aaron dalrymple dot com

I’m not sure how earth shattering this is, but this post from HotelMarketing.com refers to a study showing that most people searching for a hotel are using a search engine to find hotels rather than going directly to a hotel’s corporate site. No big surprise that the internet is helping to commoditize hotel rooms just as it assisted in pushing airline tickets that same direction.

For most people, I believe, hotel rooms are booked primarily — in this order — for their location (city & state), price, proximity to desired landmarks, amenities, and then brand loyalty. No real scientific data there, just my gut instinct on how the average person goes about finding a hotel room for a family vacation, weekend getaway, business trip, etc.

I don’t doubt that brand does come into play if there are two hotels that match closely on the other factors. But average people don’t much care if it’s a Hilton or a Radisson in most cases. So, searching by destination, as this study suggests, seems perfectly matched to my theory. And, if you look at the search data you’ll find that a city name with a qualifier such as “discount” or “cheap” are the next most popular.

The danger for OTAs and Search Marketers or resellers depending on search marketing, though, is the risk of becoming nothing more than a price and amenities comparison engine that enable users to pick out a property, from a location search, and then go directly to the chain’s website to book the room. This study suggests that just that is happening:

“The BDRC said bookings are increasingly being carried out on hotel sites but third parties such as Expedia (40%), Lastminute.com (36%) and Ebookers (22%) continue to feature prominently during the research stage.”

If all you sell are hotel rooms, how do you differentiate from the rest of the pack? How do you use all of those great rankings to convert visitors to buyers?

Here may be a clue… The PhoCusWright Travel 2.0 Consumer Technology Survey, published in December of last year, says that,

“When it comes to making travel purchasing decisions, most American travelers would rather see the options for themselves than simply act on the recommendations of others. In fact, travelers want to view the options in detail via pictures, online maps and video.”

Frankly, I’m surprised at the fact that hotels aren’t trying harder to compete head-on in search engine marketing. Aren’t they leaning on their brand a little too much? Or are we just doing the hard work for them?

Search engines dominate how consumers look for hotels

Tagged as: Travel Marketing, SEM, SEO, Online Marketing, travel search marketing, PhoCusWright, BDRC, Hilton, Radisson, Hotel Marketing, HotelMarketing

4 Comments »

Between search, meta-search, customer review sites, aggregators, OTAs and everything else the internet can throw at us - it’s actually getting harder to make travel arrangements on the web.  What??  What I mean is, the more information to sift through, the harder it is for most people to make a decision on what to buy.  It’s a fact that when faced with an overwhelming amount of choices, many people opt for no choice at all.

Airfare, however, still seems to offer limited choice - and therefore should be simpler to decide on.  And it is, for the most part.  Generally, from most cities, there are 1 or 2 choices that fit my schedule and my budget.  But if you’re a flexible traveler, how do you decide when to travel and when to buy your ticket to ensure that you get the best deal available?
Here is my method:

1. Search for my ideal travel dates in Orbitz, using flexible dates to see the fares for the days around my ideal travel date.
2. Pick the best rate that works for the day(s) I need to be in my destination.
3. Make sure that if I’m staying an extra night at the destination that the extra hotel night and/or expenses don’t exceed the extra cost of traveling on my ideal travel day.
4. Proceed to the airline’s own website to book the ticket directly and thereby avoiding the $5 service charge (and possibly getting some bonus miles in the process).

The thing my method doesn’t account for is knowing WHEN to buy the ticket…  2-3 months out is usually not possible for most business travel.  I just finished a book where the author recommends only booking 4-5 days out and using Orbitz pricing to determine where you should start bidding on a Priceline (Name you Own Price) ticket.

Farecast.com gives you a recommendation of when to “Buy Now” or “Wait”, but it doesn’t really give you a flexible dates option.  I recently ran across flyspy.com (beta) which let’s you look at rates on a graph for up to 30 days and lets you adjust for day and length while highlighting the lowest fare. But it doesn’t really give you an idea of what the fare may do if you wait to buy your ticket later (like farecast).

It seems to me like there is an opportunity for a main-stream air-only search engine that encompasses the best of these two models.  However, with little or no commissions given on air-only bookings, a revenue model might be difficult to come up with.

