Hotel group Accor has signed a new deal with digital marketing agency Kenshoo to manage its social media advertising globally.

The extended agreement will also see Accor adopt Kenshoo SmartPath for dynamic conversion attribution modelling.

This analyses the contribution of different digital marketing channels on hotel bookings so the firm can optimise advertising spend.

Accor brands include Ibis, Novotel, Mercure, Sofitel, Pullman, MGallery, Adagio and HotelF1, and it operates over 3,500 hotels in 92 countries.

The company already uses Kenshoo Search for managing global paid search advertising campaigns and claims to have seen an increase of 149% in revenues year on year.

Daniel Morgan, head of search engine marketing at Accor, said: “We’ve been using Kenshoo Search since 2011 and have seen impressive results and massive increases in revenues.

“We’ve been optimising paid search spend using a combination of our own and Kenshoo’s attribution tracking technology, which gave us interesting insights, such as the fact that people who’ve viewed our ads are also more likely to go on and book hotel rooms when they subsequently see Accor in emails, maps, or on affiliate sites.

“We’re now starting to use Kenshoo Social to manage social ad campaigns and Kenshoo SmartPath to help us optimise our digital marketing spend even better by accounting for how different channels like search, social, and email influence bookings.”

Morgan added: “Tracking the effect of our social advertising – whether it directly or indirectly results in bookings – in combination with other channels such as search and email is extremely important to us.

“Kenshoo Social, in combination with Kenshoo SmartPath, will give us an accurate way of doing this and making best use of our spend.”

Yossi Synett, director of analytics at Kenshoo, said: “Kenshoo SmartPath gives Accor a high level of accuracy in the way it measures the impact of different interactions when somebody books a hotel room through a cross-channel conversion path.

“For example, our sophisticated mathematical modelling process takes account of issues such as customer loyalty – has the user already stayed at an Accor hotel and does this affect the value assigned to a search or social ad when they book again?

“Another factor is causality – does someone click on an Accor search ad because they have already viewed a Facebook ad and, if so, how does this reflect on the value to be assigned to these interactions if it leads to a hotel booking? SmartPath answers these questions in real-time and Kenshoo updates bids accordingly.”

Rob Coyne, Kenshoo EMEA managing director, added: “It’s very satisfying when customers such as Accor are driven to invest further in Kenshoo technology after seeing real benefits from the products they are already using.

“It shows the value we’re continuing to deliver and is a testament to our focus on client excellence. Accor is quite an innovative company and Dan and his team are highly-regarded partners helping drive the Kenshoo platform forward.”

Source: www.travolution.co.uk