Attribution continues to be an issue for the travel and tourism industry as travellers hop across devices and sites during their journey according to EyeforTravel’s State of Data and Analytics in Travel Report 2017. Of the marketing professionals surveyed, 54.3% reporting that they could either track users to a limited degree (24.5%), just on their own domains (16%) or not at all (13.8%).
For those companies that report that they can track users in some detail, a quarter say they can track them across most devices and touchpoints. A further 20.7% report that they can track users across touchpoints but not across devices, illustrating that it is the cross-device behaviours prevalent in travel that are the main challenge.
“I think attribution will be one of the big focuses for travel brands over the medium-term,” said Alex Hadwick, Head of Research at EyeforTravel. “Our consumer-focused research shows that travellers are increasing their usage of mobile, especially in Asia-Pacific markets, but huge numbers of consumers switch devices during their journey with desktop still the main channel globally in terms of spending. With personalisation the primary stated goal of the industry, brands will need to be able to track users more effectively as they switch across sites but particularly across devices if they want to truly understand the journey.”
The survey also found that out of the more than 450 travel data professionals surveyed, just 30.9% are gathering geo-spatial and geographic data and 30.6% are looking at mobile app data to get insight into customers. This further supports the need for the industry to expand its efforts into multi-channel data gathering. Investment into systems and skills to do this should be forthcoming, as the report notes that three quarters believe that their department will receive budget increases in 2017 against 4% who expect a decrease.
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