In this second of two posts on the Travel report we issued last week, I wanted to share some findings from analysis we did on paid and organic traffic. In our analysis we noticed a huge difference in the ratio of paid and organic search traffic going to the various Travel sub-categories and to websites within those sub-categories. The category level breakdown is illustrated in the figure below.

Travel Agencies on average receive more of their search traffic from paid listings than do Transport or hotel websites . The top 10 Travel Agencies websites received an average of 48% of their search traffic from paid listings compared to 21% for the top 10 Transport websites and 31% for the top 10 hotel websites.
Among websites in each category is a great deal of disparity in the ratio of paid and organic search traffic. For example, four of the top 10 Transport websites received less than 10% of their search traffic from paid listings; at the other end of the spectrum, two Transport websites received more than 40% of their search traffic from paid listings.
The following SEM Quadrant illustrates this disparity within the Transport category. The chart plots visits on the x-axis, traffic from search on the y-axis and the percentage of search traffic from paid listings is indicated by the bubble size. For example, Southwest Airlines was the largest Transport website based on share of visits, with 15% market share of category visits. It received 25% of its traffic from Search Engines and only 1% of its traffic was from paid search listings.

It is helpful to benchmark yourself against your sector but it is also important to note, as in this example, that depending on a whole host of factors (including website structure, brand strength, online marketing budget), the proportion of paid traffic to your site may be very different than that of a competitor.
You can request a free copy of the report from our homepage. And you can view yesterday’s post on changing consumer search behavior here.