Google introduces sitelinks in PPC adverts

Google today introduced sitelinks embeddable in the PPC advert to bring users directly to specific pages on the advertised website (live in Ireland campaigns this afternoon). The new sitelinks are configurable in the Adwords campaign and appear only when the advert is displayed in top of page position.



Google recently enhanced PPC adverts with mapping and address data also.

See Inside AdWords: Increasing choice and relevancy in search ads

Google inserts Ads into iPhone maps - Pay Per Tap (PPT) ramps up

Google has recently launched sponsored links directly on iPhone's (and iPod Touch's) native Google maps app. When searching for services in an area on the maps app, for example searching for hotels on a map, sponsored links can now appear alongside regular service links as shown in the example below of a "New York hotels" search. Sponsored links get a special marker compared to the usual pin also (as shown on the right).



If the user taps the sponsored link, the usual screen containing phone number, address, and directions appears but additionally shows some brief, italicised ad copy under the name of the business.



Can we propose a new acronym - Pay Per Tap?

The service doesn't appear to be live in Ireland yet. Clearly, the drive towards mobile advertising is in full swing, with mobile the next battleground for pay per "tap" (PPT) funds.

See Inside AdWords

Google folds Mapping and Address Extensions into Adwords

Google Adwords now allows you to extend your advert content to include Google Local information right in the advert (in other words Google Maps) and further enhance the utility and visual appeal of your adverts.

As an example of this in action, Bookassist's Traffic Builder team have recently completed the addition of Google Local to a number of campaigns - for example a search for Camden Court Hotel (camdencourthotel.com) in Dublin reveals the map content added to the advert (the "show map" link at the bottom of the advert below):






When you click the "+" next to the map link, the location opens up directly in the advert. A similar search for the Mespil Hotel (mespilhotel.com) again shows this functionality, where the map is now embedded directly in the PPC advert, include the "get directions" functionality:



According to Emel Mutlu, a member of Google's AdWords team writing on their blog on July 24th: “Location extensions allow you to "extend" your AdWords campaigns by dynamically attaching your business address to your ads. This new feature will be fully available in the coming weeks, with some advertisers having access to the feature starting today.” The features have landed in Ireland now and are extending to other countries.

Local business adverts are now no longer a separate entity, but are identical in form to the new local-enhanced Adwords adverts. This also helps streamline the Adwords process for advertisers.

This extension to Google Local shows that the adverts are themselves beginning to mix the media available to Google - Google have already implemented blended search (see: article on blended search) where different search elements like maps, video, news are listed in search results along with the traditional website results.

Folding blended search ideas in Adwords seems to be the direction this is going - expect to see embedded video and other items soon.

Using social media to build customer relationships

Online marketing for hotels is quite different from online marketing for other products. For example, a hotel is in a fixed location, so marketing to those to whom the location will appeal must form part of the strategy. Hotels have quite individual character, so finding something unique to ensure you stand out from the crowd in the busy hospitality storefront is also crucial. The hotel is rarely the reason for traveling (except for a lucky minority who manage to make the hotel the destination itself), so the choice of hotel is ancillary to the primary travel purpose and this must be factored in by trying to determine the most likely reason your guest are searching for a property like yours. And on and on it goes.

This sounds like a lot of work to get right, and it usually is. But Web 2.0 tools help get to the bottom of this quite quickly if you use them effectively. Fundamentally, the tools of social media online can not only help you market your hotel effectively, but their use can wake you up to how your customers perceive your business. The valuable and free information gleaned can allow you to rapidly improve customer satisfaction. Be prepared to be humble - the customer’s perception is often quite different from yours, but remember it is only theirs that matters.

Everyone and their dog is saying that social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and other Web 2.0 platforms such as YouTube, Picasa are increasingly important. But important for what exactly? Before jumping in, it is important to step back and appreciate what exactly you are trying to achieve by using such tools. Put simply, when you have a particular purpose in mind, you choose a tool or approach that best suits the purpose. You don’t find a tool and then look around for something to do with it.


Not the forum for the hard sell

With social networking, you are basically trying to build or enhance your brand through engaging your customers, and you are aiming to build deeper relationships with them. While the reason for this ultimately is to raise your profile and build potential future custom, this is not a forum for the hard sell. If you want the hard sell, invest in advertising. After all, social networking is “social”, meaning people-oriented, community, common interests, like-mindedness, and “networking”, the intercommunication of those people on a voluntary basis.

Social networking is all about being part of a conversation. To be successful with social media, just like in a conversation, you have to be prepared to listen, you have to have something interesting to say, you have to contribute something new so that people are bothered to listen, and you have to engage on the level of everyone else and avoid preaching. Sticking to those rules will ensure success in social media either personally or as a business.