How do you find the best deals on airfare?  Let me know in the comments and maybe we can create an aggregated list of sites and/or suggestions…

Tagged as: Travel Marketing, airfare, farecast.com, flyspy.com, orbitz, priceline, travel search

2 Comments »

Great post here from Marketing Pilgrim, and a good lively conversation in the comments. What I would add to the discussion is that many clients WANT exactly what Greg is cautioning against in his post. Most of his points are great, but, unfortunately, a lot of people who call me (I don’t cold call) are looking for a quick meta tag and link building type campaign because the IT folks don’t want to hear your suggestions, the marketing folks don’t want your ideas and the product people don’t want your advice. I agree that SEO programs should be fully integrated, but convincing customers of that is sometimes difficult. They view it as a condiment instead of an integral part of the website sandwich…

The tips here are valid, but I don’t think they should necessarily be presented as find out if your SEO guy is unscrupulous… They should be presented as suggestions to help businesses understand why they need an integrated SEO program with a respectable budget attached to it - and, perhaps, why it is better to do it in-house…
Read on:

8 Tips for Avoiding an SEO Fraudster

Tagged as: Travel Marketing, Search Engines, Marketing, SEM, SEO, Online Marketing, Link Building, PR, SEO Consultants, Greg Howlett, marketing Pilgrim

No Comments »

Making practical sense of web stats such as time-on-site and pages-per-visit is hard enough. Getting those mysterious numbers to paint a picture that helps quantify results for companies and clients is nearly impossible with most metrics. Spencer Lavery of FreshEgg.com has come up with an equation he calls the “Engagement Factor” to help make sense of user’s behavior that looks beyond visitors and conversions.

Internet travel is so focused on conversion factors that sometimes we forget that engaging users really is the first step to converting them to customers. Many travelers simply don’t buy on their first visit to a given site; if you’re ONLY chasing sales conversion rates you may be missing out on a much more basic conversion factor… converting visitors to return visitors so that you have a second or third chance to convert them to customers.

Check out his equation below. Does this make sense for travel sites? I think it might…

The Engagement Factor - Google, Internet Marketing, Web Design,

Tagged as: Travel Marketing, Marketing, SEM, Online Marketing, Analytics, metrics, internet marketing, travel marketing, engadgement factor

1 Comment »

Discount Hotel Reservations for Hotels Near Great Areas - Trusted Hotel Search

Tagged as: Travel Marketing

1 Comment »

According to Zagat, 75% of travelers say they now use the Internet as their primary means of booking, particularly air travel. While this means great opportunity for search marketers in the travel space, it also means that the space is more competitive than ever. The survey further states that the most commonly used website to book travel is Expedia.com while TripAdvisor.com takes the honors when it comes to finding travel information. Of course with all of the affiliate sites out there for these two companies, I wonder how many people even know that they’re using Expedia or TripAdvisor…

Another report, released by PhoCusWright, states that next year - for the first time - transactions on the Internet will account for over half (54 percent) of all U.S. travel bookings. Other findings from the report include:

• While the U.S. represented just one third of total online and offline travel bookings of the combined North America, Western Europe and Asia Pacific markets in 2005, the U.S. share of online bookings was over 60 percent of all online bookings.
• Growth of dynamic packaging — the ability of consumers to easily combine airline, hotel, rental car and other product purchases online — is projected to slow significantly from 51 percent in 2005 to 18 percent in 2008. This trend is partly attributable to the current tight supply of bulk airfares and merchant hotel rates available for packages, thanks to higher load factors and occupancy as suppliers enjoyed strong sales during the recent robust economy.
• Hotels will be the fastest growing segment online, surpassing air travel, which until 2006 had long been the fastest growing product segment.
• The advanced level of the U.S. online travel market creates an atmosphere in which many innovations such as dynamic packaging, metasearch and user-generated content incubate in the U.S. before expanding to other global markets. Many of these innovations include the new online capabilities that PhoCusWright has termed Travel 2.0 — the travel industry’s application of Web 2.0 practices empowering the online consumer.
• The tipping point of the travel market, with the online channel becoming the norm for travel purchases, is going to further shape consumer behavior that utilizes Travel 2.0 tools and applications.

