Strategy firm Lima Consulting Group and ObservePoint, a digital marketing auditing company, examined 140 global travel brands to see how they and their “marketing technologies” performed.

　　Online travel agencies deploy the most internal systems to monitor web usage and behaviour, a study reveals.

　　Strategy firm Lima Consulting Group and ObservePoint, a digital marketing auditing company, examined 140 global travel brands to see how they and their “marketing technologies” performed.

　　The sites fall in five categories: OTAs, online hotel booking sites, branded sites offering hotels, airlines, and car rental sites.

　　Tags, a snippet of code, are generally inserted into a website’s template to track various parameters around user behaviour and performance of technology.

　　Such marketing technologies include Adobe Analytics, Ensighten, Tealium, Google Analytics, BrightTag, Webtrends, Coremetrics, Monetate, Domo, and ClickTale.

　　The study discovered a total of 1,443 tags across all 140 travel brands audited (LCG maintains a list of around 2,000 services).

　　Lima-ObservePoint have four key takeaways for the travel industry as a result of analysing the results:

　　1. OTA sites lead in deploying the most marketing technologies

　　Among the travel sectors audited, OTAs lead the chart with maximum number of marketing technologies deployed.

　　Hotel brand websites have the least implementation of marketing technologies. Within the hotel category, global hotel brands deploy 88% more marketing technologies than average, and twice as many as regional hotel chains.

　　47% of travel websites have just 0-5 tags implemented, 37% sites have 6-10 tags, and about 12% sites have 20+ tags.

　　Among the 140 travel sites audited, the top five sites with the highest number of marketing technologies area:

　　Airtkt

　　Cheapoair

　　Travel Supermarket

　　United.com

　　Bookingbuddy

　　Below graph details the percentage split of marketing technologies adoption within each travel sector.

　　Measuring Return on Marketing Technologies (RoMT):

　　There are four major factors that can affect RoMT.

　　1) Incomplete tag presence:

　　Websites are considered to be 100% adhering to tag-completeness when all of the site’s pages have tags. An incomplete tag presence indicates that website analytics tools are less accurate, and hence leading to incorrect data reporting.

　　In terms of tag completeness, airlines and hotels rank the lowest, with an average of 84.3% tag presence and 88.2% tag presence, respectively.

　　While only about 15% of the website pages lack tag presence, the study points out that many of these (15%) pages are generally the most important pages such as the shopping cart, order entry pages and other pages that are dynamically generated.

　　2) High average page load time

　　Airlines have the highest average site load time followed by hotel websites.