Mobile Travel takes off - Google London event

I popped along to the Mobile Travel takes off event at Google London on Wednesday 15 of May.

Aimed at the who’s who of UK online travel I guess it was inevitable I’d bump into lots of former travel clients from my agency side days.

Below and coming up in future blogs are my main takeouts from the afternoon.

Mobile no longer *just* end of funnel transactional

Google are really pushing the fact that there is a trend towards mobile being the start of the discovery stage of the travel funnel, not just the transactional stage.

Yes there are the last click ‘I need a hotel tonight’ last minute transactions that  are on the whole really good at fulfilling but, with their statistic of 47% of all UK travel transactions starting on mobile, more attention needs to be to the top of the funnel ‘needs inspiration’ user.

Desktop sites are fulfilling this task excellently on the whole but Google explained often the user experience on most mobile site versions drops the user mid funnel, not good for the more fluffy user who is just whimsically in dire need of inspiration.

Google’s enhanced PPC campaign  already deals with serving a different “ad based on geo” location and device type amongst other things which in part can help with this issue but if the site the user lands on isn’t up to the task it’s a wasted visit.

As a footnote, it’s interesting to see Lastminute.com’slatest TV campaign encouraging users directly to their mobile site and be inspired (e.g. the 20 second Paris ad, rumour has it is unfortunatly the only recent 10 second ad for them that hasn't really performed).