Why Programmatic Advertising is Essential to Travel Marketers

Programmatic advertising is essential for travel marketers to match the right travel options with the right audience—helping marketers serve the right ad at the right time. And the use of programmatic advertising continues to grow.

How Programmatic Ads Shaped the Ad Industry

One of the exciting things about programmatic advertising, where advertising has gone, is that it's moved from the old days where you blindly targeted against travel content, to where you can actually target travelers. Used to be that if you wanted to find a traveler online, you'd buy an ad on Yahoo! Travel and hope that user was searching for your market. This wasn't very accurate, because a lot of time travelers who viewed that ad wasn’t going to your market or looking at your type of hotel. Yes, they were a traveler, but nobody that you could ever target.

Fast forward to today. Programmatic allows you to understand an audience and target against them, no matter where they are online. So, if I know that you're planning to travel to Chicago, I don't need to go to a visit Chicago content page. I can target you anywhere, online, on mobile, on Facebook, in real-time. This makes sure that your money is being spent the most efficiently and effectively, because you're targeting real travelers, who you know are the right people for you.

Smarter Spending Through Testing

Programmatic advertising allows marketers to perform multivariate testing. Advertisers can create more intelligent messaging by testing different audiences, along multiple cross-device paths. This continual testing process gives advertisers key insights to help reduce their overall ad spend.

Lina Ang, General Manager of APAC, Sojern, explains why programmatic is cost effective:

Hotels with limited budget struggle to compete with others with billions of marketing dollars. If I were a hotel marketer I would use programmatic advertising - it's more cost efficient as compared to a billboard or a newspaper ad. When you partner with Sojern, we have the travel intent data for you to be able to target in-market travelers who has decided to come to your destination and we can influence them with a banner advertisement of your hotel.