Hitwise travel study shows growing power of YouTube
A study by analysts Hitwise has highlighted a significant rise in the number of Brits using YouTube to research holiday destinations.
The findings, taken from an online pool of 3 million UK users, showed sites such as Tripadvisor, Skyscanner and Trivago have seen an average 51% increase in traffic deriving from YouTube in the last three years.
The Hitwise research found comparison website Skyscanner has risen in the ranks receiving a 59% increase in traffic deriving from YouTube.
TripAdvisor, however, is currently leading in traffic volume, whilst booking.com follows closely behind.
Hitwise managing director Nigel Wilson said: "The Hitwise research has shown that video and social content is a successful platform for marketers to better understand their audience’s online behaviour.
"The increase in traffic to sites such as Skyscanner and Booking.com is a great example of the importance for marketers in the travel sector to understand the data informing their content programmes and to successfully capture their online audiences."
When it comes to particular destinations, Iceland receives the biggest share of voice, with searches on YouTube up 118%, closely followed by Vietnam (75%) and Sri Lanka (72%).
Hitwise urged travel companies to track video searches and viewership on channels like YouTube to identify emerging destinations and also to identify who the subscribers to their video channels are and what content they engage with.
It also advised companies to identify new opportunities by tracking not only popular route searches, but alternate route variations selected on aggregator sites.
The full report, Travel in 2017: A Digital Marketing perspective, can be downloaded here.
Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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