We are excited to announce the launch of Compete’s Travel Search Intelligence product. Throughout the month of September we will be featuring a series of Research Briefs that are focused on search and Compete’s new capabilities. For more information, please see the bottom of this page.

Search engine traffic is a significant contributor to shopper volumes at all of the major Online Travel Agencies (OTA’s). In this highly competitive market, several important shifts have been taking place with search market share over the past year. On average, Expedia captures 26% of all search traffic – including both paid and organic – meaning that approximately one in four search clicks to a major OTA go specifically to Expedia. Priceline has been on the rise, growing its share by nearly five percentage points compared to a year ago, while Cheaptickets is down the same amount. Expedia, Hotwire, Priceline and Travelocity all have slightly increased their share.

Digging deeper, the chart below illustrates the percentage of each OTA’s search referrals that were the result of a sponsored (paid) search click, as opposed to an organic (unpaid) click. On average, each OTA generates 36% of its search traffic from paid activity. With 44% of search referrals originating from paid search, Hotels.com posted the highest average amongst the rival set. Priceline and Expedia, meanwhile had the lowest levels of paid search traffic with 26% and 34%.

With ever increasing ROI expectations being placed on travel marketers, optimizing the online channel is critical. Given that many of the OTA’s are relying more heavily on paid search referrals, and the degree of volatility in this space, share of search traffic needs to be monitored closely across the competitive landscape. Compete’s Travel Search Intelligence can fill in the gaps with a web-wide view of your performance, benchmarked against rivals.

To learn more about how you can use Travel Search Intelligence, please contact Jack Drew from Compete’s travel team at jdrew@compete.com. We would gladly answer any questions or set up a product demonstration.

Also look for Compete at the Eye For Travel’s October conference in Las Vegas, where we will be making a research presentation on Meta Search on October 1st, and providing additional details on the Travel Search Intelligence product.