International Travelers And the Role of Mobile Micro-Moments

There has been a fundamental change in the way people consume media on their mobile devices. Mobile interaction can be broken up into thousands of fragmented moments i.e. checking the time, reading the news, texting friends, etc. And amongst these thousands of moments are what are called “micro-moments”. According to the American Marketing Association, a micro-moment is a mobile moment that requires only a glance to identify and delivers quick information that you can either consume or act on immediately. These are moments where people buy on impulse or remind them that they are ought to take an action!

So let’s look at how the role of smartphones in the different stages of a trip-planning process has evolved.

A TripAdvisor 2015 report defines the term “Connected Travelers” as those who have used a smartphone to plan or book a trip. It also found that

• 45% of Connected Travelers usually use their smartphones to book activities for a trip
• 72% use their smartphones to look for restaurants while on vacation and
• 34% of Connected Travelers want their accommodation to offer mobile check-in

These findings have been corroborated by an eMarketer Report, which projects that in 2016, 51.8% of travelers who book trips via digital means will do so using a mobile device, up from 43.8% last year. The report also highlights that travelers are increasingly researching trips on their mobile devices. In 2015, 62.6% of Americans researched their travel options digitally used a mobile device to do so, up 25.9% from 2014. This year, it is projected that 73.0% will use a mobile device to research a trip.

Ahoy Marketers! Targeting these micro-moments requires an understanding of the context of the user, in this case the traveler. InMobi has made targeting this segment extremely easy by launching several traveler segments that are open to advertisers on both programmatic and non-programmatic channels. These segments are built on data signals such as location, sent by various publishers on the InMobi network.

The International Traveler Segment

We have created a segment that reaches this “connected traveler” user base. It contains smartphone users seen on the InMobi network that flies internationally. Let’s examine a snapshot of the International Traveler segment, the users of which fly out of the United States of America.

Figure (i) The red marker represents the destination country of travelers originating from the United States of America

Figure (ii) Heat map representing the most visited countries by international travelers originating from the United States of America

We observed that these top 10 countries contributed to about 65% of all international travelers on the InMobi network originating from the United States. These top countries (in descending order of the number of travelers) are Mexico, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Netherlands, France, and India. Note, this data reflects information for the last 6 months.

Marketers, target segments such as this to get access to the thousands of micro moments of these travelers in order to get a far greater ROI due to the much higher purchase and media consumption intent quotient of these micro-moments.

In our next series of posts, we will talk about domestic traveling patterns, demographic mix, mobile OS mix and a whole lot of traveling patterns surrounding large scale events.