I have to somewhat disagree with these statements on “Travel 2.0″ though. I think they may be a bit premature. I’m not sure that anyone has figured out how to bring value to the consumer, using 2.0 elements, that translates into revenue. Until that happens, what good is it to a bread and butter company that’s trying to sell travel - not trying to impress investors (we all know how well that’s worked out in the past)?

So, how do you go about standing out in a sea of affiliate sites, rising CPCs and product commodification? And, will 2.0 be the answer?

Zagat Survey Coverage

PhoCusWrigt Press Release

Tagged as: Travel Marketing, Search Engines, Marketing, SEM, SEO, Online Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Zagat, PhoCusWright, Travel2.0, Web2.0, Expedia, TripAdvisor, Online Travel

1 Comment »

If you’re pushing all of your search traffic (PPC or natural) into your home page, you may be missing out on conversions.

When a user gets to a page that they’ve found on a search engine, always remember that they got there (usually) by a specific keyword phrase.  You can greatly increase your chances of converting that visitor into a buyer by showing them a landing page with those same keywords.

One thing that I’m continually telling my clients is that you can truly only optimize a page well for 1-2 keyword phrases.  It is also important to note here that an optimized page doesn’t ONLY rank well, but it must convert well too.  If not, is it really optimized?  Maybe our industry should change its name to Search Engine Conversion Optimization…  SECO has a good ring to it too…

So, if a page can really only be SECOed for 1-2 keyword phrases and you’re buying 15,000 keywords that you’re pushing into your home page, it stands to reason that you may be experiencing more fall-out than necessary.  If I go into a store looking for sandals but all I see when I walk in the front door is hiking boots, I may, and a certain percentage of all people may, turn around before we find the sandals by the back door.  The great thing about the interweb is that we can have as many doors as we want.  And if someone wants sandals, or cruises or all inclusive or whatever, we can lead them through that door.

I’ve seen a couple of general studies that have shown around a 40% increase in conversions after implementing keyword targeted landing pages.  In my experience, travel sites can see conversions increase in that same ballpark.  I’ve personally seen it increase conversions by 30-35%.

Landing pages should have your targeted keyword at the top of the page and have a consistent theme throughout the page.  If the keyword is “New York Hotels,” don’t show a picture of a couple relaxing on a tropical beach - instead show the Manhattan skyline so that visitors know immediately that they’ve found the right place.  If you have a booking form on that page (which you should if you can), have the form pre-populated with the city name or itinerary, or package or whatever (you’ll be surprised how many more form submissions this simple little change will garner).

The other advantages of keyword landing pages are that if you create them for your PPC campaign, they usually rank well in the natural results too!  Make sure to include them in your site map and in your Google Sitemaps XML file.  Having well optimized keyword landing pages may help bring the minimum CPCs down in your Google AdWords account as well.

Now go make 15,000 new pages!

Tagged as: Google, Travel Marketing, Search Engines, Yahoo, SEM, SEO, Online Marketing, PPC, Travel Search Marketing, Google Adwords, Landing Pages, Keyword Landing Pages, Yahoo Search Marketing

3 Comments »

Can the hotel industry take back control of its inventory and pricing?  The airline industry seems to have been able to make airline booking websites irrelevant for air-only bookings.  Rates are almost always a few bucks cheaper by booking direct and the airlines will usually throw some perks your way (usually bonus miles) when you book direct too.  Can hotels pull off the same thing?  It would seem to make sense in today’s exploding lodging market.

A recent study by PFK Hospitality Research said that U.S. hotels are forecast to enjoy their fourth consecutive year of profit growth in 2007.  So, why not push to keep more of that margin for themselves?

According to a survey released yesterday by Mintel:

After 9/11, hotel companies allowed excess inventory to be sold by third-party Internet sites at discounted rates. This helped to spur increased traffic, but resulted in lower direct online bookings for hotels. With the hotel industry showing signs of robust growth, the direct hotel companies are trying to expand their sales in the online market. With reservation rates rising, hotels are resorting to limiting third-party inventory and promising the lowest prices through their own hotel brand sites.

