New York, US / Paris, France – February 3, 2014 – 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.
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.”
