How attribution data can help the travel industry analyse user behaviour and guide marketing activity

The travel industry is a volatile one. Demand goes up and down. Marketing activities that were a hit at one point can lose their punch at others. And customers could well stop flocking to your brand once they’ve discovered a competitor.

That’s why consistently analysing your marketing channel data is so important. Evaluating this data lets you steer campaign and marketing activity towards success, so you can make sure you’re getting the best results.

At BANC, we’ve built up a boatload of experience doing this for businesses across the travel sector. We’ll share our expertise below so you can do the same too.

Understanding your customer journey through marketing attribution

One of the most vital things about marketing activity is knowing which approaches are the ones garnering sales and conversions. In fact, it’s probably the most vital thing.

Marketing attribution helps with that. No more guesswork or gut instincts, just a true measure of which activities are providing you with the most return on investment (ROI) , how customers are finding you, and the channels they’re buying your products and services from.

Mediahawk’s marketing attribution software is perfect for businesses wanting to discover the most effective tactics in their marketing mix. With it, you’ll be able to better understand the customer journey, down to each individual user, and dig deeper into your most successful (and unsuccessful) campaigns. We’re just scratching the surface of course; Mediahawk’s powerful call tracking and marketing attribution capabilities can do so much more.

What marketers can do with multi-channel attribution data

The data that comes with marketing attribution is a powerful thing to have in your arsenal.

For starters, it lets you effectively trace a path from revenue back to the marketing source that drove the initial enquiry. And doing so reveals really valuable insights you can then put to use.

With this attribution, you’ll be able to see the channels that are pushing the most calls from your customers and – importantly – not just from a last click perspective . Based on that, you’ll know what you’re investing in these channels – and crucially, which ones are working and which ones might need more in the way of investment.

Why does first and middle click touch data matter?

We made reference to last click in the paragraph above, but there’s also first click data to factor into attribution too. First click data is important because it lets us see the touchpoints that are attracting top-of-the-funnel customers – and then build strategies based around the channels that brought these new customers into the fold.

What about middle clicks? These feature vital insights too, and shouldn’t be ignored. Multi-touch models focus on first, middle and last clicks, so brands can get an all-encompassing view of how effective their touchpoints are – with three touchpoints to optimise for more conversions. These models are also helpful for brands who struggle to identify the middle of the journey in the first place.

How BANC use Mediahawk to discover attribution

When we work with our clients, we use Mediahawk’s Attribution and Sales reports to discover attribution data for them. As well as all the great things we’ve mentioned above, the latter gives us an overview of the user journey across multiple visits.

Mediahawk assigns unique reference IDs to every single website visitor, and then links calls directly to specific marketing activity. Essentially, that gives us an entire history of each user journey to work with that we can build future marketing activity and campaigns on.

Sales Matching lets us drill down into this data even further, giving us a view of the complete customer journey beyond leads. So, it’s possible to see the total value of your customers, which lets us focus on marketing ROI and move away from a cost per lead (CPL) model – where lead values can vary significantly.

It also lets us further clarify the sources that have helped make the sales, including where first and last clicks came from, as well as the last source before an enquiry converted to a sale.

So, a typical example of how our customer relationship management (CRM) team use Mediahawk for a cruise industry client might look something like this:

By implementing Mediahawk’s call tracking numbers in our Klaviyo email campaigns, we can monitor any call traffic that’s generated by emails. And thanks to UTM parameters we’re able to segment each email campaign to differentiate between performance.

We’ll then use both the Attribution and Sales reports to:

• Attribute phone calls to email campaigns so we can see which campaigns are driving phone enquiries
• Track customer journeys, identifying which touchpoints lead to conversions
• Analyse the data to understand which emails led to higher engagement and conversions

Using the Channel report, we’ll then filter by source and campaigns. This lets us:

• Track call conversions by measuring the number of calls resulting in bookings or enquiries
• Monitor how long each call lasts, as well as their outcomes, to identify the quality of leads generated from our email campaigns

After this, we’ll return to the Attribution and Sales reports to pore over call data. This gives us a chance to identify patterns in user behaviour, such as peak calling times and any conversion paths or touchpoints that keep occurring.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) through Mediahawk also helps us out here, letting us segment calls based on the intent of the user. So, we can divide and distinguish between, say, sales calls and customer service calls.

Lastly, Sales Matching data means we can understand which phone calls have led to sales, the revenue and profit made from these bookings, and other data such as the average number of touchpoints before a booking, and the average time from first visit to a booking.

How we can use attribution data in the travel industry to guide marketing activity

Our Email and CRM Specialist, Rita Sofiane, explains what using this kind of data has let us do for our travel clients…

“Thanks to the data we’ve gleaned from Mediahawk, we’ve been able to single out the email campaigns that haven’t performed as well as we’d hoped. From here, we could reallocate resources to more successful campaigns instead, helping to improve our ROI in the process.

“And because of call tracking, we can put ourselves in the shoes of users too – something that let us enhance customer engagement. By tracking campaign performance, we gain a stack of data we can compare, allowing us to see what performed best. Knowing this, we can then tailor future campaigns based on the major engagement drivers.”

The reports and insights that come about through this Mediahawk’s data is vital for both us and our clients, since it gives them full visibility into the performance of our marketing activity. It’s also key to showing why we’re making certain marketing decisions. Brands can sometimes be distrustful of the data they gather themselves. But data from Mediahawk is solid, invaluable data, giving us what we need to reinforce our knowledge and expertise so we can get that much-needed client buy-in for future campaigns.

Travel industry insights from Mediahawk

So, what specific insights from across the travel industry can we point to that brands can use to guide their marketing activity?

Mediahawk carried out research across anonymous data from 1 January 2023 to 1 April 2023, then compared data from the same period in 2024.

Their year-on-year comparison was a clear illustration of both demand and intent. From 2023 to 2024, they noted a 31% increase in paid visitor traffic, and a 129% increase in total phone calls across the sector¹.

As for site visits, the average number of users heading to a website before making a call increased by 20%². This metric, otherwise known as visitor to call ratio (VCR), is an especially good one to measure, since it measures how many visitors convert by picking up the phone. Interestingly, Mediahawk’s research shows that PPC delivers a 23% higher VCR³ compared to every other channel they looked at.

So, what can we take away from this?

Based on that last point, brands should definitely invest in PPC if they aren’t already. And since people are flocking to the phone, then we’d recommend using Mediahawk’s Speech Analytics tool. With this, businesses can automatically gather data from calls – and then use these insights to increase their conversions.

Elsewhere, Sales Matching can be used to accurately analyse ROI for each marketing source. With this data to hand, working out budget split and resource across your channels becomes a whole lot easier.

Our Head of Digital, Kate Woods says: “At BANC, we integrate the PPC activity we do for our travel clients with Mediahawk. This lets us directly optimise campaigns for phone calls, once again using Interactive Voice Response to improve our calls-sales conversion rate. Google Ads integration also allows us to work to a target return on ad spend (ROAS), something that’s allowed us to improve ROI across our travel clients.

“And by using data from different attribution models, such as last click, first click and linear, we’re able to understand which channels and campaigns were the biggest drivers for profits, bookings, and visitor to call conversion rates.”

The travel industry is one that is constantly changing. But it’s not impossible to navigate. Thanks to Mediahawk’s powerful tools, we’ve been able to help all sorts of travel clients stay afloat on the way to success. And you can start doing the same for your own business too.

^{1, 2, 3} source: Mediahawk data 2024