METASEARCH

AT SCALE
This guide was developed specifically for hospitality digital hospitality marketing executives
and stakeholders ultimately responsible for metasearch performance. The intended audience
also includes those day-to-day managers and analysts who are already running metasearch
campaigns at scale. Our hope is to share the knowledge that weve gained working with some
of the top hospitality brands in the world and by doing so, help executives develop their own
playbooks and strategic plans.

Through pitches, interviews, observation sessions, and our day-to-day client interactions
weve developed a number of insights and best practices that should help improve campaign
performance on channels like Googles Hotel Ads, TripAdvisor, Kayak, and Trivago.

When developing this guide, weve tried to specifically focus on the needs of those teams re-
sponsible for enterprise-level campaigns covering anywhere from hundreds to hundreds of
thousands of properties. While we believe the content herein is valuable to hoteliers of any size,
it should be noted that the dynamics of managing metasearch for a single property and at the
enterprise level can vary greatly.

Whats Inside

How Metasearch Works (For Digital Marketers)

The Future of Metasearch Advertising
Effectively Leveraging Technology Platforms
Strategies & Tactics to Maximize Performance

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CONTENTS

Investing in Metasearch
Metasearch for Digital Marketers
Where Metasearch is Going Next
User-facing Innovations
Search Improvements
Loyalty Programs and Personalization
Reviews
Mobile
Social Integration
Innovations in Advertising

Maximizing Metasearch Performance

Team Organization
Core Responsibilities
Data Quality
Data Analysis
Marketing Optimization
Publisher Relationships
Assuming spend gurantees service
Making everything a top priority
Delivering one sided feedback
Investing in Technology
Best Practices & Management Patterns
Demand
Cored Data
Distribution
Optimization

About Koddi

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INVESTING IN METASEARCH

Travel metasearch is experiencing a surge in popularity amongst both travel shoppers and
marketers. With metasearch acquisitions from online travel giants Priceline (Kayak), and Expedia
(Trivago), as well as technology mogul Google growing its metasearch offering by licensing
Room 77s metasearch engine, metasearch has become the fastest growing channel for travel
shopping1.

According to emarketer, nearly two-thirds of US Internet users will research travel via
digitalchannels2 and as a result, travel metasearch engines are becoming more popular amongst
travel shoppers thanks to the ability to compare different brands, products and prices early in
the path to purchase. While shoppers are presented with relevant content, real-time pricing and
hotel availability, marketers and brands are experiencing higher returns for the hotels placed
within metasearch engines.

As companies such as Google and TripAdvisor continue to improve their metasearch offering,
search volume and influence within the online travel industry will only continue to experience
growth. More than one-third of U.S. online travel shoppers (and more than half of Chinese
online travel shoppers) use metasearch engines. Twentyeight percent of U.S. leisure travelers
report using metasearch engines in 2013 for travel reservations, up from 18 percent in 20123.

The lure of metasearch continues to draw in marketers as it offers a competitive but equal
selling environment that provides both a relevant and customized user experience along
with multiple purchase options for online travel shoppers. However, when new opportunities
emerge, so do new challenges. The metasearch landscape is constantly evolving which requires
ongoing maintenance and resources. Most metasearch campaigns are purchased through a
cost-per-click auction environment that requires constant attention and analysis. In order to
capitalize on the opportunity, brands and marketers alike must invest in ongoing campaign
management and get the technology in place to provide current availability and hotel pricing
information.

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METASEARCH FOR DIGITAL MARKETERS

The internal workings of metasearch engines have been covered at length in a number of
excellent publications and presentations. We thought it might be helpful to look at things from
a different perspective: what are the mechanics of metasearch from an advertisers viewpoint?
The components that well explore are foundational to the strategies that we believe the most
successful advertisers will employ.

Quite simply, metasearch output (in terms of revenue and bookings) is the function of four
elements: demand, core hotel data, distribution, and optimization.

Revenue = f(Demand, Core Data, Distribution, Optimization)

Demand
Think of demand at the hotel level as that total potential volume for a hotel or set of hotels.
While demand can be affected by advertising, branding, and marketing activities, within the
context of metasearch it is usually an upper bound of the total revenue you can achieve. This
value has virtual constraints such as the number of users searching on metasearch engines and
physical constraints, such as the location and number of the hotels in your campaigns. The total
addressable demand for an advertiser is affected by pricing, inventory, and reputation.

