Where are you spending your spring or summer vacation? Americans searching Google for travel destination information are most interested in Disney, Las Vegas, and Florida, according to a new report by digital marketing intelligence firm AdGooroo.
In their analysis of nearly 1,000 travel-related keywords searched a combined total of 2.4 billion times in January and February 2012, AdGooroo found that Disney accounted for 7.3 percent of searches. Las Vegas was a close second, taking 6.3 percent, followed by other Florida destinations, the Caribbean, Mexico, and Hawaii.
Those who are searching for vacation and destination information must be searching a lot. As AdGooroo points out in the in-depth analysis of their findings on their blog, the 2.4 billion travel-related search queries is enough for every man, woman and child in the United States to have performed 7.5 Google searches each.
Transportation was searched more often than specific destinations, with 33.6 percent of searchers seeking out car rentals, airlines, and trains. AdGooroo suggests that many travellers already know where they’re going but need to figure out how to get there, based on the transportation query figure and lodging/hotels queries, which accounted for 21.3 percent.
Americans seem to be seeking out deals; 13.3 percent of all travel-related searches used terms such as coupon, discount, cheap, or low-price.
As far as Google PPC ads go, keywords around travel packages had the highest click-through rate, at 9.8 percent. Branded travel keyword terms like Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz had the lowest CTR with 2.7 percent.
Interestingly, though Disney and Las Vegas were the top two searched destinations, their CTRs differed and tell a story about the ads relating to each place. AdGooroo’s senior vice-president of research and analytics, Gregg Hamilton, writes, “Las Vegas searchers had a distinctly lower CTR (3.2 percent vs. 4.8 percent) perhaps reflecting a lower need to conduct detailed research and the likelihood that the organic ads contained sufficient information (i.e., the phone number of the hotel or box office) to satisfy the searcher.”
Attractions or destinations in the lower 48 states seemed most popular, accounting for almost a third of queries evaluated. Overseas destinations (including Mexico, Hawaii, Alaska, and the Caribbean) made up 14.6 percent of search queries. Though U.S. destinations had more impressions, the average CTR was lower than ads for overseas locations. Hamilton suggests this is because “the more exotic and less well-known locations required more online investigative research.”