Yatra.com the OTA backed by Reliance Capital and Capital18 has announced that its opening up of its travel site for advertising. Yatra.com is pitching itself to be the destination which is visited by a userbase which is ‘most filtered, targeted and premium audience – people who access the internet regularly, are comfortable transacting online, spend more than Rs. 5000 on an average, own a credit card, live in top 10 cities in India, fly frequently and take holidays very often – both domestic and International’.
My question is wouldn’t the above userbase be same for all travel sites? Or is yatra.com’s ticket prices more expensive than the other OTA’s and there by the premium audience? In that case its not surprising they are looking towards online ads rather than scaling ticket sales.
Anyways Yatra also claims to have roped in advertisers like Nokia, Airtel, Citibank, HP, ICICI, Reliance Communications, Tata Indicom, Hyundai i20, Mahindra Xylo, Fiat Linea, Maruti Suzuki and some more. There is no word on whether these are through an adnetwork or directly to yatra.
On the point of performance vs branding based advertising Nikhil Rungta – Head of Marketing for Yatra.com said, “We will offer both branding and performance oriented solutions. For branding we have customized sponsorship packages and web banners; for performance we have an extremely qualified database for lead generation, SMS and e-Mail marketing,”.
We hope they don’t spam people in the name of performance marketing. Given the recessionary environment and pressures on revenues dont be surprised if some websites you signed up ages back start sending you 20 mails a day!
Now the BIG question: Will advertising work on a Travel Booking site?
I have my doubts on the same. See its the objective the user comes for on a website. I expect Click through rates to be dismal on Yatra.com and even if impressions are high there is a difference between impressions and actual visibility of the ad. Users come to sites like yatra with a clear objective i.e. to book flights, rails, buses etc. So only relevant context ads like hotels, tourism related, luggage brands might work from a visibility point of view as these ads will catch my attention given my mindset at the time of booking the site. Also creative has a large role to play which is grossly undermined and not considered into the equation when one talks of perfomance marketing.
All in all I would be surprised if given the times Yatra does garner sizeable revenue via ads. More that building revenue it might just compromise the user experience on the travel site and cause a dip in the travel bookings. A place where ads might work better would be Yatra’s travel content community portal Raahi.com.
boooo….dont you talk about branding and advertising with these guys – when thy preach CPA as an advertiser – and now want to sell high CPM as a publisher – lolz loosers
Well I have a different opinion on this. I work in the travel and tourism industry and know how well Yatra.com is doing. It is a different business model altogether. For Yatra.com online travel still remains as the core area of operations and the ad sales department is just an addition to the existing portfolio of Yatra.com.