Reputation can have a much greater impact on demand than some advertisers want to admit.
If the total demand for a market is 1,000 rooms per night, but one of your properties has a few
bad reviews, the total addressable demand can be much lower. There are some guests that
simply will not consider your property or properties if their minimum rating and/or density of
reviews is not met.

Core Data
Basic hotel information - hotel name, address, phone number, amenities, latitude, longitude,
etc. - is usually not at the top of the marketing executives mind, and for fair reasons. Most
advertisers think their core data is good, or at least good enough. This thinking can cause a lot of
money to be left on the table. At Koddi, it hasnt been uncommon for us to find data issues with
10-20% of a chains properties when were onboarding a new client. Bad data can be a blind spot
for advertisers because it often leads to silent failures that can add up to significant shortfalls.

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Consider the formula shown in the
introduction to this section. The Hotel Name Hotel Name
potential revenue that you can drive Address Address
from metasearch is, to this point, a Phone Number MATCH Phone Number
function of the total demand across Zip Code Zip Code
your property set and your core data.
How so? Metasearch engines can only Even though the data in the example above doesnt
show (good) ads when they can match match exactly, it matches closely enough to assume
your property to the their own data that the property on the right is the same as the
set. This match is often done through property on the left
a clustering of data points. Bad or
missing core data can cause your ads
not to be seen, or even worse, to be
seen for the wrong property.

Core Data isnt always a 1 or 0 multiplier; amenities are a good example of where impact can be
more nuanced. If your data is not listing Free Breakfast as one of your amenities when it is in
fact offered, then you are probably not missing out on a significant number of searches. Missing
multiple amenities (or having incorrect ones listed) across hundreds of properties and multiple
metasearch engines could cause a measurable effect on volume and performance, though.

Distribution
The impact that Distribution has on your total metasearch revenue is determined by two sets
of factors: accuracy and speed. Accuracy is affected by how well rate, availability, and room
data match up to the canonical data source and the overall completeness of data. Speed is the
amount of time it takes for the metasearch engine to consume and reflect the data from its
canonical source.

Speed is a relative concept here; whats fast for one supplier may be irrelevant to another if
that supplier updates rates more or moves inventory more or less quickly.

Measuring distribution efficacy is important to advertisers, and there are a lot of different ways
to go about it. Many advertisers crawl publisher partners to pull to parity, and use this data for
competitive research. There is a free method to acquiring this data if you participate in Google
Hotel Ads, covered in the section on Management Patterns.

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Optimization
The final element is also the one that responds the most dramatically and immediately to
change and effort. Optimization represents all of the activities that go into the day-to-day
management of a campaign. This can include bidding, reporting, analysis, testing, copywriting,
and placement negotiation.

There are three major types of cost models for metasearch campaigns:

1. Cost-per-click or CPC, which is self explanatory.

2. Cost-per-action, commission, or CPA, where a fee or % of booking value is charged.
3. Hybrid, which is a combination of the two.

These cost models can individually become more complex. In Googles Hotel Ads, CPCs can be
adjusted by many different factors including the cost of the hotel room, the placement of the ad
within the search results, the length of the stay, the location of the user, and the type of device
a user is using. TripAdvisor and Trivago CPCs vary primarily by the source of traffic, but can also
become more complicated by their Bucket system, in which a bid is made by selecting a Bucket
that corresponds to a CPC value.

While these options do add complexity, they are also extremely valuable to advertisers. Each
attribute described above has a significant impact on the value of the click. The ability to bid
by those attributes allows an advertiser to match the value of the click with the cost per click.
These bidding mechanisms give advertisers the ability to target users more granularly than they
otherwise could.

Weve included reporting here as a specific consideration because it is often not planned for.
Without the right automation in place, reporting can take a significant amount of time. Some
teams have dedicated analysts that in actuality do very little analysis, and mostly compile reports
from disparate data sources. Reporting quality is made up of the accuracy of data, its granular-
ity, and its efficiency. Reporting that comes in any later than the next day is a liability because it
can delay responding to any issues with campaigns.

