Study reveals busiest day for holiday searches
Travel companies could be wasting money by paying to advertise on search engine Google at all the wrong times.
The latest report on the holiday sector by search marketing agency Greenlight found that the most travel-related queries on Google are on Mondays and gradually decrease towards the weekend.
Saturdays see the fewest holiday queries and Sundays have only slightly more, yet the amount travel companies spend on paid ads on Google at weekends suggests they are over-estimating how many customers are searching for holidays on Saturday and Sundays.
Greenlight tracked, recorded and analysed the behaviour of consumers online in May for its latest sector report. For the week beginning May 14, which was selected at random, by far the busiest day for holiday searches was Monday. Wednesday was the next busiest, after which searches declined until Sunday.
When Greenlight looked at the advertising behaviour of four of the largest travel companies, including First Choice, Low Cost Holidays, On The Beach, Travel Republic Thomas Cook and Thomson, it found they have similar bidding strategies for keywords on Google.
However, the majority of advertisers didn’t seem to realise that Monday was the busiest day and Saturday and Sunday were much quieter.
By Linsey McNeill
Linsey McNeill
Editor Linsey McNeill has been writing about travel for more than three decades. Bylines include The Times, Telegraph, Observer, Guardian and Which? plus the South China Morning Post. She also shares insider tips on thetraveljournalist.co.uk
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