of visits coming from search engines in March, 3% from email services, and 39% from other travel sites. TripAdvisor accounted for 12% of upstream visits to Expedia.co.uk in March. As mentioned in my previous post on TripAdvisor, these sites enjoy a strong partnership and were both owned by IAC until Expedia was recently spun off.

As you might expect, among search engines, Google UK refers the largest share of Expedia.co.uk's traffic. More interesting is that Ask.com UK was the search engine referring the second largest share of visits to the site. Ask ranks after MSN Search and Yahoo! Search in the share of UK searches powered so this immediately piqued my interest. I should note that until recently, Expedia, TripAdvisor and Ask were owned by IAC.

I looked at the search terms sending visits to Expedia.co.uk from Ask.com UK compared with the other search engines and discovered some interesting differences. Searches related to weather and maps are much more prominent among the search terms from Ask.com UK than the other search engines.

Among the top 30 terms sending visits to Expedia.co.uk from Ask.com UK were 12 map related terms and 7 weather related terms. Ask recently relaunched its search engine and the links at the right hand side of the home page do a nice job of guiding consumers to results for popular queries - among which are "Maps & Directions" and "Weather". The share of visits that Expedia.co.uk receives from searches for "map of england" nearly doubled last week compared with the same week in 2005. The share of visits from "maps" increased two and a half times and visits from "map of spain" more than tripled year on year.

It appears that the prominence of Ask.com UK among Expedia.co.uk's upstream sites comes down to Expedia adapting to the updates Ask has introduced, rather than any corporate relationship.

Online Brand Strength

Expedia's online strength is no doubt in large part due to aggressive offline promotions and significant ad budget reported to be £14 million in December 2005 by Mad.co.uk (may require subscription). The search term "expedia" is the highest volume term sending visits to websites in the Travel - Agencies category. The share of UK internet searches for "expedia" outstrip searches for "cheap flights" and "holidays".

95% of searches for "expedia" sent visits to Expedia websites in the past four weeks. Expedia receives a far larger share of visits from searches for its own brand than average, indicating that the site has been successful at protecting its brand through search engines.

Expedia has successfully adapted its business to new technologies and customer expectations. The site has moved beyond being a destination to book a flight to become an online source for destination information, ideas for holidays, reviews, pictures and maps.

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 01:26 AM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Travel