Charleville Lodge Boosts Business by 59%

As an online strategy partner for hotels, Bookassist (bookassist.org) has been engaged in the social media and web 2.0 arena for some time and in recent years has been strongly encouraging their hotel clients to be proactive online. Following a Bookassist seminar on web 2.0 tools in mid 2008, owner/manager Paul Stenson of Charleville Lodge boutique hotel in Phibsboro, Dublin (www.charlevillelodge.ie) decided to focus on interacting with his customers via TripAdvisor and Facebook, as well as providing a richer web experience to them via Youtube and Picasa.


According to Stenson, they’ve seen “over 8000 views on the Youtube account in that first year. We can see that people move from there to the website and vice versa so it’s definitely something people are interested in seeing.” While he acknowledges that directly attributing bookings and revenue to his use of web 2.0 tools is hard to track, he has no doubt about the success of the strategy. “We’ve had a successful website for many years, but used Bookassist for a new website in 2008. We worked with them also to set up Youtube, Facebook and other tools. In the year since we started, we’ve seen a 59% increase in direct booking income through our website compared to the previous year. Bear in mind that this is in the middle of a recession and our booking value has been forced downwards also with increased competition”, says Stenson, “so we consider that pretty strong proof of the power of social networking”.

Stenson is also rigorous in his approach to TripAdvisor, ensuring that he deals with issues that may arise as quickly as possible. “There is no doubt that guests are cross-referencing TripAdvisor content with our website, our Facebook pages, the reviews we publish on our own website in the Bookassist booking engine, all of these things. People clearly want assurance before they book and we have to be sure we keep on top of it all.”

Using Facebook to talk with customers, answer queries and provide information is something that has become routine in Charleville Lodge, with staff always online to field queries. With hundreds of followers, tracking of incoming bookings for his hotel originating from Facebook hits is on the rise, according to Stenson. “The interest via Facebook is strong, but the drawback is that customers have to request to be a friend first before we can interact. We’re now working with Bookassist on a Twitter strategy so we can converse with potential customers in a more immediate and natural way and be even more proactive in getting the news out there about our property and getting guests’ views. It’s early days but Twitter seems the way to go.”


“Getting” or “not getting” Twitter

Stenson’s experience highlights one of the key differences between sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and the Twitter service. While Facebook and the others are largely about keeping in touch with people you know, in a leisurely way, Twitter is about finding people you don’t know but who have information you need or questions you can answer. Twitter is extremely immediate, reflecting what’s on people’s minds right now.

Twitter is undoubtedly becoming more and more important, but it is still a mystery to most business owners in terms of where it sits in their online strategy. Bookassist’s view is that it can sit dead-centre if handled properly.


There’s a typical evolution that people go through in embracing the Twitter platform. They first see it as a useless fad and ignore it, but they eventually try it out to see what the fuss is about. At this stage they don’t quite “get” it. If they persist, then they get comfortable posting tweets but even now are really just using it “one-way” to make observations or statements. This is as far as most businesses go. But moving beyond this to a real “two-way” conversation is the real hard part. Persistence pays off.

Hotels should set up Twitter accounts and use tweets to advertise special offers or events they may have. Tweets should contain keywords that others may be searching for to improve your chances of being read, (“hotel”, “special”, “dublin” book”) and the offers should be immediate, for tonight, tomorrow etc., since Twitter is so immediate. This is the basic approach of using Twitter in an advertising strategy.

But hotels should also pose questions to their guests using Twitter, to try to get conversations going. For example, “do you think our atrium dining room is the best feature in the hotel?” might elicit responses where people say they didn’t realise you had an atrium and something else was far more important to them in their stay. You now have valuable information about what is important to your guests. You can ask if guests would like to see any other kind of events, or ask how specific services can be improved. Rather than waiting for comments or fielding complaints like in TripAdvisor, you can get into the driving seat with Twitter.

Going beyond this, the open approach of Twitter where your tweets are published to the entire world by default, as are your guests tweets, means that anyone can search for all conversations that involve your hotel and can therefore see an entire history of what you say online and how your interact with your guests. And how quickly you resolve issues. Likewise you can jump into conversations involving your competitors and legitimately highlight how you would have done it differently, or offered better service, giving you a marketing advantage. Once you tweet honestly, are not overly commercial in pushing your business, and remember that everything is public and forever, then you have nothing to fear from being part of the online chat.

Undoubtedly, time commitment is an issue for hoteliers. Once you begin with Twitter, you need to continue to do so or your lack of interaction itself becomes a negative. Because it is fundamentally “personal” in its approach, it puts you the business owner at the front line. But there is no better way to engender trust in your customer base than to interact with them on a personal level, with immediacy, and to show through your public interactions with others that you actually care.

