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Intent Media Study: Choice of Hotel Image Has Major Impact on Click-Through Rates
Monday, August 20, 2012
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Results Exceeded 100% Improvement In Many Cases
Intent Media announced today that, in a lengthy study, hotels marketing online significantly improved their click-through rates on a leading online travel site by optimizing the images of the hotel seen by consumers. The better performing image drove a 15% or higher click-through rate improvement more than 76% of the time. In multiple cases, the results exceeded a 100% improvement in CTR. In some tests, the best performing participant saw the winning image boost CTR by over three times over the losing image.
“We tested multiple images for the same hotels,” says Richard Harris, CEO of Intent Media, “We knew we’d see some difference between the winners and losers, but the degree of difference surprised us. The impact this can have on a hotel’s ability to be considered, and thus booked, is pretty significant.”
“We learned that our opinion and the customer’s opinion about our best photo are not the same,” says Claudio Silveira, Sales Manager at multi-hotel property manager Posadas. “We saw a 46% improvement in click-through compared to the image we originally were using. It definitely blew us away.”
Other than changing the hotel image, all other factors – price, description, ratings, and placement – were held constant. All tests were done in the Orbitz hotel booking path. The tests were run using the image testing capability built into Intent Media’s Sponsored Search Network. Hotels were able to load multiple images and let the system run through the options automatically. The images were presented to actual hotel shoppers rather than run through a lab or focus group.
"This data is pretty compelling and we’re glad that our system is letting hotels gather this kind of learning. Understanding which image consumers best respond to is learning they can apply across their marketing and sales efforts," concludes Mr. Harris.
Intent Media (www.intentmedia.com) helps retail sites fully monetize their site traffic by augmenting transaction revenues with high margin ad revenues. The company's platform identifies intent actions and targets highly relevant advertising against that intent. Intent Media deploys a proprietary suite of data-driven risk mitigation tools to enable retailers to extract the advertising value of their traffic and simultaneously preserve transaction value. For example, the company’s Ads for Travel enables several of the top online travel agents to monetize traffic in their flight booking path with advertising from airlines and other OTAs.
The privately-held company is based in New York and backed by institutional investments from Redpoint Ventures and Matrix Partners and individual investors including LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, AppNexus’ Brian O’Kelley, and Gilt Groupe Inc.’s, Kevin Ryan.
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