# Austria Tourism

Austria Tourism Sees Significant Campaign Performance Increase Thanks to Taboola

### Company

Austria Tourism works to promote Austria as a vacation destination. Their central goal is to secure and expand tourism to the country, and increase Austria’s competitiveness in cooperation with Austrian tourism partners.

### Challenge

To increase web traffic to, and engagement with, Austria Tourism campaigns in order to make users aware of travel deals to and within Austria.

### Solution

Use the Taboola Discovery Platform to reach new audiences on premium websites across the open web.

### Results

Austria Tourism saw a 33% performance increase across all campaigns when they used Taboola in place of display, and a 2% decrease in bounce rate to campaign landing pages, increasing user engagement.

Taboola is responsible for 50% of all leads generated through native advertising for Austria Tourism.

## Introduction

Since 1955 the non-profit organization Austria Tourism has promoted Austria as a vacation destination, including development of the brand slogan “Vacation in Austria”. The brand aims to differentiate Austria from other vacation destinations, and conveys the emotional added value of a stay in Austria.

They also support Austrian Tourism partners with customized marketing activities tailored to their respective needs and market opportunities.

## Why Discovery with Native Formats?

“The biggest challenge with traditional campaigns (e.g., display) is advertising effectiveness and placement. Display ads are about 33% less effective in performance than native formats.

We also noticed that our ads didn’t work as well on travel sites, because our audience there has yet to decide where to go on vacation. On travel pages, users typically already know their desired vacation spot, so they aren’t as open to investigating other destinations. For that reason content discovery marketing is the best solution for us, because we’re in a space where users are ready to discover something new.”

– Claudia Sokoll, E-Marketing, Österreich Werbung

## Increased Reach – A Targeting Success

Austria Tourism specifically targeted users in Germany. The objective was to promote all Austrian tourism regions as well as events and festivals. The campaigns linked directly to subpages on the Austria Tourism website (austria.info), providing further information about each of the regions. The user then has the opportunity to view various offers and book travel through a tourist partner.

Through continuous data analysis and campaign optimization, Taboola has been able to improve the performance of Austria Tourism campaigns. Austria Tourism increased reach, CTRs, conversion rates, as well as decreased bounce rates and their cost per click.

Austria Tourism geo-targeted Germany, optimized for desktop and mobile and to target certain publisher sites, and used these sites to target interests of the relevant audience groups. Since the beginning of 2017, the company has registered half a billion impressions via the Taboola platform.

Taboola is responsible for 50% of all leads generated through native advertising for Austria Tourism.

## Increased Reach – A Targeting Success

Austria Tourism realized at an early stage that classic display advertising (IAB standard formats) alone did not achieve the desired results.

They are growing their digital media mix, as well as advertising in print media. Native Advertising with Taboola has become an integral part of the online marketing mix.

Due to the great success of their campaigns with Taboola in the past year, Austria Tourism is interested in testing other Taboola portfolio offerings such as Taboola Video. They also plan to expand the campaign to other countries in addition to Germany.