This week marked the summer solstice and the official beginning of the summer season. For travel brands, however, the summer travel season has been in full swing for a couple of months now. Summer means increased ice cream sales, high cooling bills and most relevant to us–lots of travel.

When planning yearly budgets, the Koddi team places a heavy emphasis on maximizing summer performance. This is because summer can either make or break a travel brand’s year. There are hundreds of things that we do to prepare, but we thought it might be helpful to share some of the most important steps we take to ensure our clients have a successful summer season.

Here are our top ten tips for maximizing summer metasearch performance:

1. Budget for Seasonality – Proper forecasting is a finely-tuned skillset made up of art and science. There are thousands of variables to consider, and no two advertisers follow the same trends. When planning summer budgets, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. We’ve invested heavily in developing technology and the expertise needed to forecast budgets for our clients accurately. That said, most travel advertisers can anticipate a significant seasonal increase in demand. To capture demand, advertisers need to make sure their budgets can keep up with it. Losing out on bookings due to poor planning marks a huge opportunity loss.

2. Focus on Summer Markets – This point is pretty intuitive but often overlooked because it can be very difficult to accomplish at scale. Hotels located in beach-adjacent locales tend to see the biggest increases in activity. Metasearch sites allow you to target these customers specifically. At a minimum, travel brands should make sure they are regularly keeping up with competition on their properties in hot markets. Best case, travel brands should implement automated bidding algorithms (like the ones used at Koddi) to react to market trends on a real-time basis and maximize activity right when users are searching.

3. Audit Your Account – We harp on this point a lot, but poor hotel data, missing rates, or overlooked mistakes can dramatically reduce campaign performance. Whether it is a wrong address, mismatched property, rouge bid, or forgotten daily spend cap, small mistakes can have a damaging impact during summer months. It is important to ensure that hotel information is correct, account settings are properly dialed in and that all placements have accurate bids. A full audit can be a time-intensive process. Luckily Koddi has a full suite of tools that automates most of this work.

4. Target the Summer Traveler – There is a ton of flexibility in the way you can approach bidding across metasearch publishers. To reach summer customers, ensure that bids match expected behaviors. For example, users searching for resort properties in Hawaii will likely book a longer length of stay. Brands looking to capture vacation traffic from this market would, therefore, need to increase their bids on longer lengths of stay.

5. Ensure Full Rate Coverage – A metasearch best practice, ensuring rate coverage, is vital during the summer seasons. Missing rates means missing impressions, which leads to lost bookings. At Koddi, we continually ingest many different reports to ensure we are maximizing coverage for our clients.

6. Leverage Internal Data – When we first start working with a new advertiser, we often find that they are sitting on a goldmine of unused information. Internal data such as occupancy data and customer loyalty information is instrumental when designing a comprehensive metasearch strategy. For example, we found that by leveraging internal occupancy data we were able to drive a 10% lift in conversion and drive a 20% lift in bookings. Incorporating additional data sources is challenging, and we’ve spent a lot of time turning this process into a repeatable science. The summer season is when you will see the biggest bang for your buck from this kind of investment.

7. Update Inventory – Too often we see advertisers taking months to add new properties to their metasearch campaign because of inefficient upstream processes. The longer the hotel is off of the market, the more impressions, bookings, and revenue is lost. If there are new properties still not included in your inventory, now is the time to get them up and running.

8. Check Insertion Orders (IOs) – Another simple point, but one of the most crucial. A well-oiled metasearch campaign will see large increases in spending during the summer months. If the advertiser’s current agreement does not cover the increase in spending, their campaign will shut down mid-season. This is especially devastating if it occurs over the weekend or leading up to a major holiday. Now is a perfect time to double check current spend pacing and existing insertion orders. Make sure there is plenty of room for scale.

9. Optimize for Mobile – Mobile is a huge source of traffic for metasearch advertisers, especially those who are advertising budget rooms. We found that nearly 51% of bookings for rooms priced under $150 came from mobile users. So it goes without saying, this traffic deserves attention. There are a hundred ways to improve your mobile experience, and we have explored this concept in great detail. At a minimum, custom bid strategies should be put in place to maximize mobile traffic for affordable room types. This will go a long way in capturing last-minute, short-term and budget customers.

10. Promote Summer Sales – Last but not least, ensure that the best deal available is being advertised across all metasearch sites. Price is overwhelmingly the most important factor influencing booking behavior, and summer sales can drive big results. Displaying sales and member rates is an excellent way to capture traffic. When possible, leverage features like Google callouts to highlight time-sensitive deals. Regardless of how customers get the deal, it is always best to advertise only the absolute lowest price instead of using a strikethrough option. In fact, we have found that when comparing the two options displaying only the lowest price drives a 30% higher click-through rate and a higher 16% conversion rate.

These ten tips are a good starting place to help any advertiser improve summer performance, but there is so much more to cover. To see these points and others explained in greater detail, download our free whitepaper on metasearch.