By Chris Lee

TUI Travel PLC is one of the world’s leading leisure travel companies with over 250 trusted brands in 180 countries and more than 30 million customers. Its well-known brands include Exodus, Adventure Company, Thomson Sport and Sunsail, and with such a wide variety of activities on offer, TUI required a system that could track where its customers came from, what path they took to get there and what keywords they used.

TUI said its investment in websites and strategic online marketing is fundamental to its growth and as a result the company has invested heavily in areas such as social media, display advertising, search and affiliate marketing. The company also ensures that all online activities are measured through analytics and search management tools.

Complex environment

Given the diverse nature of TUI’s offering with products ranging from adventure and sport holidays to marine and other specialist interests, customers often go through prolonged purchase decisions and often require assurances that the holiday is tailored for their needs. This requirement for further information can drive customers to ask questions directly to one of TUI’s travel consultants by phone. Coupled with non-transactional websites offering information, the difficulty that TUI faced was how to track customers who completed their purchase by phone instead of online.

Tracking back

TUI chose AdInsight Clarity, a call tracking tool from by AdInsight, which works by inserting code onto each of the target websites and by providing a unique telephone number for each concurrent visitor to the site at any one time.

This dynamic telephone number provided each visitor with a unique identifier, enabling AdInsight Clarity to automatically track the visitor as they clicked through the site and subsequently whether their visit resulted in a phone call. AdInsight Clarity could also track a multitude of other variables including the keyword they used to enter the site, the pages they looked at before, during and after the call, the date and time of the call, as well as the sales or lead value of the call.

The system was easily able to integrate with existing analytics tools used by TUI including Google AdWords and their preferred bid management software. They could also track caller location, visitor history, call centre staffing requirements, call logs and generate keyword reports.

The results

TUI says its online revenue increased by 30 per cent, with AdInsight Clarity playing a valuable part in this uplift.

Prior to implementing AdInsight Clarity, one TUI said that one of its brand was 'on target' for its paid search allowable cost per lead. After AdInsight was integrated with TUI’s bid management software, it could then see all of its telephone call conversions at keyword and campaign level, instantly reducing their cost per lead by nearly half. This enabled them to intelligently increase its spend and visibility to obtain more leads.

Jo Bradbury, Sector Paid Search Manager at TUI Travel, said: “A lot of our holidays are booked over the phone. The problem we have had is that these people disappeared off the online radar and we were not able to track them. We had little idea where they came from, the path they took to get to us, or indeed whether they were responding to a particular ad. The AdInsight system has completely solved this problem. AdInsight has helped us to improve our online activities as well as return on investment as a result.”