Audience Measurement

Audience Measurement for Travel | Analytics & Attribution

Travel has one of the longest, most complex customer journeys of any industry. A holiday booking might involve weeks of research across YouTube, organic search, comparison sites, social ads and direct visits before a customer converts. Last-click attribution misses almost all of it.

At Summon, we use advanced audience measurement and multi-touch attribution to map the full travel booking journey - identifying which channels influence decisions, which touchpoints drive intent, and where your budget is delivering real return. We use Google Analytics 4, Google Campaign Manager 360 and custom reporting to give you a single, accurate view of your customer across all devices and channels.

Marketing mix modelling for travel

Attribution follows clicks. It can't see TV, brochures or the weeks of research before someone books, and it sees less every time a visitor declines cookies. Marketing mix modelling comes at it from the other direction. It looks at weekly bookings and revenue alongside spend in every channel, then accounts for seasonality, pricing, promotions and holiday demand to work out what each channel actually contributed.

We build marketing mix models for travel brands. For each channel, the model shows:

• the bookings and revenue it drove that wouldn't have happened anyway
• its return on spend, with a range showing how confident we can be
• where the next pound of budget would work hardest, and which channels are close to saturation
• how long the effect lasts after a campaign ends, which for TV and video can be several weeks
• what would happen to bookings if budget moved between channels

Here's the kind of question it answers. Say a tour operator spends heavily on paid search through January and runs a TV burst each autumn. Attribution gives search the credit for almost every booking, so TV looks like the obvious thing to cut. The model might show that many of those January searches came from people the autumn TV had already reached, and that moving TV money into search would lose bookings rather than add them.

January is worth a word on its own. The industry calls it peak, but most of what lands that month was set in motion long before: a brochure on the kitchen table in November, a friend's holiday photos in the summer, a price someone has been watching since the autumn. Spend in January catches that demand as it turns into bookings, so it always looks brilliant. Part of the model's job is working out how much of the peak would have arrived anyway, and how much the January budget genuinely added.

It works alongside the attribution work above rather than replacing it. Attribution shows what's happening week to week; the model shows where next year's budget should go. Stella Akindolie, our Performance Media Analyst, leads the modelling work. If you'd like to see what it would show for your business, get in touch.