Allocate Marketing Resources More Efficiently

Challenge

Allocating your marketing resources wisely is crucial to drive growth and stay competitive.

When you use data to guide your decisions about your marketing budget, you ensure that your resources are invested in the most effective channels, targeting the right audiences, and driving the best possible results.

Ready to take the guesswork out of budgeting and make smart marketing choices backed by data?

Use this step-by-step guide through Market Explorer, Traffic Analytics, and EyeOn to optimize your marketing strategies and maximize ROI.

Step 1: Explore Traffic Trends by Channel to Focus Your Budget

Start your research with Market Explorer. Here, you can identify the market’s top channels and traffic distributions among competitors in these channels.

Review the Traffic Distribution and Social Media Distribution charts to understand the overall market trend by channel and compare the competition’s most important traffic sources.

Head to the Benchmarking Report to review the Traffic Distribution charts. Check the overall market trend, shown in the bar at the top of the graph labeled "Market”. As you review each competitor, notice which ones show trends against the overall market. They may have figured out a strategy that gives them an edge in that channel.

In this chart, hotels.com beats all its competitors and outshines the market with referral traffic. tripadvisor.com gets more organic search traffic than the market or any competitor. And, although relatively small, agoda.com sees a good deal of paid search traffic.

What are those brands doing to get such great results? What can your brand learn from these results to divvy up your marketing resources better? Use these insights to think about how to allocate your resources.

Step 2: Identify High-Growth Channels with the Growth Quadrant

Navigate to the Growth Quadrant [found in the Market Explorer Overview Report] to explore the overall competitive landscape. Here, you can see which competitors are gaining traction in different channels.

If you’ve seen many tripadvisor.com social media posts recently, check the quadrant to see if their emphasis on social media has helped them grow.

According to the quadrant, tripadvisor.com has seen growth in organic social media. Use this data to focus on areas showing growth among your competitors, and avoid channels where you see little growth.

Step 3: Target High-Potential Regions
in Your Market

Explore the Market Geo Distribution section to uncover which countries show the largest traffic increases. Select the Top Changes tab and check the Changes column to see the largest traffic increases over your selected timeframe.

If you notice a sharp traffic increase in a specific region, consider reallocating part of your marketing budget to these countries. This could involve region-specific promotions, localized content, and translations to better engage the growing audience in that area.

Step 4: Time Your Campaigns
for Maximum Impact

Switch to Traffic Analytics in the left navigation bar for insights into how timing impacts competitors' traffic patterns.

In this Trend by Competitor chart, three competitors saw a jump in purchase conversions from April to May. Purchase conversions remained high through July.

How can you shift resources to attract more customers who are ready to buy during those spring and summer months?

To identify peak traffic days of the week, click the Visits tab and select “Daily” in the drop-down menu. Based on these insights, optimize your campaign timing and resource allocation to maximize your reach and impact.

In this example, Saturdays drive the least traffic, especially for booking.com. Take this as a sign to avoid Saturdays when running ads.

Step 5: Draw Insights from Competitors’ Top-Performing Pages

Click on the Top Pages report to examine competitors' best-performing content.

If you identify pages with significant traffic and an upward trend in the 1Y Trend column, allocate resources to create similar content or promote comparable products and services. This approach can help drive traffic
and boost engagement by aligning with what’s already working well.

If you discovered one competitor investing in a less popular channel, you could check that competitors top pages in that channel to see what they're promoting.

For example, in Step 1 of this use case, we identified agoda.com as a leader in the paid search channel. Checking their top pages reveals a focus on localized content for Korean and Japanese audiences.

This insight suggests that allocating budget towards targeted paid search campaigns promoting region-specific pages could effectively attract similar international audiences.

Step 6: Explore Key Traffic Sources and Destinations for Strategic Insights

Next, review the Traffic Journey report to uncover top incoming and outgoing traffic sources. By analyzing competitors' user behavior trends, you can identify valuable opportunities.

In this example, 37.3% of traffic from google.com leads to booking.com, showcasing its strong search visibility. However, 53% of traffic leaving the chosen domains comes from booking.com, suggesting that many visitors aren't fully satisfied with their experience and are resuming their search.

This insight presents an opportunity: invest in Google Ads targeting similar search terms to capture users leaving booking.com who are still looking for travel options, reaching them at a pivotal moment in their journey.

Step 7: Stay Agile with Competitive Monitoring

Set up competitive tracking with EyeOn to monitor competitors’ Google Search Ads, blog posts, landing pages, and social media posts. Based on their successes and weaknesses, adapt your approach and reallocate resources in real time to stay competitive.

Stay informed to adapt your strategy in with up-to-date data. For example, a sudden spike in your competitors’ Google Search spending indicates a need to reexamine and potentially adjust your PPC budget.

Review the content in the “Timeline” section to find potential business development & content opportunities.

Using a combination of Market Explorer, Traffic Analytics, One2Target, and EyeOn, .Trends gives marketers everything they need to make smart budgeting decisions.