Travelzoo Ups Search ROI
Internet media company Travelzoo relies on persuading people to give in to that spur-of-the-moment travel impulse.
In fact, Erik Qualman, head of North American marketing, says he used Travelzoo before he became an employee: “I’d just sit back and wait for a great deal.”
Travelzoo.com posts trip and lodging offers from more than 600 travel suppliers. Some 11 million members in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada access those offers for free through the site’s newsletter, e-mail subscriptions or the on-site Super Search vertical search engine. Many subscribers are drawn by the list of the top 20 Web travel deals the company puts out every Wednesday.
The deals come from Travelzoo’s big-brand suppliers ranging from JetBlue and Ritz-Carlton to Orbitz, Expedia and HotWired. They pay Travelzoo a fee for their listings and Travelzoo posts their offers, draws the traffic, then hands the prospects off to the supplier sites. All deals are vetted by Travelzoo’s staff before being posted.
When Qualman came to Travelzoo in 2005, it was following a rules-based approach to search marketing. The company had a maximum cost per acquisition to which its keyword bid prices were rigidly linked. If the bid on any keyword went above that target, Travelzoo dropped the word until the price came down into range again.
Qualman says he felt there was a better way to manage his company’s keywords. “We were looking to generate more revenue and profit margin from our search marketing efforts — to become more efficient,” he says.
So Qualman, whose career had taken him through Yahoo!’s small business division, reached out to Efficient Frontier, a search marketing firm founded by fellow Yahoo! alumna Ellen Siminoff. Efficient replaced Travelzoo’s rules-based bid management system with its patented portfolio method that permits advertisers to exceed maximum bids on some important keywords by readjusting the overall bid mix in real time using current market prices.
Travelzoo started the migration to Efficient Frontier’s platform by handing over two months’ worth of current keyword management data, which Efficient used to set up the optimized bid policies and run simulations on the impact the new technology would have on Travelzoo’s business. (“Important to us,” according to Qualman, “because search marketing affects our business dramatically.”)
When Efficient’s optimizer platform went live, Travelzoo’s search performance dipped below par for a few weeks. “Then all of a sudden the optimizer got all those learnings and performance started to jump through the roof for us,” Qualman says.
From bidding on some 20,000 keywords before switching to Efficient, the company now runs a keyword list of almost 170,000 terms. Bid adjustments are running at about 69,000 a day.
With the tactical burden of bid management lifted, Qualman says his team can devote more time to strategizing ways to attract quality subscribers rather than simply driving warm bodies to the site.
“It’s important for us to maintain a high quality of user,” he says. We employ quality scores for our ad channels. With the Efficient Frontier platform, we can now push data back to them and report that for whatever reason, this engine has a lower quality score than that one, so let’s put more money over there.”
Blinkx AdHoc Set to Bow
Video search engine Blinkx will introduce a video ad targeting platform later this summer that’s designed to match TV-style ads to Web content.
The Blinkx AdHoc platform uses patented speech-to-text transcription and visual analysis — technologies the company already applies in its video search — to understand the content of a video ad. The platform won’t sell ads itself but will work with the ad syndicators that Web publishers have chosen, using contextual targeting to increase the value of the inventory they sell.
“Until now, online video advertising was a kind of Frankenstein’s monster — an attempt to cobble together technology that was built for text Web banner advertising and apply it to an entirely new medium, the video Web,” says Blinkx founder/CEO Suranga Chandratillake.
Blinkx AdHoc will let advertisers choose from a flexible menu of ad timings and formats, including pre-, mid- and post-roll ads, dynamically selected banners, in-video mini-banners, and a post-roll catalog view.
Blinkx also is reportedly planning a limited beta test of Blinkx Broadband TV, a Joost-style Internet peer-to-peer TV service showing full-screen videos from Web sites that Blinkx indexes, along with targeted advertising.
— BQ