According to Stenson at Charleville Lodge, “it all really just boils down to service. If you can show high service levels online before they even arrive at your hotel, which these tools help you to do, then you are already winning”.

Charleville lodge is online at www.charlevillelodge.ie, and is on Facebook, YouTube and just beginning to take the plunge on Twitter.


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Dr Des O’Mahony is CEO and Founder at Bookassist, the leading technology and online strategy partner for the hospitality industry.

Google Local launches in Ireland - Kinda

It's not rolled out across all searches on Google in Ireland, but it is certainly alive and kicking for hotels.

Google recently enhanced their search results pages with the addition of local business results (Google Maps) to searches targeting locations within Ireland. While these results have been available for some time in other locations such as the US and UK, this is the first time that searches for Irish locations have triggered maps as well as web links.

The implications for website owners are that the nature of the results page on Google has changed dramatically. It is no longer sufficient to list highly for location searches in the standard results, if you do not perform well in the map results. The figure below shows the results for a search using the phrase ‘hotels in Dublin’. The clear winners of this change are the sites that appear high in the map listing, as the previous first web listing has now been relegated from first to eleventh place on the page.

Google Local in action today for the search "Dublin Hotels" with the top six hotels availing of Bookassist's Traffic Builder online marketing service

The blended search results are also triggered by property name searches (see below), so it is important to ensure that your listing in Google maps is well managed. We've previously highlighted the usefulness of Google Local as part of Google's drive towards blended search in this blog entry: Get high search ranking through blended search results.

A property name search on Google Ireland today, now showing Google Local information

To maximise the benefits of this change, go to http://www.google.com/local/add/ and log in with a Google account.
You can then claim your map listing by going http://maps.google.com/ and searching for your property by name. Click on the “more info” link and then on the “Add or edit your business” link. From here you can confirm your web and email addresses as well as your physical address and phone number. You can also correct any errors in the map location for your property. When all the important details are correct, you can the concentrate on enhancing your entry by adding a good description, uploading photos and videos, as well as other details such as free wifi or parking.

What hotels should and should not be doing in the current downturn

In this economic climate, it is even more important to know exactly where your marketing money is being spent, what return on investment you are getting, and how you can maximise it.

What is clear is that the medium that is most easily analysed and maximised in terms of return on spend is the internet, specifically direct selling on the internet. Moving budgets now from offline to online is not only smart in terms of watching budgets, but it affords an opportunity to tap previously untried markets, lower costs per acquired booking, and even generate income growth through promotion of a mix of offerings.

The good news is that bookings online are continuing to grow. Bookassist figures across all our markets have shown a growth in the number of bookings year on year. Many current studies are continuing to show a growth in direct online bookings at the hotel website, at the expense of offline and indirect channel bookings. This is probably because the economic climate is causing people to look around more: the simplest way to look around is online, not offline, and the best chance a customer perceives of getting value is directly at the hotel. So hotels need to tap into this marketplace.

Here are some pointers.

1. Don’t cut your marketing budget. You need it now more than ever. But redirect your marketing spend to online now.
2. Get rid of your hunches, suppositions, feelings. You need facts. Don’t make sudden changes, for example switching suppliers because of a perceived better deal or trying completely new advertising approaches. Sudden changes are the result of panic - you need to hold your nerve until you have the facts. You may well lose the position you have in such a switch, rather than building on your position. Perception needs to be replaced by fact leading to informed rather than rash decisions.
3. Concentrate on direct booking. Be careful how you are using third party intermediary sites. They can commoditise your hotel in simple lists based on price, start rating etc which eliminates your unique qualities. They may be sending you lots of business, but these online customers can be yours directly if you adopt a proper direct booking online strategy as outlined below. The margins of third party intermediaries compared to direct booking on your own website means that you are losing 20% to 30% revenue per booking for each booking received from them. This makes no sense in today’s climate and some of that business can certainly be diverted directly to you with proper planning. And above all, ensure that the rate on your own website is always the best rate. Otherwise, you might as well close down your website.
4. Analyse. Analyse. Analyse. Ensure that services such as Google Analytics work for you by tracking all website usage. Have a clear picture of usage patterns on your website before you rush into changes. Use Google Analytics to analyse your online user base, in terms of their origin for example. It may surprise you and alter your strategy. Use a booking system that can integrate directly with Google Analytics Ecommerce, like the Bookassist Booking Engine. With Bookassist’s Ecommerce integration, every single booking is transferred to Google Analytics and linked to the customer’s path through the website and through the booking process. Any single booking can be directly linked to a specific cent spent on a specific pay per click campaign or email marketing campaign. This is very powerful data and shows instantly where your money is being spent most effectively in terms of return on investment measured in actual booking value. It eliminates the hunch and shows you the bare facts. Google Analytics for web usage is great, but it lacks the real meat: full Ecommerce integration goes way beyond web usage and is critical for optimising ROI.

