With the pandemic restrictions going back and forth, Travel Apps are slowly gaining back their popularity. In this article, we are going to take a look at the top advertising travel apps in the U.S for December 2021 and shed a light upon their app marketing strategies.
As you can see, there are more than 227k apps ranked under the Travel keyword.
One way of improving your search results is to improve your download volume. With paid user acquisition, you can reach out to users through advertising channels and increase your download volume, which will eventually improve your organic search results since download volume is an important factor for your organic rankings and visibility in the app store. Moreover, Branch’s research shows that every paid install brings approximately 1.5 organic installs.
This is why you should always compliment your App Store Optimization efforts with paid mobile user acquisition. And, market research and competitor analysis are extremely important to identify your target audience and create the right content for them.
So, let’s take a look at some of the top advertising travel apps and find out what they are doing to engage with users.
GIG Car Share
GIG Car Share has a decent visibility score in the App Store while also being the top advertising travel app.
In the last month, they ran 1141 ad creatives and kept only 112 of them. This means that they are continuously testing their ad creatives to find the ones that best engage with their target audience.
Another important aspect is that they run their ad creatives solely on social media channels. It seems that they prefer reaching out to potential users through social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram.
GIG Car Share runs ad creatives only in the United States, which explicitly shows that the U.S is their target market. We also see that English is the only language utilized in the bodies, titles, and subtitles of ad creatives.
Now let’s take a look at their ad creatives.
These 5 are the top ad creatives of GIG Car Share in terms of impressions. They are simply utilizing their screenshots to promote their selling points.
And for those who don’t settle for simple, they have the video below.
It shows how GIG Car Share eases the process of car rentals. No paperwork, no waiting in line, fuel and insurance included. They sum up pretty much every problem they solve with their app in their ad creative.
Apple Search Ads Strategies
In the last week, GIG Car Share utilized 9155 paid keywords. However, only 232 of them have a volume higher than 30.
As our Search Ads Intelligence shows, GIG Car Share bids on other apps brand keywords and actually gets a good share of their impression.
As you know, the specific the search gets, the higher the chances of receiving downloads. For “Car Rental”, Expedia gets the lion share, and GIG Car Share has the second-best impression share with %20.4. We always say ASO and Apple Search Ads go hand to hand. For more competitive keywords, your organic rankings will be an important factor for winning ad impressions.
Holidu: Vacation Rentals
It has a similar visibility score to GIG Car Share in the App Store. Holidu also relies on paid marketing for user acquisition. However, Holidu advertises to a much bigger area and applies a different paid marketing strategy, compared to GIG.
While Html was the dominant ad creative format for GIG, Holidu benefited from Images the most. Their total ad creative count was 820 and they kept almost 94% of them. Moreover, they preferred a balanced distribution of Ad Networks but still utilized social media only.
Would it be wrong to say that Holidu has a more colorful marketing strategy than GIG? Well, as you can see above, Holidu mostly targets Europe and utilizes more languages for their ad creatives.
See? They are utilizing Dutch in this video ad creative. In this way, Dutch-speaking users engage better with the content. Remember, localization has a significant impact on your conversion rates and user acquisition costs. Be sure to benefit from it.
And, here is a video ad creative in English.
Apple Search Ads Strategies
Holidu, unlike GIG, has a very soft approach to Apple Search Ads. They have only 139 paid keywords in total and this number drops to 11 when we filter the search results by popularity.
As you can see, we set the search for keywords with 30 or more popularity. These 3 paid keywords came on top for Holidu but they aren’t getting enough impression share.
Holidu must improve its list for paid keywords. They aren’t even in the top 5 for their own brand keyword.
They should add some popular generic keywords and increase their bid levels. In this way, they can reach out to more users. As our partners know, these actions are a lot easier to do with our automation tools and accurate data.
GetUpside Cashback: Gas & Food
GetUpside Cashback is an app that lets you earn cashback from the places you shop. Every road hiker’s and traveler’s dream, right?
Let’s see How GetUpside Cashback markets this dream.
As you can see, instead of focusing on the social media channels, they work mostly with Admob for their ad creatives. If you look closely, you will see that Admob distributed 20% of the ad creatives to Unity. You can track your mobile ad creative’s journey with MobileAction, optimize and learn more about the relationship between ad networks and DSPs.
Similar to GIG, GetUpside solely focuses on the U.S and runs ads only in English. This approach is understandable since both apps operate only in the United States. However, if your app offers services in different regions, you should definitely localize your ad creatives to communicate better with your target audience.
This is a top ad creative for GetUpside. They show news footage that explains the value proposition of the app. This kind of marketing might help you convince users to download your app due to real people and news have higher reliability. Moreover, the ad creative also shows the user interface. In this way, users can see how the app works and onboard a lot easier.
Apple Search Ads Strategies
GetUpside runs Apple Search Ads only in the United States and utilizes 1335 paid keywords.
However, they do not utilize the right keywords. Just like their fellow top advertising travel apps, the number falls drastically when we set the filter to 30 or more popularity scores. Only 67 keywords out of 1335 meet the criteria.
However, as you can see GetUpside dominates the market when it comes to related keywords to their features.
One of the best ways to grow your user base is to target users who are looking for your competitors. GetUpside also gets high impression shares from its competitors’ brand keywords. So, when users who search for “Gas Buddy” for instance, encounter with GetUpside first and can decide to download it without checking Gas Buddy.
We took a short glance at three of the top advertising travel apps. You can utilize our Ad Intelligence and learn a lot more about competitors, market, and user trends in an instant. Schedule a demo now and utilize our tools to perfect your advertising strategy by analyzing the creatives of world-class advertisers.