Many metasearch engines dont provide reporting data in as timely a fashion as digital
executives are used to, sometimes taking days or even weeks to reconcile cost data at the
most granular level. The means and methods for delivery are also dated, in an industry that
heavily relies on APIs, only two major metasearch providers (Google and TripAdvisor) provide
programmatic access to reporting data.

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Optimization also affects the total revenue for a metasearch campaign by impacting the
positions and ranks in which ads appear. As a general rule, high rankings drive more traffic.
Ranking is typically a factor of the offer - the price for a room relative to competing advertisers
- and the bid. On Google, some preference is given to the best offer but it is possible to outrank
that offer with a high enough bid. On Trivago and Kayak, position 1 is always given to the
lowest price.

WHERE METASEARCH IS GOING NEXT

The metasearch space is changing quickly, and effectively planning for the future requires some
idea of where things are going. In the section below, weve chosen some parts of the metasearch
experience that we believe will change for both consumers and advertisers.

User-facing Innovations

We believe savvy metasearch companies are focused on the challenges that consumers are
having today and will continue to make incremental improvements to the process in the coming
years. Innovations focused on user experience can fuel advertising innovations, and advertisers
can start making small investments today to be in front future trends.

Search Improvements
Metasearch engines generally have a tremendous amount of information about hotels, but you
wouldnt know it by using their search features. Search is something that has been limited in the
name of simplification. One challenge for publishers is that adding too much choice and diversi-
ty into the search process would likely limit usefulness to the average user.

Multi-directional transparency will catalyze evolution in metasearch. As users search more and
in more advanced ways, metasearch engines will be able to more effectively fine tune the search
process. Instead of a future where a user has thousands of filtering options, both parties will
know a little more about each other and be able to get closer to the right result set for that user.

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TripAdvisor has shown great
improvements in search. Users are
allowed to customize their experience and
integrate with social media platforms to
modify the search results to a hotel that
the user is likely looking for. On the right
is a landing page from an organic click
through Google on romantic hotels
in Dallas.

Interestingly, Googles results for Hotel

Ads is much less keyword-aware,
but expect for this to become a more
personalized experience across
all publishers.

Loyalty Programs and Personalization

Increased personalization will also make its way into the inventory search results. Many engines
have or are building integrations with loyalty programs. Results in the future will be impacted
by things as simple as generic bonus offers or special treatments from those programs to more
complex recommendations like this room costs $24 more, but will enable you to reach Platinum
status before your trip on the 17th.

Reviews
Early in their evolution, metasearch engines increased the value of reviews by focusing on
volume, and then on quality. There have been some experiments, successful and unsuccessful,
on the structure of reviews. Today, even very new engines have access to plenty of review data
from third parties. Google has even integrated reviews from online travel sources into their
Hotel Finder experience as seen below. The next increases in review value from the searchers
perspective will come in exposing the right reviews in the right scenario.

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The business traveler and the leisure traveler have different value points and bases for compar-
ison. Even the same traveler in different scenarios will need access to different data points to
make the right decision. Today, the traveler bears the responsibility to synthesize all the infor-
mation at hand and apply it to his or her case.

Mobile
Device, means of consumption, and engagement points are also evolving. Metasearch has be-
come more mobile, but the research side of the experience is still underserved. Publishers that
rely heavily on mobile-ports of desktop usage patterns struggle with stickiness. Where compa-
nies like Google and TripAdvisor are currently delivering well for users, it is within their ability to
serve as a travel tools beyond metasearch.

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 Metasearch mobile traffic is growing by 25% every month

25%

TripAdvisors mobile app allows users to deeply engage with relevant content throughout the
lifecycle of their booking with information around attractions, things to do, restaurants, and
more.

Googles entire ecosystem is starting to helpfully integrate travel data into all of its applications.
Already, if a traveler uses Google Now, they will see information on their upcoming trips and
hotel bookings. When they use Google Maps to look up their hotel, data about their stay
including check-in and check-out times are seamlessly integrated into the hotels
information card.

Geo-local and map-based innovations will also impact users. Maps are already starting to
become more dynamic and personalized, with Googles implementation as the most robust
example. It is unlikely that many publishers will invest as advanced a map application;
regardless, with the Google Maps API, OpenStreetMaps, and other already well-built map
applications, other publishers could layer interesting data sets onto maps and thereby create
unique value. Hipmunks heatmap feature is a great example of this.

