Criteo, a performance marketing technology company, has announced that its proprietary technology has helped OTA Yatra to maintain its local market leadership position. Yatra has been working with Criteo since the second half of 2015 and their ongoing collaboration has resulted in a 34 per cent increase in average order value (AOV) and a 62 per cent increase in domestic flight bookings, while decreasing cost per acquisition by 54 per cent from August 2015 to March 2016.
With consumers typically browsing and comparing similar offerings across various online travel sites before making a purchase, Yatra observed that a higher volume of online traffic would not necessarily translate to increased conversions. Yatra thus turned to Criteo’s unified performance marketing platform, which combines the ad inventories from Google, Yahoo and Facebook, as well as other publishers. Criteo’s solution could also compute an individual’s readiness to purchase by assessing factors such as online navigation patterns, geographic locations and seasonality, before delivering the optimal number of relevant and personalised ads to encourage each consumer to return to Yatra and complete a transaction.
Commenting on the occasion, Ajeet Kandachar, MD, Criteo India said, “Driven by the Indian government’s visa reforms, investments coming into domestic airline sector, improved rail connectivity and evolving internet infrastructure, digital travel sales in India generated business in excess of US$ 12 billion in 2015, which is a 48 per cent increase from 2014. With India being the world’s fastest-growing online travel market and experiencing a growing bourgeoisie, it continues to be a top favourite for increase in internal competition and entrance of more international players. Today, travellers expect to receive information and offers customised to their individual preferences and communicated or delivered in a timely manner on their device of choice and convenience.”
He added, “To drive increased sales, seamless user experience across platforms and higher adoption, online travel providers must find a way to ascertain an individual’s readiness to purchase and effectively engage the consumer when he or she is ready to take action. Criteo’s proprietary technology has achieved significant and measurable results for Yatra within a relatively short space of time, by precisely doing so. We look forward to continuing to go places with online travel businesses in India, by helping advertisers drive meaningful consumer engagement on a 1:1 basis, thereby boosting sales and user experience.”
Yatra witnesses eight million monthly visitors on desktop and four million monthly visitors on mobile, accounting for over 30 per cent of all local online travel transactions. Yatra adopted retargeting solutions from three vendors, which resulted in an initial increase in online sales. However, given that these vendors operated separately and their display ads designs were not visually optimised to appeal to each individual, consumers would end up being served an excessive number of generic ads. This meant that Yatra could not effectively engage potential travellers and was paying for more ads than necessary to secure each successful transaction. Retargeting had become counterproductive, causing user fatigue, discouraging conversions and incurring higher costs.
Sharing his thoughts, Saurabh Gupta, online marketing manager, Yatra, expressed, “Criteo is one of our best partners and has been efficiently delivering business growth. We had already established retargeting as a key channel for us to acquire new users and drive higher conversion rates. However, our key struggles were finding a way to ‘scale up’ retargeting and optimising our cost-per-booking. The strength of the Criteo Engine, along with the company’s extensive publisher relationships and ability to integrate ad inventories from Google, Yahoo and Facebook, allowed us to engage users more effectively – by treating multiple sites as though they were ‘one’ site.”
He added, “Criteo was also able to integrate all the product information we had and then automatically deliver the most suitable ad format and design. This meant that our ads would not just be personalised to users, but also personalised for each ‘micro-moment.’ We now only use Criteo and we don’t foresee any need to switch.”
