Since we’re going into a long weekend, I thought I would post on a couple of things that I’ve been following and thinking about since I won’t get a chance to post much over the next few days.

Kayak.com gets $11.5M in financing for marketing, expansion - I heard someone say at a conference last year, meta travel search engines are an answer to a question no one asked. And based on the JupiterReaserch data that I posted about earlier today, only 4% of travelers are using them. I guess you could look at this two different ways: 1) HUGE growth opportunity; 2) No real value to the costumer using one of these engines. I’m going with number 2. In Kayak’s case, though, there’s $30 million saying I’m wrong. Accel Partners, General Catalyst Partners, Sequoia Capital and American Online have all invested in Kayak, which is using the new funds to expand into the U.K., Germany and France.

Google AdsBot Now Coming To Assess Your Landing Pages – Google just keeps getting smarter. In case you don’t already know, when you buy pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google, your position is not only based on how much you’re willing to pay, but also what the click through rate (CTR) is on your ads. So you can bid $100 for a click, but if after a short amount of time (measured in impressions) your ad doesn’t receive any clicks, you’ll see your ad drop in the rankings. This ensures maximum revenues for Google and, in my opinion, seems to be fair to everyone. Now, they’re taking it a step further and are going to inspect the landing pages you’re pointing your ad to to help establish your ranking. It makes a case for targeted landing pages; which is something we already know helps conversions. This should be beneficial for everyone from Google down to the consumer.
Google AdsBot Now Coming To Assess Your Landing Pages, Will Impact Your AdRank

What do you think of this:
Is Google Dropping Conservative Sites They Disagree With?

Have a Great Weekend!


Tagged as: Google, Travel Marketing, Search Engines, SEM, Online Marketing, , , , , ,