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Social Integration
Publishers will continue to integrate more deeply with social sites, giving them deeper insight
into a users preferences and previous interactions. Social data can also help customize the
user experience to show the right types of hotels and room combinations. For example, if a
user had previously checked in at a hotel or liked a specific brand, social data could be used to
power what hotels and rooms are shown to them. Day of week and stay length data can then be
layered on top of this to understand what type of travel the user is doing, and further refine
the results.

Innovations in Advertising

Metasearch advertising is slightly behind the rest of the digital marketing world. In search
and display, there is rich user data, bidding across any conceivable dimension, and heavy
standardization around reporting figures and means. Metasearch is a different story; advertiser
campaigns are typically run through a series of spreadsheets, e-mail requests, and
manual activities.

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Only recently (in parallel to this documents writing, in fact) are some of the largest metasearch
publishers allowing some of their customers limited API access to some of their customers.
This means that even basic advertising has been a fairly inefficient activity, and that doing so
effectively is a considerable time investment.

Automating metasearch optimization and reporting as a clear and direct focus point is a rela-
tively new activity, with only a handful of companies in the world specializing in this. Building
technology exclusively for enterprise advertisers is all we do at Koddi. From this experience, a
number of immediate opportunities are clear.

Eventually, access to data will become more automated. Google has set a new standard in the
competitive set with data that helps advertisers optimize to every dimension of their campaign
and programmatic access to reporting data. Advertisers will adopt these standards, allowing
them to report on, analyze, and optimize their campaigns from one point. Today this exists for a
handful of providers; someday, a new metasearch engine wont offer bidding without providing
access to reliable data.

The granularity and timeliness of this data will also improve. A business traveler and a leisure
traveler booking a three-night stay in New York City will act differently and need to be valued
differently; advertisers will benefit greatly from bidding on them intelligently or customizing
their value proposition.The context of these two travelers is also important, but today it is largely
unavailable to advertisers. What the user was searching on, what filters they used, and their
previous activity are all critical factors for determining when, where, and how much to invest in
acquiring them.

In addition to data access and granularity, the methods in which bids can be adjusted and
controlled will continue to become more sophisticated. Currently, Google leads the way with
giving the most granular control over bidding, but an advertisers is still at the mercy of the
publisher on the number of eligible impressions the advertiser can receive. Giving advertisers
more control over where their ad shows within search results, not just where their ads show in
the auction, will give advertisers the flexibility to use metasearch ads to support
branding initiatives.

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MAXIMIZING METASEARCH PERFORMANCE

As a result of increasing importance and complexity, it is critical to get the right plan in place
to maximize yield from growing metasearch campaigns. In the next section, weve outlined a few
specific actions to consider, apply, or improve upon based on the best practices weve found
working with some of the most innovative hoteliers and OTAs in the world.

Team Organization

Every brand we work with is different, but we have seen certain trends in team organization
and structure that are worth pointing out as they relate to high-performance metasearch. The
status quo today is for a digital marketing organization to be split officially or unofficially into
two groups. Largely these are digital marketing / ecommerce and distribution.

Metasearch optimization responsibilities often lie with a specialist that more closely aligns to the
distribution group. Historically, this has made a lot of sense; a few years ago
metasearch was considered to be a low-touch channel.

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As metasearch has become increasingly complex, gray areas have begun to form. For example, it
is not uncommon to see the management of Google Hotel Ads residing with the team that focus-
es on Paid Search programs, while Distribution manages TripAdvisor.

Based on our beliefs about where metasearch is headed in the coming years, we predict an
increasing shift of bidding and optimization responsibilities to Digital Marketing teams. In orga-
nizations in which a hybrid management style exists, those with more specialization in Digital
Marketing will become responsible for the optimization of metasearch campaigns as well.

Two of the core pillars of high performance metasearch (data analysis and marketing optimiza-
tion) require distinct and sometimes divergent skillsets. In response, we see our most successful
clients shifting bidding and optimization management to their digital groups while the distri-
bution groups focuses on data integrity to and maintaining a high level of quality within those
channels.

