Study: Optimized travel pages push conversion rates

First, the details on travel-minded shoppers. comScore reports that the US online travel spend has now topped $100 billion for the first time (2012); while most travel shoppers are purchasing airline tickets, many are also looking for hotels or rental cars. And some are still researching destinations. So, optimizing those pages can be a huge improvement for many brands.

Enter the new report out from Intent Media. According to their research airlines that optimized landing pages based on different travel profiles increased conversions up by to 25%.

"The beauty of this test is the airlines didn't have to build a lot of new pages," said Richard Harris, CEO, Intent Media. "We used pages they already had. It was just a question of more intelligently deploying those pages. This is a good illustration of 'de-averaging'. Typically companies spend a lot of time and effort to tune their campaigns and especially their sites to produce the best answer for all of their traffic. But as our research shows, there is no single best answer, but rather multiple answers depending on the type of trip being planned."

One example Harris uses is that of a leisure trip landing page, which was optimized to include a calendar of flight options both on the exact travel days and around the travel days. This gave vacation planners options in their flight times, arrivals - and even the cost of tickets. Compare that with a static landing page offering only flights for a specific day.

Tags: comScore, Intent Media, landing page optimization, travel advertising, travel websites, website optimization