Search has been the growth engine of travel brands–until recently. Type in the destination city plus the travel term, and you have a highly qualified prospect ready to buy.

After years of paid search marketing and more competitors increasing pay per click bids daily and weekly–acquisition costs in paid search became unprofitable for most.

Unprofitable to the point where TripAdvisor devotes their entire TV budget to retrain consumers how to search on Google: don’t type in “New York” type in “TripAdvisor New York .” The entire point of their TV campaign is to retrain consumers to make their search more specific thereby decreasing their search acquisition cost in a highly crowded and expensive vertical.

But for those without $50 million of TV budget to retrain search habits, the non-brand search metrics become so thinly sliced almost all non-brand search becomes unprofitable except for a few. The investable channels left: display, video, and social display.

The problem with those channels, however, is that last click and viewability make them enormously hard to measure accurately, with a true picture of what causes demand generation and demand acceleration. The advertiser’s previous efforts measured media channels in their own silos, with the success metric of last click or view, which resulted in a significant issue of over counting conversions.

After all conversions from each siloed channel were added up (including SEO and Organic), the claimed number of marketing transactions was 3.8 times higher than the actual number of transactions. The business intelligence team was brought in to work side-by-side with marketing to create stability and credibility in the metrics.

The C3 Metrics platform was employed to remove the silos, measure media effectiveness across all channels while controlling for non-viewable digital ads and attributing credit across both digital and television.