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Search or content ads in travel? A marketer’s dilemma

March 06, 2008 | Internet Marketing

In his recent WebProNews article, Jason Lee Miller takes an interesting look at CheapFlights.com online referral sources to answer the question whether to focus your online advertising strategy on direct referrals via search or content sites.

The Compete.com graph for CheapFlights shows that a trouncing majority of referrals that went on to partner sites came from Google, as might be expected. But in January*, Google referrals spiked from under 20,000 to over 40,000, a 119% increase. Despite numbers already much, much lower, Yahoo and MSN did not come even close to keeping pace with the sudden spike.

That indicates a couple of things about search, at least in the travel sector: Google’s referrals in January stomped (stampeded) the competition; search is much more directly effective at generating referrals than ads on content sites.

Emphasis, as you can see, is on the word “directly.” While every marketer has the judgment to decide which kind of campaign is right for his or her brand (indeed, in some cases a search campaign will be more appropriate than a contextual campaign, just like direct mail is sometimes more appropriate than a broadcast campaign), I think it might be tempting to abandon the branding concept altogether, just based on numbers like these.

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