The travel agency had a particularly strong footing in the Hakone area and has a very good reputation in the Kanto area. Because of this, they decided to offer tours for Thai tourists in the Hakone area.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, there were three main issues with this strategy:<\/p>\n
1. <\/strong>The Hakone area is not well known among Thai tourists<\/p>\n 2. <\/strong>The travel agency is not well known<\/p>\n 3. <\/strong>The travel agency has a small budget for advertising<\/p>\n As if attracting Thai tourists wasn’t a big enough challenge, the website came with issues as well:<\/p>\n 1.<\/strong>\u00a0The site is not available in Thai. Only in English, Chinese & Korean<\/p>\n 2.<\/strong>\u00a0The online booking forms had too many fields to fill out and users were exiting during the booking process.<\/p>\n 3.<\/strong>\u00a0The design of the website was outdated<\/p>\n Because of the small budget, localizing the website to Thai and doing a complete renewal of the website was out of the question. As grim as it looked, the travel agency decided to push on without addressing the web issues. They believed it could be done by if they accomplished the following targets within a 3-month period:<\/strong><\/p>\n Run promotions to stimulate travel demand in the Hakone area (latent demand)<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n <\/p>\n The first thing to look at is how Thais behave when making travel plans. First, they search the net for places they want to go. Next they assess and compare search engine results from high-ranking travel agencies. They then decide on which one is cheap and reliable before finally making their purchase or reservation.<\/p>\n With this in mind, the travel agency thought that making travel related promotions on the web could have a significant impact. The agency decided to go with Google as their search engine because Google\u2019s share in the search engine market in Thailand is more than 98%.<\/p>\n \u201cTravel\u201d was chosen as the primary keyword for advertising and \u201ctour\u201d was chosen as the ad group keyword. Keyword combinations relevant to the area, tourism, and other proper nouns were also chosen.<\/p>\n Based on the characteristics of the keywords, the total number of searches for the keywords was about 5,000 times per month including “Hakone”.<\/p>\n The number of searches was higher in comparison with searches for Japanese local cities and since the search parameter of keywords list is short, \u201cJapan\u201d and \u201cTokyo\u201d were also included.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Most visitors land on the page through listing ads and placements but leave the site right after browsing to visit other sites for comparison before booking. This meant that it was very important to remind users about \u201cHakone area\u201d and encourage them to revisit the site by implementing re-marketing ads<\/strong>.<\/p>\n At Google, the re-targeting network is called re-marketing and in Yahoo, it\u2019s called re-targeting. This basically means that users who visit the company website are shown advertisements that prompt them to revisit the company site after they leave. It is also referred to as follow-up advertising.<\/p>\n Although implementation was limited due to budget constraints, changing banner ads accordingly to the page being visited can increase the effectiveness of the ad. In addition, modifying the duration of re-targeting ads and setting the number of impressions can make ads more effective as well.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Text listing ads mentioned earlier are a great way to spread the word about Hakone and build awareness for both the agency and the location. But the ads themselves won\u2019t do you much good.<\/p>\n The placement of the ads is equally important as well. \u00a0Take Japan for example. While Google has more than 98% market share in Thailand and therefore favors GDN, the Yahoo display ad network is more popular in Japan.<\/p>\n Once you get the ad network down, the next stage is narrowing down on the advertising medium and location.<\/p>\n The image above is for the site Marumura<\/a>. It is quite the popular website among Thais and on this site, they can look for travel information about Japan. \u00a0By narrowing down the advertising medium, it increases the efficiency of the ad.<\/p>\n In addition, many Thai Web media use the Google ad-serving platform (Google Adsense), which can provide a lower CPC or CPM than that of pure ads. Conversely, pure advertising is high-priced in media companies and it is not recommended for purposes other than maximizing exposure for brand awareness due to the poor cost-effectiveness.<\/p>\n Our first three strategies encourage customers to visit\/revisit the site by building awareness and hooking readers to visit the site. However, if users don\u2019t make a booking reservation, it won\u2019t mean anything<\/strong>. For this, you must monitor user behavior on the site, as it is important to facilitate continuous improvement. The following list is provided as a reference.