The Great Travel-Marketing Whodunit Is Attributing Credit for the Last Click

How do travel marketers attribute proper credit to the various stages of consumers’ sometimes-multiweek journey from research to a booking? While previously – and often still today – the last click got all of the credit, marketers are now trying to assess the impact of various interactions whether it was an early click on “cheap tickets,” a branded keyword such as “Expedia” or perhaps a click on a hotel through Kayak or TripAdvisor that ultimately led to a hotel site or online travel agency booking. The assessment is key for marketers who not only want to track what led to the ultimate click but also want to rework their campaigns based on their attribution findings. The issue also is front-of-mind for metasearch players such as TripAdvisor as CEO Stephen Kaufer knows that his company doesn't always get appropriate credit for an online travel agency booking that it might have greatly influenced. Kaufer referenced the issue during TripAdvisor's fourth quarter of 2014 earnings call in February when he discussed the rollout of the company's book-on-TripAdvisor feature, Instant Booking, and the effort to plug so-called leakage. Kaufer cited the "effort on our part that started last year and will take place this year and beyond to plug the leak and just get fair credit for all the transactions that we're driving but get lost in the online attribution shuffle." Tel Aviv-headquartered Kenshoo, with travel industry clients including Expedia, Skyscanner, Accor, Ctrip, Delta Air Lines and others, provides a variety of attribution solutions and digital software/marketing services. Skift discussed trends in attribution technology with Kenshoo’s Christine Vincent:, a Kenshoo global industry partner, and Alan Tam, Kenshoo’s director of product marketing. Skift: What do you see as the latest trends as it relates to the travel industry in attribution technology? What's going on now? What should we look for in the near future? Christine Vincent: We work with a lot of global travel clients and they use a variety of attribution technologies. Attribution can mean a lot of different things to different people. It's solving for understanding the efficiency of your marketing dollars across all of your channels. I think the biggest shift that we've seen in the attribution space, in general, is that last- touch attribution has always been industry standard and moving to something more sophisticated than that is the direction that I