Core Responsibilities

Referring back to the model mentioned above in the Metasearch for Digital Marketers section,
we can pull out three core responsibilities at which a high-functioning team must excel at, and
the skill sets that will set that team up for success; Data Quality, Data Analysis, and Marketing
Optimization.

Data Quality
Data quality can be a significant challenge for teams without a background in distribution, and
the most impressive managers we see come from that talent pool. Achieving and maintaining
a high level of data quality requires familiarity and comfort with the systems that make rate
and occupancy data available to outside partners.

This responsibility requires the ability to effectively and efficiently communicate with technical
resources and teams, as well as the ability to quickly troubleshoot any unexpected errors. Any
hitch in this process will cause performance issues at some point.

Quick Test: { What was our price accuracy on TripAdvisor yesterday?}

Data Analysis
Any standard reporting, insights, and deeper questions about campaign performance fall into
the realm of data analysis. Effective data analysis requires a thorough understanding of business
goals, metrics, tracking platforms, attribution, and company systems.

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Successful analysts get accurate reports and insights to relevant stakeholders quickly They
provide high-level focus points for active and historical metasearch campaigns and help
to identify new opportunities. The best analysts proactively find and resolve reporting
discrepancies, ensure that analytics systems are performing consistently, suggest leading KPIs,
prove (or disprove) microconversion hypotheses, and can model the effects that different
strategies and tactics may have before they are implemented.

Top candidates to fill analyst roles (or roles that require some reporting and analysis) will have
experience and certification in your organizations analytics platform or software. They will
understand outofthebox and custom reports, be able to efficiently create insightful views
of datasets, and have a strong understanding of different attribution models.

Quick Test: { What metasearch engines had the highest bounce rate yesterday?}

Marketing Optimization
Setting and reviewing bids, designing and executing A/B tests, communicating with internal
and external partners, communicating and pushing promotions, and reviewing performance
are some of the day-to-day activities in the marketing optimization responsibility set.

Increasingly, metasearch publishers will soon be enabling advanced bidding options similar to
what Google has put in place with their Hotel Ads. This includes unique bids by properties or
placements, and even very granular details like by length of stay and user device. These
options are valuable in that they allow the advertiser to target the exact user they want or
need to convert.

Advanced advertisers are finding success in having team members with backgrounds in Paid
Search take on the optimization aspects of metasearch campaigns. The skills that these search
experts have learned and practiced on that side of the business allow them to think about
metasearch optimization problems in new ways. The level of detail they expect from publishers
and the velocity at which they expect new data and insights serves to tip the scales more in the
advertisers favor.

The highest-performing teams that we have seen possess these core competencies. Depending
on budget and complexity, these teams are sometimes made up of a single or shared resource;
other times, they are made up of as many as 10 resources when an agency is involved and
considered. With the right skill sets, teams of various sizes can do great work.

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Publisher Relationships

A great relationship with a publisher can be the difference between good results and great
results. A great publisher relationship can mean getting an extra bit of insight that will help you
maximize your campaign or being involved in the latest beta. A relationship thats less than great
(or worse, non-existent) can mean a better insight and a head-start for the competition. It can
mean the difference between being involved in the next beta or missing it completely while your
competitor gets the head start.

Advertisers running high-performance metasearch campaigns often have many or all of the
following things in common:

They know and contribute to the publishers roadmap.

They clearly prioritize for the publisher and hold them accountable.
They actively provide mutually beneficial feedback.
They develop publisherside representatives into advocates.

It may seem obvious, but were compelled to include this section because of the number of
advertisers we see or talk to that dont have productive relationships with their publishers.
This affects their campaigns by slowing down insights, keeping them out of important new
initiatives, or missing out on opportunities because they havent considered their publisher
partners roadmap in their own strategic planning.

Some of the most common pitfalls that cause advertisers to fall out of sync with metasearch
publishers are below.

Assuming spend guarantees service

In working with some of the biggest metasearch advertisers in the space, weve seen it
proven that this is definitely not the case. There will almost always going to be another
advertiser investing orders of magnitude more than you are.

Making everything a top priority

Most metasearch publishers in the space are big companies. Account management teams
are often a few layers removed from engineering by at least a few layers. If someone on the
account team is going to push an initiative, its best if there is a very clear story and priority to it.
Advertisers sometimes end up sabotaging themselves by having a new top priority every
few days.

