EyeforTravel: How To Use Mobile Across the Travel Buying Process

Google and Microsoft explain how consumers are interacting with mobile…and how suppliers can reach them.

Thomas O’Neil, Google Travel

Mobile landing pages: designing the user experience

• landing pages are evolving
• 4 great examples
  • Hotels.com/iPhone
    • being first moving has big advantage
    • have 1 million+ app downloads
  • m.toyota.com
  • m.cnn.com
  • iPhone.fandago.com
• key take-away: there needs to be optimized landing pages for the consumer
• not everyone has an smart phone…design for less
• search google webmasters: “mobile seo”
  • search algorithm is different for mobile sites

Mobile search: what consumers are doing

• not usually willing to do more than one search
• probably won’t go beyond top 2-3 search result listings
• they search for roughly the same amount of words…but search less often
• SEO is extremely important. If you’re not in the top 1-3 results, you may as well not even be there.

Advertising on the go: opportunities to reach individuals

• 4 types of Google advertising opportunities
  • WAP search
  • HTML search
  • content network (on other sites)
  • YouTube videos
• understand which apps your audience is using to choose advertising opportunities
• Google provides a high level of reporting options

Krista Pappas, Microsoft Bing Travel

• Mobile is at the center of the digital lifestyle
• The big story is that mobile is huge & growing. It’s critical you begin developing this one-on-one relationship with your customers now.
• Once people start using the mobile web, they don’t go back
• 107% more news & info was consumed through the mobile web in 2008 than 2007
• View mobile as more than just another media buy
• Mobile web is NOT the World wide Web
  • screen size limits text
  • information needs are based on location and situation
  • requires information be filtered so only relevant info is delivered
• Bing is working to give great mobile results
• Search results are optimized for mobile devices
• People may be booking more hotels last minute…as opposed to airline tickets. Tickets require more certainty and search options, hotel booking is seen as a much simpler process.