Dive Brief:
- Booking.com, the largest spender of advertising on Google, would like for Facebook to improve its direct response advertising.
- Booking’s CEO, in an interview with Venture Beat, however, did say Facebook has made the most direct response progress among social media and messaging networks such as Twitter, WeChat and Pinterest.
- Estimates place direct response at 60% of all digital advertising.
Dive Insight:
Darren Huston, CEO of Booking.com and its parent company the Priceline Group, wants Facebook to become a major player in direct response advertising. He told Venture Beat that Facebook hasn’t “cracked” the direct response code, but that it is ahead of social and messaging network competitors like Twitter, Pinterest, WeChat and Line.
Huston said Booking.com engineers are going to work directly with Facebook to make its advertising work more similar to Google’s level of efficiency. In a Venture Beat interview he said, “Generally how this works is, get the business people out of the way.” Explaining that the two groups of engineers will come together to generate ideas in a space where they “have license to break the rules. We want to be involved in the process of creating product.”
The CEO of the world's largest travel company told Venture Beat that because Facebook targets ads to people based interest, as well as using retargeting, it's not as easy to calculate a very accurate ROI from each ad as with Google on search.
Booking.com’s performance ad spend is 20 to 30 times what it spends on brand advertising and its known as the largest spender of advertising on Google, and estimates have direct response as 60% of all digital advertising spending.