Bookassist’s ECommerce integration with Google Analytics gives valuable strategic information and allows for fine-tuning of online advertising spend resulting in much higher conversion rates, 5.24% in this example from a Dublin hotel.

5. Act on information you glean from Google Analytics and Ecommerce integration. The conversion figures for lookers to bookers are your key indicator. All the visitors in the world are useless to you if they are not converting. Using Ecommerce integration you also get a much deeper insight into conversion in your target segments. For example, with a recent Dublin-based hotel of ours, visitor numbers alone in Google Analytics showed that the vast majority of the website visitors were UK based, with other countries being far down the list. The traditionalist would therefore target the marketing budget at the UK. But the Ecommerce integration showed us that conversion rates for German visitors to the website were a factor of 4 higher than the UK visitors. So targeting spend at the German market and using German language package descriptions in the booking engine resulted in higher bookings online. It was a safer bet. Only Ecommerce integration can give you this kind of analysis. Using this type of analysis has allowed Bookassist marketing teams to drive conversions on pay per click adverts to over 4% in many cases, a massive increase over industry norms.
6. Analyse your web presence holistically. Remember there are two users of your website, firstly the search engines who will analyse and position it based on its content, and secondly the customer who will use it. The customer won’t come if the search engine hasn’t been targeted. So be smart, you have two jobs to do. Invest your budget into ensuring that your website is optimised for search engines AND ensure it is easy to navigate and booking-friendly for customers and never loses an opportunity to convert. Do not waste your budget on rushing to build a new site just to give yourself a fresh look - remember, you see your website every day and customers see it once or twice a year, so fresh is relative. Be sensible about your spend, target improvements for measurable return on investment reasons, not aesthetics.
7. Structure your online pay per click advertising campaigns so that they promote key attractors and differentiators for your property. Advertise your name as a keyword so that customers who search for your name will get your advert. Advertise your location as a keyword, but be as specific as possible to avoid catch all phrases that are expensive like “Ireland”, “Dublin”. Promote unique qualities in your Adwords text. Alter them frequently and track their conversion to tweak their effectiveness.
8. Combat competition online. Search for your hotel name and see who is using your name to capture your customers. If third parties are using your name to capture search results position, then tell them not to. If competitors are using your name to leapfrog above you in search results, then trademark your name and take action to stop it. Adopting this approach will ensure that people searching for your name, those who are already your customers, will see your website first and
9. Use email marketing effectively. It takes time to build a proper (legal) opt-in email and phone list of customers, but the best way to do it is not to abuse the channel - always give something genuinely special and new in an email blast and use a booking service such as Bookassist’s which allows you to embed links in emails that bring people directly to the booking page for that special, not just to the website or to the general booking page. Use Twitter services to remind users of new offers via mobile phone. Think strategically - for example, advertise offers for this coming weekend so that a sense of urgency is created for the customer who feel they must act now or miss their chance. “Offer ends at midnight, unique offer available for this weekend only!”. Sounds familiar? Airlines have been doing this with a lot of success for some time now.
10. Listen to your online customers and correct issues quickly. Remember that over 80% of travel planning is now done online. Even if people are not booking, they are looking. This colours their future choices. Make sure that you are on top of social media sites such as TripAdvisor and others - be registered with them and monitor your property. Make use of your own customer comments on your website, for example availing of Bookassist’s automatic review system where customers who have booked online and stayed at your hotel are given a follow-up opportunity to submit their views. Above all, always respond to online reviews, whether positive or negative, so that potential customers see that you care. We all know that correcting a fault graciously often engenders more loyalty and satisfaction in a customer.

Be aware that the habits that customers are now learning could well become the norm for the future. Why? Because the approach is yielding value for the customer. Shopping around online, doing research online, making price comparisons online, reading reviews, going directly to source to book. These are all things that may have been enhanced by economic necessity, but are likely to stay as the norm as we exit recession.

Hotels that have tackled this climate constructively and strategically will likely emerge stronger and will be well positioned to capitalise on the upswing that will invariably come.

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Dr Des O’Mahony is CEO and Founder at Bookassist, the leading technology and online marketing supplier to the hospitality industry.

