Travel Marketers Can Target The Most Valuable Travelers with Enhanced Criteo Engine Capability

Smarter algorithms enable travel companies to fine tune advertising spend based on each individual's likely booking value.

Latest value-driven Criteo Engine increases total booking value by 20 percent.

Enriched performance banners are now based upon travel-centric parameters to improve results.

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Criteo

Feb 03, 2015, 05:00 ET

NEW YORK and PARIS, Feb. 3, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Criteo (NASDAQ: CRTO), the performance marketing technology company, today announced powerful new updates to its Engine that enable travel companies to target consumers based on the amount they are likely to spend when booking travel and vacations. The Criteo Engine now assigns each individual a predicted booking value based on extensive data computation and takes this into account when bidding on ads. This additional bidding intelligence allows online travel websites, such as airlines, hotels and online travel agencies to focus their marketing budgets on the most valuable buyers; those who are most likely to purchase, and optimizes campaigns to boost online revenue at the right cost of sale. The enhanced Criteo Engine is already live with more than 300 clients worldwide and has increased overall booking value by an average of 20 percent for travel clients.

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The latest release of the Criteo Engine automatically evaluates a traveller's readiness to book and the expected booking value for each ad opportunity, by assessing a significant number of variables such as navigation patterns, destination and pre-booking window. These are evaluated in real time and as a result, the Criteo Engine is able to optimize advertising spend by focusing on the right users, identifying the right timing in the crucial pre-booking window and adapting to travel seasonality in each country.

In addition, Criteo has launched a new set of advertising layouts for the travel sector that are mobile-native. Criteo's new travel ad layouts help airlines achieve their performance and branding goals, while maintaining compliance with airline advertising regulations.

"The travel market has one of the most discerning online audiences, with purchase decisions typically driven by extensive research across devices, often with the help of many different websites," said Jonathan Wolf, chief product officer at Criteo. "Our latest Engine enhancements are specifically focused on the travel industry. Travel advertisers are now able to reach higher value vacation planners who are likely to spend more, and reduce ad spend on lower value customers. As a result, our travel clients across the world have seen on average a twenty percent increase in booking value from Criteo marketing."

"By activating Criteo-COS-Optimizer – a feature that increases the probability of conversions based on data such as travel duration and advance booking period – we were able to optimize the KPI's of our campaigns," said Gretlies Ringe, senior campaign manager marketing, TUIfly.com. "Thus we were able to reduce the COS by 29% and the CPOs by 10%. In addition to this, we were able to increase the Conversion Rate by 11%. It is a real business advantage that Criteo regularly offers new options to optimize our display efforts which means we see a continuous improvement in our performance."

"The enhanced Criteo Engine takes our campaigns to the next level and has allowed us to build a deeper relationship with the customer," said Andrew Booth, chief revenue officer at LateRooms.com. "As we drive towards live interactions with customers, automatically understanding spending patterns means we can ultimately drive more relevance, which is resulting in significant increases in our core customer KPIs."

For more information regarding the Criteo Engine and Criteo's digital performance advertising solutions, please visit www.criteo.com.

About Criteo
Criteo delivers personalized performance marketing at an extensive scale. Measuring return on post-click sales, Criteo makes ROI transparent and easy to measure. Criteo has over 1,000 employees in 21 offices across the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific, serving over 6,000 advertisers worldwide with direct relationships with over 8,000 publishers.

For more information, please visit http://www.criteo.com.

About LateRooms.com
LateRooms.com is the UK's leading online accommodation site, offering fantastic deals in over 65,000 properties worldwide, ranging from bed and breakfasts to five star luxury hotels. LateRooms.com is part of TLRG, based in the UK, which operates three brands – LateRooms.com, AsiaRooms.com and MalaPronta.com. TLRG is also part of TUI Group, the world's number one integrated tourism business, consisting of 1,800 travel agencies and leading online portals, and with 30 million customers, operating in 180 regions.

About TUIfly.com
TUIfly.com is the flight portal of TUI Deutschland, which not only offers flights on TUI's own airline TUIfly, but also flights of various other airlines like Air Berlin, Germanwings, Lufthansa und Sunexpress. In addition, TUIfly.com offers a variety of other travel products from different providers, including package holiday offers, rental cars, and travel insurance.

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SOURCE Criteo