Leading small group adventure travel company generates 15% uplift in purchase per user by tailoring the booking experience
Industry
Capability Used
15%
uplift in purchase per user
using Global Control Group to measure overall impact of select campaigns
14.9%
increase in revenue per user
by optimizing the menu to include more navigational links
50%
increase in conversion rates
after dynamically injecting relevant trip-oriented content
Introduction
G Adventures is the leader in small group, responsible adventure travel. The company has grown from offering a handful of trips in Latin America to more than 700 adventures spanning the globe, with 200,000 travelers now exploring the world with them every year. But in a highly specialized space where not everyone loves to travel the same way, G Adventures sought to learn more about their customers and their unique needs. That’s when the team of passionate travel experts turned to Dynamic Yield’s powerful personalization engine, which they used to better tailor the right trip to each individual during the booking process. Upon doing so, G Adventures quickly became more customer-centric and witnessed significant uplifts in key business metrics, including a 15% increase in purchase per user.
“We love how Dynamic Yield has allowed us to learn more about our customer base. During our time experimenting with the platform, we’ve gained valuable insights into who the individuals are behind each of our trips and what their distinct buying habits are. We’re excited to launch more tests and look forward to its continued impact on the booking process.”
Greg Cormier, Global Director of Digital Marketing & Communications at G Adventures
The Challenge
With so many travel options available, discovering the right trip is a highly research-intensive process. Knowing this, G Adventures recognized it needed to help individuals find the right destination and tour for them. To bridge the gap, its team of experts would require a solution that could:
- Democratize data from various channels and sources
- Identify and analyze high-value audience groups
- Target audiences based on their affinity to different travel styles
- Optimize trip-oriented content throughout the site
After evaluating 20 other technology vendors in the space, G Adventures selected Dynamic Yield as its personalization partner.
Execution
Delivered targeted experiences on the homepage according to user affinity
As the main hub for many travelers searching to find the right trip, G Adventures sought to better leverage its homepage, which it utilizes to showcase its many tours. The first order of business was to use Dynamic Yield’s visual experience editor to adjust its hero banner, without any dependency on developers, according to the user’s affinity to a certain destination. The team served experiences targeted to 12 different countries, each with two variations – one highlighting people and the other, scenery or popular landmarks. After implementing, G Adventures found the location-based personalization outperformed its generic homepage for all countries in revenue per user.
Experience for travelers interested in Thailand: Focused on the country’s beaches
Experience for travelers interested in South Africa: Focused on safari trips
Next, G Adventures supercharged its heavily engaged Travel Style section on the homepage, targeting users with experiences based on travel style affinity. The team delivered and tested 10 experiences in total, one per trip style, pinning the preferred trip style in the first slot of the content widget. In almost all instances, the pinned affinity-experience proved higher in terms of both engagement and conversions, leading to substantial uplifts in revenue.
Affinity for Local Living Tours:
Affinity for Classic Tours:
Optimized the site’s main menu to include more navigational links
Originally, G Adventures’ three main menu links were static, redirecting visitors to separate pages for further exploration of its various Destinations, Travel Styles, and Travel Deals available. To make it easier to access all of this content, the team decided to optimize its navigation, rolling links to all of its top pages into one mega dropdown. The result was a 17.9% increase in purchases per user and 14.9% uplift in revenue per user.
Tested the impact of showing more or less content
Considering its Trip Pages (PDPs) have a ton of content, G Adventures hypothesized that active users will likely seek out more information if desired, but passive users may be turned off by information overload. To test this theory, the team removed blog posts featured on Trip Pages to focus the traveler’s attention on key benefits and increase purchase rates. In another attempt to eliminate unnecessary distractions on Trip Pages, G Adventures removed outbound links to other areas of the site where the likelihood of conversion is lower.
Control:
Variation (Fewer content blocks):
Finally, G Adventures experimented with layering alternative trip-oriented content on a handful of its Trip Pages. Using a rich media module, the team targeted specific trips centered around boats or marine activities with relevant videos and pictures about the boat, voyage, amenities, and crew. The additional content boosted conversion rates 50.96% and increased overall interest in the trip, generating a revenue uptick of 70.5%.
Ultimately, what the team discovered is that in some cases, reducing the amount of content on the trip page drastically improved conversions, purchases, and revenue, while in others, more content needed to be injected. Based on the initial success seen, G Adventures plans to continue its optimization of text, links, images, and videos not just on additional trip pages, but also other sections of the site.
The Key Takeaway
Travel is so personal to the individual, and therefore, the process of booking a trip has to be a highly tailored one. G Adventures understood it needed to know more about the travelers visiting its site in order to inspire action, the team just required the right technology to connect the dots and allow for the delivery of more personalized experiences. Using Dynamic Yield’s personalization technology, G Adventures joined their customers in exploration, experimenting with a number of different use cases to improve the overall customer experience, which resulted in a 15% uplift in purchase per user.
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