What do the marketing reports cover?
The marketing reports display performance metrics related to generic route-related flight searches on Google.com. Examples of route-related flight searches:
- Flights from London to Paris
- Cheap flights to Seattle
- BOS LAX
- London to New York
- London Dubai
What do these reports capture and analyze?
- Schedule: publicly available flight schedule data
- Ad Opportunities: all commercial engagement opportunities that you can influence within a single query and where you can drive customers from discovery to decisions.
- SEM performance: i.e., how did you capture the ad opportunities on search for your routes (e.g. impression coverage and click share)
- Note that flight routes are filtered according to the following restrictions:
- Circuity of 2.0 or less
- Itineraries with 2 or fewer stops
- Duration rank of 60%
- Codeshare and interline itineraries are removed
Why are the most recent days missing? Is the dashboard refreshing?
The reports refresh daily, but our internal data tables have a three-day minimum time lag due to consolidation and categorization.
Why is there a difference between my Google Ads account and data in these reports?
- When directly comparing performance data in this tool and your Google Ads account, you may see different numbers.
- Google Ads reports on the performance within your account while this tool only includes the subset related to flight searches.
- Classification algorithms are used by this tool to identify flights-related queries and associated origins and destinations. Some route-related searches may be missed by the classifiers used by this tool.
How are origin and destination determined?
- The tool uses sophisticated techniques to map airports, landmarks, and other geographic entities to cities.
- The origin is inferred if one is not specified in the search.
- If the origin and destination cannot be determined, the search query will not be measured by this version of the tool.
How do you calculate Capacity Share for route AAA-CCC?
Heuristics are used to estimate how many possible competitive booking options there are for the user to fly the route AAA-CCC (over an interval of one full calendar week).
Based on the schedule analysis of every carrier and the seat allocations it offers on its planes, we compute the number of seats for a given carrier on routes it serves (direct non-stop, or via carrier’s hubs and spokes like AAA-(BBB)-CCC).
We use further heuristics to compare the carrier seat count against the total number of seats served by all others flying the same route.
What could be the reasons for lower coverage?
The common reasons are:
- Partial keyword set, missing localization
- Budget bottlenecks, restrictive bidding that might need a review to align with your goals
- Quality score is low
- Conflicting targets and exclusions
- Review campaign geo-targeting to ensure reaching the right users
I want to achieve a high coverage (e.g., impression coverage / click coverage) and/or better ROI. What can I do?
Please reach out to your local Google Account team with details on your campaign objectives. Your local account team will help you put a proposal and strategy together on how to best reach this goal.
What is Capacity Share?
Percentage of a single carrier’s seat contribution on a given route compared against all carriers on the same route, for the same interval.
What is the source of data?
Public schedule data of flights that’s powering Google Flights Search, typically sourced from OAG.
How do you split the seat flow for hub and/or multiple connections?
We try to get the maximum booking options for every route. If the flight from AAA-BBB and BBB-CCC do not have any alternative flights, the capacity we assign to both AAA-BBB and BBB-CCC will just be the min-cut/max-flow of the two flight segments–which is the smaller seat capacity.
However, there would usually be some other connecting flights. For example, with AAA-(BBB)-DDD, the traffic from AAA-BBB will be split into: terminal in BBB, BBB-CCC and BBB-DDD. We will estimate the capacity by splitting the AAA-BBB traffic according to the seat capacity of the BBB-CCC and BBB-DDD flights.
How do you ensure integrity of the calculations?
Within the algorithm scope, we backtrack to ensure mutual exclusivity as we split the traffic and that the forward seat flow doesn’t exceed the plane allocated seats from all feeding flights.
Also by applying the same calculations across all routes and carriers, we find a percentage of total as a representation of relative estimated capacity, and the noise gets canceled out with the consistent calculation approach.
Do you use historical data to supplement the calculations?
It is ideal to add some historical travel splits; however, this adds significant complexities and the incremental gains are marginal compared to the challenge we initially wanted to address to get an understanding of the relative offerings for every route at a grand scheme.
What are the criteria you use for building the comparative set of airlines serving a single route?
We only analyze the data for the most competitive itineraries. Major filters we apply:
- No codeshare, no interline
- Max circuity of 1.6 (total distance flown divided by straight line distance)
- Duration percentile rank of 50% or less (the itineraries are among the top 50 fastest connecting options)
How can it be used for advertising?
The capacity share is used in the Route Coverage Tool (RCT) where the carrier advertiser will have access to supply and ad opportunity data and gets updated daily. Supply is represented by the capacity share for the competitive routes for the carrier, while ad opportunity is computed from the volume of commercial engagement opportunities based on user search queries against the SEM KPIs (impression coverage and click coverage). The goal is to have a target click coverage closer to capacity share offering per route. Please ask your Google account team for deep insights and access to the tool.
How often does capacity share change?
We refresh our data nightly. However, for the majority of routes (typically planned 9–12 months in advance), the shares don’t change a lot.