19 November 2009

Survey reveals most visible travel websites

The most visible websites in natural search results in July were DirectLineHolidays, Thomson and HolidayHypermarkets, according to new data.

They achieved 71%, 62% and 55% visibility respectively, research by independent search marketing company Greenlight found in its first quarterly integrated report for the holiday sector.

Each report consists of both natural and paid search data.

The paid search section of the report determines an advertiser’s share of voice based on how often they appear on Google, which ad position they are bidding for and the search volume generated for the keywords they bid on.

The ranking represents visibility across the top 90 keywords in July.

First Choice was the most visible advertiser in paid search reaching 65% share of voice, achieved largely by effective bidding on 68 of the 90 keywords analysed in Greenlight’s report at an average ad position of four.

Second and third positions were achieved by TeletextHolidays and IceLolly with 51% and 40% visibility respectively.

Of the top 10 advertisers only three were direct providers, First Choice, Thomas Cook and Thomson.

This is consistent with other travel sector reports, such as hotels and flights, where aggregators bid aggressively in the paid search space, Greenlight said.

The report determines the most visible holiday operators and aggregators in Google natural and paid search results for the third quarter of the year.

The latest research is based on more than 29 million searches that took place between June and August for holiday related search terms.

The searches were categorised into generic holiday terms and broken down by short haul and long haul destinations.

This data was then used to rank the most visible brands on page one of Google’s search results.

But the natural search league table shows that only 16 out of the 60 top sites were visible to more than 10% of the searches performed in July.

The research analysed 3,200 of the most popular generic keywords for holidays.

The generic term ‘holidays’ accounted for 25% of all holiday related searches that took place during the month.

The most popular destination-based search term was ‘Turkey holiday’.

This differs from other travel sectors such as flights and hotels where analysis has seen Spanish-related terms consistently being the most searched for.

by Phil Davies