Tripadvisor boosts booking efficiency by 75% through AI-powered audience expansion

BUSINESS OBJECTIVE 

Driving efficient bookings through audience-focused strategy

Tripadvisor’s marketing strategy centers on capturing high‑intent trip‑planning moments and driving incremental experiential bookings, from guided hikes to local tours, by engaging travelers who are actively planning their next trip across digital channels. Working with its strategic marketing partner, PMG, the company set out to scale reach across display and video channels while maintaining strong performance and efficiency.

High-quality third-party data can help advertisers identify these high-intent audiences, but scaling activation has often meant navigating complex pricing models and managing thousands of individual segments.

Knowing this, PMG sought to explore a broader set of audience signals while maintaining control over strategy and performance outcomes. The media buying team gained access to premium third-party data on our data marketplace, within our platform, which offered more predictable pricing, with AI-powered automation to help them scale campaign performance with confidence. 

SOLUTION 

Scaling high-intent audiences with Audience Unlimited

PMG led the campaign strategy by first defining the audience approach, campaign goals, and performance priorities through their proprietary technology, Alli. The agency was one of the first adopters of Audience Unlimited, an evolution of our data marketplace, recognizing its ability to help the team reach travelers and drive incremental bookings with high-relevance third-party data segments.

The team used our platform AI to apply advanced targeting and workflow automation while keeping execution aligned with the previously set strategy and guardrails.

Using the Audience Assistant capability, PMG expanded the pool of relevant third-party segments by 2.4x, allowing the campaign to explore a broader range of high-intent audience signals and reach more qualified consumers.

The campaign was structured as a controlled test across display and video, allowing the team to evaluate how Audience Unlimited impacted overall campaign performance. These tests included several audience approaches, including:

• Standard third-party audience targeting 

• Audience Unlimited-enabled targeting 

• First-party data-based targeting using Tripadvisor pixel data

As the campaign progressed, the Audience Assistant feature continuously surfaced and automatically added new audience segments that aligned with PMG’s targeting strategy, helping the team scale discovery without increasing manual effort. 

RESULTS  

Improving outcomes by expanding high-value audiences

Activating Audience Unlimited helped deliver measurable improvements in both efficiency and conversion metrics.

Across the campaign, Tripadvisor achieved:

• 75% more efficient CPA (cost per booking) 

• 2.7x higher conversion rate compared to the control group 

• 30% more efficient media CPM 

• 38% more efficient data CPM

These results show that expanding audience inputs helped the team identify and convert high-value travelers more effectively while simultaneously improving media and data efficiency.

More importantly, the approach allowed Tripadvisor and PMG to scale audience discovery without adding operational complexity. By leveraging automation to continuously expand and activate audience signals, the campaign demonstrated how performance can be driven at scale while keeping strategy firmly in the hands of the marketer. 

Find out how you can use Audience Unlimited to gain access to high-relevance data with AI-powered expansion. Contact us or reach out to your account manager at The Trade Desk today.