According to a report from Efficient Frontier the travel marketers’ PPC campaigns appear to be seeing higher returns during the economic recession.
Statistics have shown that the impression values for the UK travel sector have increased by 32% from Jan-March 2009 compared to the same date range in 2008. The report puts forward reasons for this down to Google’s removal of minimum bids in an effort to maximise unused inventory which increases the availability of long tail keywords to marketers. It also states that the economic downturn is causing people to be more stringent when researching into holidays in an effort to find the best holiday deals. (you can read about it on Internet Advertising Bureau)
I think that you could write all day for the reasons why the travel sector has seen a surge in impressions (holidays becoming cheaper, the global village, travel abroad more accessible…to name a few) however it think that these findings are interesting for search.
The fact that people are researching further into the best deals and using words like ‘cheap’ and ‘discount’ in their search queries mean that there is defiantly an area to exploit if you want to get through to people during this economic downturn (if you are not already). Secondly (IMO) I think that the findings are a reflection on the fact that people are becoming savvier when it comes to searching on the web. No more vague and one word search queries anymore as people know how to seek the information they require and this is ever more evidence on the importance on ranking well for long-tail keywords.
It will be interesting to see if this continues to surge and whether the economic downturn has in fact anything to do with it…