Get high search ranking through blended search results

Optimised web pages are far from the only way today of cruising to the top of the listings thanks to the increasing trend of blended search results

Google Universal Search, an approach also termed “blended search”, is about mixing sources in search results listings - for example giving you image search results and video search results in with traditional relevant website search results. Yahoo! and MSN do this too. To a large extent, the potential for optimising for such blended search has not been seized upon by the marketplace. Launched in May 2007, the second anniversary of Google’s Universal Search is fast approaching and in that short time some very interesting user patterns have emerged which should prompt online marketers to wake up to the very real opportunities being presented for getting your listings in front of customers.

Vertical searches

First, some background. Google and other such search engines are broad-based search engines which are not so good at zoning in on relevant information for more generic searches. Users regularly get a Google results page which states that millions of possible results exist for their query - for example a search today for the term “harmony” yielded the statement “Results 1 - 10 of about 72,200,000 for harmony [definition]”. Often, we have to think hard ourselves about how to narrow down the search to make Google perform more accurately for us.

To counter this problem for users, and to promote its own offerings more, Google continues to launch a number of so-called vertical or specialised searches to allow people confine their searches to certain criteria or avenues of interest. Examples of such vertical searches are Google Image Search, Google Blog Search, Google Local & Maps, Google Patent Search, Scholar etc. You can find these searches in the tabs bar at the top left of the Google home page. There are many other such searches which are proving increasingly useful and gaining in popularity for sophisticated targeted search (Google Accommodation as a vertical may not be that far off, who knows?). But with the exception of Images and Maps, none of these are reaching mainstream searching volumes.

Because many people still don’t use these vertical searches, Google is increasingly promoting results from these verticals in the standard Google results listings by folding in images, videos, books and of course local map results right into the standard search results. Web search is no longer simply “web” search.

An edited example of this is shown in Figure 1. A search for the term “galway” shows the standard results but it is highly mixed - label 1 in the figure shows Google Local & Maps results which might be relevant, placed right at the top. Natural listings of web results start at label 2 but are again interrupted by the insertion of YouTube relevant video results at label 3, before the results revert again to natural listings below the videos. You can do this search a number of times and find that the map or video results may not always appear so the approach from Google is not rigid.

Figure 1: (click image for larger view) Google’s approach to blended search results in its Universal Search interface, which is now the standard. Areas 1, 2 and 3 here show Google Local & Maps, natural listings and YouTube results respectively.

Often, for more specific searches relating to businesses, the Google Local & Maps area will concentrate more solidly on Google Local and show a series of relevant businesses related to your search, such as the Google Local listing shown in Figure 2 for the search term “Berlin Hotels”.

Figure 2: (click image for larger view) Google Local shows relevant businesses related to a search term on an interactive map embedded in the standard search results listings, in this case Berlin Hotels.

How people interact with search results

Probably because images, maps, and videos are more visually striking on a results listing than just plain old natural listings, their influence is far higher in terms of click through rate. Bookassist recognised this early on and has long advocated the use of such media for hotels to promote their business more effectively online and has been at the forefront of Web2.0 implementation in the accommodation sector, not just in Ireland where it is the market leader, but in all its marketplaces abroad.

Research in 2008 by iProspect(1) attempted to quantify what users are doing with these blended search results on Google, Yahoo! and MSN. A diverse user base of just over 2400 was surveyed, which in an ideal world gives an error margin of about 2% and, to be fair to iProspect, their methodology for balancing the backgrounds of the respondents brings them to a conclusion of a slightly wider error margin of about 3%. Some very interesting trends emerged. Summarising the results for users surveyed:

* 68% of users clicked a result on the first page of results, and 92% of users clicked a result within the first three pages of results.
* 36% of users clicked on a “news” result within the blended search results page, and 31% of users clicked on an “image” result within the blended search results page, while only 17% and 26% respectively click a “news” or “image” result after using the news and image vertical searches directly.
* 17% of search engine users surveyed click on a “video” results on a blended search results page, while only 10% click on a “video” result after conducting a video-specific search on the Video tab.

Basically, the research indicated that a user is around twice as likely to click on a specialised search result in a blended listing than on that same results in the vertical search results themselves.

Web 2.0 shines

There are two important lessons here. Firstly, we can get more clicks with good content in the images, news, maps, video, blogs and other “verticals”. But secondly, and more importantly, is that while an enormous amount of blood, sweat and tears is spent by search engine experts in optimising web pages for natural listings - getting keywords right, keyword densities, meta tags, image alt tags, incoming links etc. - the criteria for getting local business listings, videos, images, or other vertical search results into the first page of search results are far more lax at the moment.

Put simply, because there are less videos about “hotels in Berlin” than there are webpages, it is relatively more easy to get your services towards the top of a relevant search by using well-tagged videos, images, blogs etc than by optimising web pages. This is a great opportunity for Web 2.0 content to shine.