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Delivering one-sided feedback
Publishers often have well-intentioned interest in improving things for their advertisers, and will
solicit their feedback. Some hoteliers weve met miss out on the opportunity to maximize the
value of this conversation by being self-focused. We consistently see mutually beneficial
feedback be acted on more quickly. As an example, one-sided feedback is we need better
ranking data, whereas mutually beneficial feedback looks more like we project that we could
invest 16% more with ranking data.

Investing in Technology

The right technology can add a tremendous amount of efficiency and performance to
campaigns. It can free up your team to invest time in growing the business and executing great
campaigns. As a result, many of our clients are able to increase their investment and their return
at the same time when leveraging the Koddi platform.

In 30 days, we helped drive:

56% 1200 24%

Increase in ROI Additional Bookings Increase in Conversion Rate

Our program to date ROI is currently at a > 25:1 and growing

The best technology in the metasearch space is purpose-built for metasearch. Bidding
platforms adapted from paid search applications tend to be cumbersome and dont solve
issues end to end. It takes focus and a very specific experience set to build a platform to the
specifications advanced advertisers require.

It should also leverage the advertisers canonical analytics. At Koddi, we call this leveraging
the advertisers source of truth. Over reporting is rampant in the metasearch space because
of legacy tracking concerns that are rarely still founded. Weve worked with advertisers who
had been erroneously reporting the ROI on major campaigns at 200-300% higher than reality.

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Your metasearch management technology investment should enable:

Total integration with existing analytics platforms

Completely automated, customizable reporting at any level of granularity
Dashboarding and data visualization
Automated bid management
Access to every advanced bid dimension
Service to help review and implement new strategies
The ability to customize automation to your business needs

With how quickly the metasearch space is changing, your technology or technology provider
should also be nimble enough to quickly integrate and adapt to those changes. Release
cycles should be frequent as new publishers arise, features are added, and APIs are added or
modified. Ultimately, your technology investment should be a decision that unlocks your
potential for success in metasearch, gives you highlevel and granular visibility into
performance, frees your team up to do high-value tasks, and is customized to give you a
unique advantage in the space.

Best Practices & Management Patterns

In conclusion, the most successful advertisers we work with are great at manipulating as
many levers across their campaigns as possible. These activities create patterns of success
that can be organized into the elements of the formula we introduced in the beginning of
this guide:

Revenue = f(Demand, Core Data, Distribution, Optimization)

Demand
Advertisers should strive to understand demand at as granular a level as possible while
keeping their ability to roll up demand intact. This roll-up should align tightly with how the
business is ultimately managed. This data can be informed by and compared to demand data
across channels, enabling you to identify gaps in expected, observed, and realized volume.

In addition to coming from platforms like Koddi, demand data can come from search
campaigns (think queries like hotels in Dallas, for example) or from publisher partners.
Metasearch publishers are usually happy to share top market information around volume as
well as movement from quarter to quarter. Acquire this data regularly to understand whats go-
ing on in the marketplace and compare it to your own campaigns. Any gaps may indicate an
opportunity worth pursuing.

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Core Data
Core data may seem much less actionable and interesting, and maybe its because of this
misconception that it represents such a significant growth opportunity for so many advertisers.

Best-in-class advertisers constantly maintain, optimize, and redistribute their core hotel data.
A common misconception among advertisers is that core hotel data is a static data set. This
often couldnt be further from the truth! Over the course of a year, even an advertiser with a
portfolio of only a handful of hotels will have openings, closings, remodels, expansions, changes
in amenities, phone number changes, address changes, and flag changes, just to name a few.
When weve tracked this data for large advertisers weve seen hotel data vary by a few percent
month to month.

If these changes arent promptly reflected, the result is an outdated data set with significant
consequences. Consider the hotel that changes its phone number, but fails to update its core
data. How many bad customer experiences could that contribute to? If one of those customers
leave a scathing review due to their bad experience, how much future business could be lost?

A strong core data program not only has mechanisms to track the quality of any outgoing core
data, it also tracks how data shows up at its destination. Many publishers either merge data
from several different sources automatically, or have processes that have less quality assurance
than you might expect. Both of these scenarios can contribute to unexpected results.

