Overview
The hotel travel space is highly competitive, and with profitable customer acquisition through paid search increasingly tapped out, travel marketers are exploring alternative tactics to expand their online bookings. This leading hotelier had experimented with both contextual and behavioral display advertising only to find that its cost per aquisition (CPA) goals resulted in limited ability to drive scale. The question: could Quantcast Lookalikes drive an increase in profitable bookings at a scale that was meaningful to its business?

Challenge
Online travel companies aggressively market to consumers, driving up costs for paid search and contextually targeted display ads—especially during peak travel seasons. High costs and limited media opportunities restrict the volume of profitable bookings that travel marketers can attain. In addition, these tactics tend to limit the opportunity to influence a broader set of consumers who may not utilize typical online travel media within their consideration process.

Lookalike Audience Approach
The marketer chose to Get QuantifiedTM and tagged its site with Quantcast tags. Within a few days, it gained deep insights into the demographic, interests, behaviors and affinities of its customers. A Quantcast Lookalike audience was built by modeling consumers who had booked travel on the marketer’s site. Quantcast then used this profile to deliver an expanded group of consumers who looked just like the marketer’s converting audience—millions of potential new customers.

Campaign Tactics
The marketer deployed Quantcast Lookalikes directly with premium publishers and across the real-time exchange inventory they secured. Quantcast Lookalike audience segments ensured that delivery goals could be achieved within the desired short time frame, reaching the maximum number of consumers with a high affinity to the marketer’s converting customers during the critical booking season.