A recent Forrester research paper(2) highlighted this current advantage: “On the keywords for which Google offers video results, we found an average of 16,000 videos vying to appear on results pages containing an average of 1.5 video results -- giving each video about an 11,000-to-1 chance of making it onto the first page of results. By comparison, there were an average of 4.7 million text pages competing for a place on results pages with an average of just 9.4 text results -- giving each text page about a 500,000-to-1 chance of appearing on the first page of results.” This statement indicates that an optimised video could be about 45 times more likely to appear in a search result for a particular keyphrase than an optimised webpage. While these figures are again not strictly scientific and should be treated with caution, any user who has seen blended results would see the clear advantage to be had by having additional media available to reflect your business. This advantage clearly won’t last forever.

What to do

Here are some basics that will help you capitalise on these opportunities. Start by registering as a user with Google, then:

* Go to Google Local (local.google.com), and use "My Maps > Create new map" to get your business listed and positioned on the map so that it appears for search results on Google Local & Maps. Use good keywords and descriptions in the business description as you would with regular search engine optimisation.
* Get good quality videos, preferably entertaining and not just brochure-ware, and host your videos on YouTube (youtube.com). Give them keyword optimised titles, tags and descriptions, then use YouTube’s embed feature to embed the videos in your website as a video gallery.
* Get an image gallery of high quality pictures onto Google’s Picasa photo service (picasa.google.com) and embed the image gallery into your website, again with each image having keyword-driven titles, descriptions and tags.
* Go to blogger (blogger.com) and set up a blog and begin to write content on a daily or weekly basis ensuring you always have something relevant to say about your business. You can use basic blogger templates to link your blog to your website and ensure you also link your website to your blog.

Blogger in particular is so simple and effective to use. It is free and easy to set up and, in a hotel's case for example, can be used for advertising special events and other events that change on an ongoing basis rather than the traditional approach of just putting a paragraph on the hotel's events page or special offers page every once and a while. Good URLs are also easier to get with Blogger, for example hotels could set up a URL with prime keywords such as patricksdayindublin.blogspot.com or easteringalway.blogspot.com. Hotels could then create relevant content about such events, but in parallel push their own packages and websites as examples. For annual events, the blogs can remain up all the time, and they should generate more traffic year after year. Good URLs can be worth their weight in gold, figuratively speaking, if used properly.

The key here with all these opportunities is not just to get other vertical searches populated with good information about your business, but to also use these to pull your regular website up through embedding and linking with quality content.

You win on both fronts with your regular website and your new Web 2.0 content.

References
(1) iProspect
(http://www.iprospect.com/premiumPDFs/
researchstudy_apr2008_blendedsearchresults.pdf)
(2) Forrester
(http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing/
2009/01/the-easiest-way.html)

Authors
Dr Des O'Mahony is co-founder & Managing Director of Bookassist, Ciaran Rowe is Senior Search Specialist at Bookassist's Dublin office.

Booking buttons from the channels - proof of the power of direct booking

The big name third party accommodation channels have served an important role in the online travel arena. In the years when search engines were only beginning (Google started in late '98) and hotels did not have the knowledge to market themselves properly online, third party channels were the very necessary middle-man between the online booker and the accommodation provider, facilitating indirect booking. Their generally high commission charges were justified by the delivery of business that otherwise was lost to the hotel.

As direct search moved to dominance, as online bookers became more savvy and in particular as hotels embrace online marketing, the need for customers to use third parties is rapidly diminishing and the opportunity for direct booking between customer to hotel is rapidly rising. Not only can this direct booking model providing better value for the online customer, it is also helping hotels strongly reduce their commission charges while allowing them build their own brand allegiance online to capture repeat business.

Bookassist was the first to push this direct booking model for hotels, since its foundation in 1999, constantly highlighting its growth and its importance as the key booking strategy for hotels. An average of 50% of hotel business is now generated online, and the more of this that comes direct, the better for the hotel.

In this changing environment, third party channels are beginning to recognise this shift in consumer habits which will begin to erode their indirect booking income stream. In recent months, two large third party accommodation channel sites have launched booking services of sorts to allow hotels capture bookings directly on their own websites, and others will surely follow. If anything proves the rising dominance of direct bookings on hotel websites versus indirect bookings on third party channels, it is the launch of these services by third parties. Hotels should recognise the reality in this move.

Typically, the third party offering has taken the form of a button or simple form which the hotel can embed on its website. The customer clicks to book and is taken back to the third party channel to complete the booking.

This is bad news for hotels, and here's why.