The online agencies are posing a threat to hotel revenues.  Is this a threat to the online agencies?  Most of the well-know agencies have done a great job at branding themselves as a one-stop-shop for leisure travelers, though, and this is what will keep them in the game.  But for those of us who usually book components separately, going direct to save some coin is the best option.

According to Mintel, more than 36 percent of survey respondents used an agency site to book their hotel stays, compared to 32 percent who said they used the hotel’s Web site.  With combined revenues of over $40 billion, a few points either direction makes a huge difference on the bottom line.

The advantage that the agencies will probably always have (for the foreseeable)  is the ability to search, search and compare hotels side by side.  Although, I can see how this may be a opening for a really good travel search engine, which I’ve not yet run across…

Tagged as: Travel Marketing, Hotel Industry, PFK, Mintel, Online Travel Agencies, Travel Search Engines

2 Comments »

I think I mentioned something about this last month. Sure enough, here it is.

Analytics have never been easy to nail down. Even though most internet marketers have a love affair with them, they’re not always reliable or easy to comprehend for that matter. The data you really want many times seems just out of reach for even the best web stats packages. And as technology changes, so does the ability of today’s webstat packages to accurately track visitors on your site.

According to this piece from ClickZ, tabbed browsing, which is part of Firefox and will soon be a part of Microsoft’s IE7, has changed the way that users interact with websites and may, at some point, have an impact on the accuracy of your web analytics. Tabbed browsing may affect cookie tracking, path tracking, time on site (heck, sometimes I have pages open in tabs for days at a time), and others, all mentioned in the article.

Last month I linked to a clickstream study that believes that web services are largely responsible for changes in how users interact with the web, including the fact that 15% of all web navigation actions are now form submissions.

I would also be curious to learn how AJAX is affecting web analytics. In an AJAX application, the interaction with the user all takes place within one page view…

Web Analytics: The Results of Tabbed Browsing

Tagged as: Travel Marketing, Marketing, Online Marketing, Analytics, AJAX, Web Analytics, IE7, Firefox, Tabbed Browsing, Clickstream

No Comments »

A recent study analyzing clickstream data and eye tracking results found that the web is quickly becoming the interactive tool that it has always promised to be. The development of web based technologies like Ajax and the expanding adoption of broadband have led to a number of changes in how users interact with the web.

The University of Hamburg research found:

• An F-shaped pattern of clicking activity similar to results found in eye tracking studies. There appears to be a strong link between our eye and hand movements over the surface of web pages.
• Following links accounts for 43.5% of page transitions.
• Direct access through bookmarks, typing in urls, or home page buttons has remained relative steady over the last several years at around 10%. However, new window launches has jumped from less than 1% to over 10% of all page transitions in the past 11 years.
• Form submission has increased from 4.4% to over 15% of all navigation actions reflecting the increase in web services
• 43% of all form submissions involve search submission, followed by online dictionary and travel planners.
• There has been a 50% drop in the use of the back button for web navigation.

The study attributes many of these changes to the increase in web services, AJAX, etc. I wonder how much tabbed browsing affects these numbers as well? Considering the study was performed with “experienced volunteers,” are avid users more likely to use tabbed browsing and therefore driving the new window launches up considerably? I know I use tabbed browsing and launch links in a new tab more often than I use back and forward button browsing. Other findings include:

• Over 45% of all user clicks occured in a region slightly larger than the upper left quadrant of the visible page.
• Over three quarters (76.5%) of selected links were in the visible area at load time (above the fold).
• 23% of all links followed were below the fold.
• For 1024 by 768 screen users, the average available document width was about 890 pixels because users are not necessarily expanding their browser window to fill their entire screen.
• The average web page has 53 hyperlinks and 551 visible words.
• 25% of all documents were displayed for less than 4 seconds and 52% of all visits were shorter than 10 seconds with a peak value located between 2 and 3 seconds.

The data also reveals some mistakes that we make when designing pages for the more dynamic Interweb.

• Designing pages for a specific resolution may not be a great idea. Users generally only use 85% of their available screen space for a browser window. And, users almost never scroll horizontally. Make sure your “above the fold” ca