The team responsible for this data should have a way to measure its accuracy across partners
over time, and should seek out feedback explaining non-matches. The team should make
updated, fresh, optimized data available to publishers and marketing partners, and ensure that
those partners use it.

In addition to accuracy the team should also strive to be constantly improving the quality of
the data through an optimization plan. Location data for better or worse is something that
moves through organizations pretty slowly. Its realistic to budget a few minutes a week to
positively affect the quality of core hotel data by expanding / validating amenities, optimizing
content, or confirming key NAP (name, address, phone number) information.

Best-in-class core data, by definition, is accurate, rich, and easily accessible. The more this is the
case across all channels, the more effectively advertisers are able to respond to demand. If it
isnt realistic to manage this internally, these activities can be outsourced to any number of com-
panies for relatively little investment.

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Distribution
In a high-performance environment, connectivity and distribution are measured and
accountable. The efficacy of distribution can be measured through automated parity reporting
or through accuracy spot checks. This is currently a black box for too many advertisers they
dont know how bad or good things are at any given time. Often, no news (a la customer
or partner complaints) is good news.

Since distribution and connectivity are so frequently outsourced, this isnt a big surprise.
Advertisers dont need to settle for this though: it should be relatively easy for the
vendor to provide clear KPIs for distribution activities. Advertisers should be dashboarding
these KPIs and have processes to respond quickly and proactively to any changes.

In addition to these on-the-fly metrics, high performance advertisers regularly and formally
solicit feedback from publishers around the quality of their data. Scheduling these activities on
a frequent basis helps to ensure consistent and incremental improvement.

Optimization
When it comes to optimization, dont settle for anything less than 100% automated reporting
that aligns as closely as possible with your internal source of truth. Paying intelligent people to
compose reports in Excel for hours per day instead of leveraging them to analyze
and grow campaigns is simply not going to move the needle.

Every data point relevant to your metasearch decision making should be at your teams disposal
and reconciled at a reasonable time. Anything less means that money is being left on the table.

Analysis should be formalized and process-oriented, with those processes being improved
over time. Investing in even very basic analytical training can pay dividends. Any time
something is missed or misrepresented, its a great opportunity to revisit that process and
reprogram that behavior.

The most sophisticated advertisers dont optimize bids, they optimize bidding algorithms and
strategies. Humans can be dangerous bidders: they have a bias towards seeing the success
in their decisions, they bid emotionally, and they cant store all the data needed to analyze
what strategies were successful and what strategies missed the mark.

That is not to say that they cant get amazing results; they absolutely can. What they cant do
though is repeat that analyze, bid, review cycle day in and day out with efficiency and
absolute precision.

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When those bidding activities are automated, the metasearch optimization specialist has the
opportunity to improve the process over time instead of undertaking the Herculean task of
manual bid management. They are able to review, design, and implement different bid
strategies that impact campaigns in a longer-term, more reliable, and more scalable way.

While powerful, automated bidding is not a silver bullet, moving to some level of bid
automation through a platform like Koddi can open the team to do some very impactful
manual optimizations in a much more controlled environment, like conducting tests or
adjusting overall campaigns to take advantage of promotions.

It also creates the opportunity for much more controlled and formalized testing, which goes
beyond testing of the algorithm. Testing encompasses a host of activities ranging from where
to advertise and what placements to test to how to optimize the landing page, and what offers
to put in front of certain segments.

The best metasearch marketers augment automation when necessary. In times of promotion
or heavy advertising on another channel it makes sense to boost or pull back on specific
segments. To get the most of these activities, document what went into those changes to see
if its possible to automate those steps. Design and test different hypotheses based on what
you know about how your users actually book. For example,if you know that Canadian users
book long stays on your properties in Mexico, test bidding to those specific scenarios. There
is still magic in marketing; the job of technology is to make it easier to make that magic more
efficient, accountable, and repeatable.

ABOUT KODDI

Koddi was founded in May 2013 specifically to tackle the challenges advertisers face in the
metasearch space. We live to create technical solutions that make digital advertisers more
successful and are motivated daily by client results. We run an engineering forward company
that solves problems quickly and releases platform updates almost daily.

Our clients include some of the top hotel and travel brands in the world who trust us with
campaigns totaling hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Koddi is based in Fort Worth,
Texas.

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