A booking button, form or link-off service to a third party channel is not a direct booking facility. It merely cannibalises the business that has already arrived directly at the hotel and which should be serviced by the hotel. The facility seriously devalues the service presented to the customer in the hotel's name, leaving the customer with a "passed over" feeling that the hotel would rather not deal with them. Usually, there is no way to continue navigating throughout the hotel website or returning to it with a single click. Customers can be re-directed to third party channel website where offers from other providers are displayed. Hotels will likely find it extremely difficult to request upgrades or new features and the technology will be limited, since this does not represent core business for the third party channel.

A booking button, form or link-off service to a third party channel is not a direct booking strategy. Direct booking is about more than a booking facility, it should be a key strategy to drive an increasing percentage of your online business to the hotel website and as such the booking facility chosen is only a small part of that. What a third party channel cannot and (for obvious reasons) will not do is aid the hotel in building a direct online marketing strategy and in reducing their reliance on high commission third party fees. This is where the long term damage can occur for hotels that do not adopt their own direct booking strategies.

We view this move by third party channels as a strategic move to increase control on the hotels as those hotels become more and more aware of the importance of direct distribution strategies and online marketing, and to placate hotels considering a direct strategy into thinking that their third party channel can provide one.

The fact is that while third parties can and do deliver valuable business to hotels, they are none the less in competition with the hotel website online. Using third party "direct" booking facilities can mean allowing those channels to have full information on the hotel's inventory, pricing strategies and yield strategies, as well as full access to the hotels customer's database. Such information could allow a third party channel to assess everything happening on a hotel website in comparison with a hotel's direct competitors.

Our advice for hotels is that they can still work with third parties on channel distribution, but when it comes to their direct distribution they should partner with a true technology company that understands their challenges and requirements, a company that shares the same goals as the hotels themselves: to build the hotel's own brand, to handle the customer online with the highest level of service and security, to make hotel websites the primary distribution channel with the lowest commission rate possible and the highest margin for the hotel.

Authors
Dr Des O'Mahony is co-founder & Managing Director of Bookassist, Yahya Fetchati is Head of Business and Operations at Bookassist.

Act now to increase your online business in an economic downturn

Bookassist clients represent the majority of the Irish hotel industry. Our feedback indicates that many hotels are experiencing a downturn in overall business in recent months, and recent news articles and industry press are saying the same (see Sunday Business Post July 20th, 2008).

But other hotels have genuinely been able to boost the online portion of their business by having a strong proactive internet strategy. Our experience shows that you can give yourself a competitive advantage if you act quickly and decisively, and we want to remind you of some tips to achieve this.

THE REAL ISSUE
Firstly, focus on the real issue. If total bookings have changed, it is not a problem with your booking technology. The problem in economic uncertainty is less bookers due to less discretionary spend, not a "booking process" issue. Sure, each booking engine provider has a different angle on the customer interface, but the technology from the main players all pretty much "works" and mostly they're just differences in approach, not serious flaws that prevent booking on a massive scale. The bigger weaknesses with online revenue generation lie elsewhere in online strategy but were perhaps less noticeable when customers were spending more. Bookassist handles tens of thousands of bookings monthly on behalf of our clients and we continue to see this volume increase not just in Ireland but in many countries. So don't waste time on small detail issues - look at the big picture because there is still room for growth.

Secondly, we see that overall booking volume online is still on the up so the key is to get a larger slice of that pie. Make no mistake, some hotels are feeling the pinch right now but others are generating more online business and with proper strategy you can certainly seek to improve your income. Since Google search is the primary storefront for your offering, you need to look very carefully at how that operates for you. In short you need to be as visible as possible, you need to be as clear as possible about what you are offering and your offer needs to be as compelling as possible for the online customer.

VISIBLITY
It is vital that you have your website regularly (not just annually!) analysed and optimised to ensure that it has the best possible chance of getting high up on the Google rankings, the natural listings, for the typical search phrases that your customers might use. You need to have a carefully orchestrated pay-per-click advertising campaign to complement that natural listing and you need to be prepared to budget for it. Tracking and analysis of spend on pay-per-click is so clear now that there is no need to be wondering whether it is working for you or not - you can see at a glance at any time. But you must act on the information and continually adjust strategy. You also need strong analysis of visitors and trends on your website so that you can act decisively to clear any bottlenecks and provide your visitors with exactly what they are looking for. These are continual and expert tasks that your online partner company may be better equipped to handle for you.

You can also broaden your visibility by ensuring that you tap into other new markets. Have multiple languages, promote your hotel in specific language target areas on Google. Bookassist clients have seen significant new business by focusing new multilingual websites on different untapped geographical areas and the Bookassist engine already operates in 9 languages so there is scope to unify your website and your booking process for a number of different foreign markets. But you must ensure that this is not a token effort that is done once and sits there - ensure that you have special offers etc regularly translated and perhaps targetted uniquely at specific markets based on what those markets might want.

