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Planning your vacations through and through is no easy task when you know little of the location you are about to visit. Once you arrive, it is equally difficult to keep track of the routes without a cheap data roaming plan. Luckily, the whole travel planning experience might have just gotten simpler thanks to Google’s new mobile application.

Google Trips is a free app that will organise your plane tickets and hotel reservations, combining it with editorial guides, and top spots to see. Through data analysis, it will adjust your journey to your interests and time constraints. Most importantly, all content including maps, can be downloaded in advance to your smartphone and work in offline mode.

Personalised recommendations basing on one’s Google history sounds like a useful feature, but without doubt they also raise the issue of privacy. Some users already report that the app is slightly interfering when browsing e-mails and previous locations with the goal of adding them to its repository of trip plans.

Another concern proposed by Gavin Haines relates to the enriching characteristics of travelling that may be taken away by the application. In its own promotion video, Google unknowingly shows the effects of vanishing human interactions. A young traveller seeking advice on nearby attractions prefers to consult her smartphone, rather than continue talking with the local hotel receptionist.

For the time being users may expect to work with the “top 200 cities”. It is a reasonable amount considering the app is out for no longer than a week, and still in need of some fixes. At the moment the application may look to compete with TripIt, however the latter is more business travel related and lacks a number of features.  Also Airbnb is struggling to introduce Airbnb Trips, a travel app of their own.

Google Trips is a big step towards improving journeys into new places. I am yet to test it during my next excursion, but I would definitely like to hear your initial thoughts on the future of this application.

 

Krystian Palczewski 384439

Sources:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/comment/google-travel-app-wants-to-be-your-tour-guide-but-is-that-a-good-thing/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/geoffreymorrison/2016/09/21/google-trips-review/#370bca3f603b

http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/19/12943054/google-trips-travel-app-android-ios

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The number of websites grew exponentially over the years, from 1 website in 1991 to 1 billion in 2014 and more than 3 billion active users of the web in 2015. Businesses have understood that their success eventually lies in digital, and not traditional marketing. The online revolution disrupted the advertising industry in an unprecedented way, reshaping traditional ways of advertising into digital ones. The most prevalent advertising methods so far have been search advertising and social network advertising.

Google, the current market leader in search advertising, introduced Google AdWords in the year 2000. The technology relies on cookies and predefined keywords by the advertisers. The adverts are displayed in an order based on multiple factors, such as the budget of the advertiser, the keyword relevance and many more. On one hand, the global and direct reach through the world’s most popular search engine is a great strength. On the other hand, the marketing medium can suffer from click fraud and is limited in the amount of characters used for ad description. The technology might  benefit from opportunities such as growth in the number of Internet users and online shoppers, or the use of different platforms. These possibilities however, might be diminished due to changes in government policies on privacy and cookie usage. Other threats include the alliance of Bing and Yahoo! or the rising costs caused by fierce bidding competition.

Social media, which originally began as an entertainment tool, quickly evolved into means of powerful marketing. Platforms such as Facebook, YouTube or Twitter noticed the emerging opportunities and initiated the concept of social network advertising. Its largest benefit over other methods is the current audience and availability of targeting options, such as geo, socio-psychographic or behavioral targeting. This is by far the most outstanding feature that makes Facebook Adverts such a crucial and disruptive technology. The technology is servicing a wide range of industries, but the ads may receive a weak click-through-rate. It might become easier to target niche markets and audiences in the future, however these can be threatened by users with adblock extensions or aggressive campaigns run by competitors.

Evidence collected about the advertising industry points to the direction of more extensive usage of mobile devices against desktops. Mobile searches surpassed desktop searches for local businesses in the US in 2015. It is undeniable that mobile advertising can be best reached through social network applications which are checked multiple times during the day by mobile users. By 2018, over half of mobile phone owners globally will be using a smartphone. Social network adverts will receive improved conversion tracking. Ads which stimulate the user to take measurable actions, such as ordering a product or registering for an event, will be able to report how effective the ad actually was. All the above lead to the conclusion that in the coming years more focus is going to be placed on mobile advertising via social network apps than through desktop search engines.

 

Group 16:

Yifei Fan 384022yf

Ching-Yun Wu 434176cw

Krystian Palczewski 384439kp

John Grigoriadis 459881ig

 

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2014/apr/02/apps-more-popular-than-the-mobile-web-data-shows

http://marketingland.com/social-media-advertising-set-explode-next-3-years-121691

https://thefutureorganization.com/using-swot-for-social-media-strategy/

http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/