Solving the O2O Challenge for the Travel Industry

Solving the O2O Challenge for the Travel Industry

A lesson in online-to-offline measurement

An interview with:
Cree Lawson

Marketers in the travel industry have to contend with measuring the impact of messaging across multiple devices, and then multiple locations. eMarketer’s Yory Wurmser spoke with Cree Lawson, CEO of location measurement provider Arrivalist, about how to determine visits to a travel destination with the most accuracy. Lawson was interviewed as part of eMarketer’s May report, "O2O Measurement and Marketing 2018: How Location Tracking, Identity Graphs and In-Store Metrics Are Improving Online-to-Offline Capabilities."


Why is ​online-to-offline [O2O] measurement such a big hurdle for the travel industry?

Cree Lawson:

The hardest part of measuring an arrival is not so much where the device is, but where the device is from. A pitfall of mobile marketing is you aim at a fixed audience that can be in a variable area. By targeting ads to Times Square, you might hit a few New Yorkers as well as people from all over the world. Everything is a moving target in mobile.

If you just look point to point—this device was here and it went there—you can get a lot of noise with your signal.


How do you identify where a user is from?

Interview conducted on November 17, 2017

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