Most of you have heard of the billboard effect that creates increased bookings on your brand’s website when your hotel is also listed on an online travel agency (OTA) site. Chris Anderson, an assistant professor at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, has been doing a series of studies on the billboard effect and wanted to test what the benefit might be (if any) for a large, well-known lodging company. We can see how the billboard effect might help a relatively small, unknown brand, but what about a brand that is well known around the globe?

As explained in a recent report from the Center for Hospitality Research, Anderson enlisted the assistance of Expedia and InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) for his test. (A copy of the report is available on the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research website.)

Before I explain how Professor Anderson ran his test, let me give you a quick look at what he found. In short, the billboard effect did function as advertised. Anderson could compare the number of bookings at the brand website by people who first had visited Expedia to the number that were made through Expedia (and not the brand site). The result of his calculations was for the period of this study a range of three to nine bookings at IHG-related hotels were influenced by having the brand listed on the OTA website.

Nearly two-thirds of the bookings at the IHG brand site were by people who visited Expedia first. About 20% of this particular group of consumers visited only Expedia and did not go on to other sites. For that group, if IHG wasn’t listed on the OTA, they’d certainly have booked a different brand.

As I’ll explain in a moment, most people don’t just go to an OTA and book a hotel on the spot (although some do exactly that). Instead, it’s much more likely your guests will visit several websites before they book your hotel. We can check the clickstream for this particular group of consumers because Anderson used a comScore database, which monitors a consumer research panel to keep track of the panelists’ web use. Anderson was able to follow these customers’ travel-related website visits and travel-related searches for a period of up to 60 days before they booked. This particular group of consumers booked a total of 1,720 rooms during the Northern Hemisphere’s summer months of 2008, 2009 and 2010.

So, let’s look at the consumers’ web use. Nearly three-quarters of those who had booked at the brand website had first checked availabilities at one OTA or another. Most of the bookings—80%—were for Holiday Inn, but when Anderson looked at how these Internet users researched their hotel booking, he found those who eventually booked IHG’s upmarket brands (InterContinental, Hotel Indigo and Crowne Plaza) spent more time researching their hotel visit at the OTAs, even if they eventually booked at the brand website. For example, 83% had conducted a web search (on Google, Yahoo or Bing), and most of those people had both run a search and visited an OTA.

Anderson noted for this group of consumers, the average number of visits to an OTA was 12, and they spent about five minutes and requested 7.5 pages per visit, on average. This means on average over a period of time, would-be hotel guests spent an hour on OTA websites and viewed something like 90 pages of content. I’m emphasizing the idea of an average because these numbers are skewed by a few members of the respondent panel who spend an awful lot of time on the web. There were several consumers in this group who made more than 100 OTA site visits, and a few recorded 150 visits. More typical is 10 to as many 20 website visits before booking.

Anderson concludes lodging firms could consider their strategic view of OTAs as being both agents and marketers. Certainly they perform the classic function of being an agent for room sales. Beyond that, there is a marketing and education function, which is summarized under the billboard concept. Even when this particular group of hotel customers conducted a web search for hotels (and I hope you have optimized your website for Google and other search engines), the consumers then went on to the OTAs for further research. Some eventually booked a room through Expedia, but the majority eventually landed on an IHG brand website. If you know your guests’ clickstream, you can see for yourself where they are getting their information before they book—and that can be a real boost to your marketing efforts.

Glenn Withiam is director of publications for the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research.