<\/p>\n ♦ High Exit Ratios\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Currently, only the English pages of the site are viable references when making Thai pages in the future. These are the pages users often view shortly before the leave the site \u2013 making this a bottleneck.<\/p>\n ♦ Online Booking Form<\/strong><\/p>\n Because there are too many fields to fill out, making the booking form unnecessarily complicated, cases where users dropped out before completing the booking procedure occurred.<\/p>\n ♦ Product Development Ideas for <\/strong>Thailand<\/b><\/p>\n When doing listing ads, looking at the search queries revealed user needs. Consequently, the keywords list was able to provide ideas for creating content and tours Thais are interested in.<\/p>\n ♦ Devices and Area Analysis in Thailand<\/strong><\/p>\n A list of information was made for areas that have a large number of access points and devices that are commonly used in Thailand.<\/p>\n An effect analysis was conducted after two weeks. Although ad impression and click-through remained as expected, almost no new bookings were made.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not good.<\/p>\n The following are the results of analyzing users.<\/p>\n With a high bounce rate and a short visit duration, cases of non-completed bookings increased. As expected, the barrier for booking was high because of the English only areas and complicated forms.<\/p>\n Even knowing that information, dealing with the site system and language wasn\u2019t a viable option yet so we implemented 4 measures for improvement.<\/p>\n Improvement measure 1: Place booking form link buttons to other parts in the landing page in addition to the link button in the first view.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n The page structure is structured in a way that made it hard for users to see the bookmarking link. We had to find better placements for the buttons.<\/p>\n Improvement measure 2: The listing ad and banner ad hyperlink destinations were subdivided.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n In order to maximize the traffic inflow to the booking page, listing ads and banner ads were revised to direct users from the entry page to the booking page.<\/p>\n Improvement measure 3: Change the targeted area from Thailand to Bangkok.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n By viewing the results of the ad distribution in different locations on Google AdWords, the following results were obtained in the Bangkok area in Thailand. The results looked very promising.<\/p>\n \u21d2 7% of ad impressions came from Bangkok<\/p>\n \u21d2 8% of conversions came from Bangkok<\/p>\n Still, it was hard to say that the numbers were highly accurate. Taking the population and income level into consideration, I decided that concentrating our ad distribution in the Bangkok area would be effective so I narrowed the area down from Thailand, to Bangkok.<\/p>\n Improvement measure 4: Change the delivery method.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n By comparing the device-specific data in Google Analytics, we saw that inflow results from Thailand were about 30% smartphone. This ratio is higher than the entire site\u2019s numerical value and it was determined that access from smartphones were essential in Thailand.<\/p>\n On the other hand, since the target site has no support for smartphone users, when compared to the traffic inflow via PC and tablet, the bounce rate was high, the average page views were low, and visit durations were short. It was clear that making a site optimized for mobile was going to be important but we didn\u2019t have the capacity for it in our current stage. So I controlled the bid to mobile terminal in Google AdWords.<\/p>\n It should be noted that in addition to area segmentations in Google AdWrods, delivery segmentations such as gender and age could also be selected. But beware when using these as targeting methods because of low accuracy.<\/p>\n Comparing the results of the first month and the third month since implementing the measures, we saw the following results.<\/p>\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.waca.associates\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/1hitori_webanalyst09_01.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe Solution: 4 web marketing strategies<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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1. Listing advertisement<\/span><\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n2. Google Display Network (GDN) \/ Re-marketing<\/span><\/h3>\n
3. Google Display Network (GDN) \/ Placements<\/span><\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n4. Site Analysis: Identify Bottlenecks<\/span><\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nTwo weeks after running advertisements, we take a look at the results and make further improvements<\/h3>\n
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<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nResults after 3 months: Bookings has increased 7.5 times<\/strong><\/h3>\n