Introduction
Ryan Gillis is the Associate Director of Research and Insights at Tripadvisor.
Since February 2000, digital travel agency Tripadvisor has operated as a family of brands that connects people to experiences worth sharing. Their mission is to be the world’s most trusted source for travel and experiences, and in the process making everyone a better traveler.
They do this by leveraging their brands, technology, and capabilities in order to connect their global audience with selected partners — including Cint.
Challenge
For Tripadvisor, customers advertising on their platform is their bread and butter. Measuring the impact of these campaigns is essential for demonstrating value and driving continued investment.
Prior to partnering with Cint, Ryan and his team at Tripadvisor found themselves facing limitations when it came to scaling these much-needed ad effectiveness studies.
“Before we started working with Cint, we didn’t really have an option to scale our ad-effectiveness offering,” Gillis says. “We had a very limited offering of partners that we worked with, and they had onerous requirements to actually reach feasibility from an ad-effectiveness perspective.”
Tripadvisor needed insights to tell a better story. And not just when a campaign was over but while it was running.
Solution
To do that, they leveraged Lucid Measurement by Cint.
“Being an ad sales research and insights team, we’re always looking for the best story,” Gillis says. “The challenges that Cint helps us solve in that context specifically is that wealth of data that’s now available to us within the platform itself, where we’re able to see different cuts of data by demographic, frequency or creative.”
Tripadvisor is also now using Study Creator, the self-service measurement workflow available within the Lucid Measurement tool,
“There’s been so many gains for us, particularly with the self-service function. That’s been a huge unlock for us over the last six months or so,” says Gillis. “It allows the ad-effectiveness machine to function in a flywheel where we’re able to essentially run everything ourselves — with a lot of help from Cint. The ability to create and activate those studies in minutes if we have all of the inputs that are required has been a huge unlock for us and something that has really helped from an efficiency and time management perspective.”
Results
Sales Conversations that convert
With the insights Tripadvisor gains from Lucid Measurement, they’ve showcased the full value of advertising on their platform to new and existing customers, making sales conversations easier.
One example of this is when Tripadvisor needed to prove to a destination marketing organization (DMO) client that working with Tripadvisor goes beyond capturing people at the lower end of the funnel.
“We activated a brand lift study with [the DMO] where we saw the resulting impact on awareness and in the middle of the funnel.”
Insights into brand favorability and message exposure allowed Tripadvisor to showcase the value of its platform throughout the sales funnel.
As a result, the client signed on for year two.
Mid-campaign optimizations
Tripadvisor can better serve its clients with more effective mid-campaign check-ins.
“It helps us tell a cohesive story for our clients. If we’re doing a mid-campaign check-in, it’s really easy to make optimization recommendations from our end because we’re able to tie everything back directly to the results we’re seeing in the live campaign in Lucid Measurement.”
“It helps us tell a cohesive story for our clients. If we’re doing a mid-campaign check-in, it’s really easy to make optimization recommendations from our end because we’re able to tie everything back directly to the results we’re seeing in the live campaign in Lucid Measurement.”
Ryan Gillis
Associate Director of Research and Insights, Tripadvisor
Offer Scaling
Gillis’ team at Tripadvisor has been able to radically scale up their ad-effectiveness studies.
“We’ve run well over 60 ad-effectiveness studies during our time working with Cint over the past few years, and that number continues to scale each year,” states Gillis.
“Currently, we have around 10 to 12 studies live on the platform, and I’d say almost all of them—if not all—have been activated using the self-serve tool [Study Creator]. So we’re definitely doing quite a bit of work with the self-serve aspect of Lucid Measurement as well.”
Data-backed storytelling
When asked what Ryan would miss most if he wasn’t able to use Cint, he said:
“the depth of insight that’s available at my fingertips. I don’t know that we’ve worked with or I’ve had experience with any other ad effectiveness partner who has the sample sizes that afford or allow for us to be able to have this depth of insight, and also have it available to you at a really detailed level.”
In addition, the scale of sample available with Cint, “allows [Tripadvisor] to, with confidence, tell a variety of different stories and cut the data in a number of different ways.” Instead of making assumptions off of a small group of respondents, they have a rich data set that’s easily accessible.
Conclusion
Tripadvisor’s partnership with Cint has transformed the way its research and insights team are able to measure and communicate advertising impact. By embracing Lucid Measurement and the Study Creator self-service feature, Tripadvisor can now scale ad-effectiveness studies with greater efficiency, speed, and depth.
“I’d tell a colleague or client that Cint has been a really great partner for us,” says Gillis. “The best part of doing research, in a lot of ways, is being able to tell a really interesting story with data that’s actually backed up with enough data to be able to tell said story. I can’t say enough how much Cint allows us to do that.”