From looking at Bookassist reports throughout Ireland, with hundreds of hotels, after Ireland, UK, US and Northern Ireland, the next 20 countries that generate business are displayed on the pie chart below. These are markets you can target to get more business (click the image for a larger view). If you need more localised information for your hotel, contact your Bookassist account manager.



Many hotels for example have foreign nationals working with them and this is a major advantage for visitors from their home countries who would feel much more comfortable dealing with a native speaker. So why not highlight the languages your hotel staff can offer on your website? It's one advantage over a competitor hotel who doesn't. Also, read our recent blog entry by an industry expert on why translation is so important in the wider marketplace.

CLARITY
You want to stand out from the crowd and you want the customer to click on your link. Look at how your hotel is displayed in Google results. Is the simple website title, page title and description good enough? Can it be tighter, more to the point? Is it clear to a customer who you are and what you are offering immediately, not muddied by having other similar websites with similar names appearing to offer similar offerings on your behalf? Do not confuse the customer at this vital search results stage. See for example Bookassist's opinion on operating multiple websites - you can't stand out from the crowd if you yourself create a crowd.

COMPELLING OFFERING
Focus on the quality of your online presentation and on differentiating your offering. Do the obvious stuff, like making sure the best prices are on your website, but look at other things like even seeing if you can reduce prices or have particularly good value specials where you might be able to offset that rate reduction against potential higher booking volume. Package more - engines like Bookassist allow you to have add-ons and room variations at booking time so consider better virtual packaging to have a stronger offering, perhaps partnering with local amenities to offer tickets or bundles with them.

You have to sell better and dispel any doubts, so ensure good quality photos for all room types offered, not just photos of your one best room. Engines like Bookassist allow you to have room specific photos built right into the booking process, so use those facilities. Consider more customer generated content, reviews online or video reviews which you can also post on YouTube. All of these things will enhance Google's opinion of your website, pushing you upwards, but they will certainly enhance your customers' opinion of your offering also and make it far more compelling than your competitors.

Hotels should consider exchanging links with other hotels who are not direct competitors to boost online traffic as well, featuring such hotels in a section of their website as a preferred or recommended partner.

At Bookassist we pride ourselves in getting it right, and we consistently do, for our clients (see some Bookassist testimonials). We can see clearly from our client base that those who listen to our advice and respond quickly and decisively are increasing online revenue right now.

Des O'Mahony, Roshan McPartland, Mary Collins, Christina Roche at Bookassist's Dublin office.

Multiple websites for your hotel might confuse your customers and erode your long term business

So I’m a customer. I’m looking to book a hotel online in Galway. Last time I stayed at “The Green Fingers Hotel” so I’d be happy to go back again to the same hotel. Very friendly staff, and a great breakfast if I remember correctly.

I type the hotel name into Google and hit search, and up comes the results page.

There it is, the hotel website – “Book online at the Green Fingers Galway”, greenfingersgalway.com – right at the top of the Google results page. So I click through to the link. Nice hotel website this, I recognise the photos of the nice rooms, the view. I had a pretty good stay there! Prices seem ok too, still reasonable. I wonder if it’s any cheaper on other sites though, like listings sites? Only takes a few seconds to check on other sites. Back to my results page for a quick scan of my options, maybe read a review or two.

Hang on, the second result on the results page looks like the hotel website too – “Green Fingers Hotel Galway Book Now”, greenfingershotel.com. Similar web address too. So I click through on that link. Nice hotel website this, not the same as the last one though! But the same hotel? But this is the official website surely? But then what was the last one? I mean the photos are the same, even the prices are the same, or close enough. Two fairly legit looking but obviously different websites for the same place? What’s going on here? Multiple personalities?

This is like that scene at the end of The Life of Brian – “I’m Brian. No, I’m Brian! I’m Brian and so’s my wife!”

I really don’t like the look of this at all. They can't both be "official". I wonder if one of those sites is spoofing and is up to no good? I wonder if the hotel knows about this? Surely they must check their own Google results from time to time!? They must have agreed to this. Cleverly done though, I’ll give them that, because I have no idea which is actually the official site. They’re both pretty good and pretty representative, though I guess anyone could get photos and logos and run up a website that looks official. But why, I'm thinking, would a hotel have two different websites? Surely at best they'd just send a fraction of customers one way and a fraction the other, it can't generate more customers! Unless of course one is being marketed well to attract a higher fraction of the existing customers at the expense of the other. But if you can do successful marketing with one site, you could equally have just applied your skills to the other and not bothered with the second site. I can't see the business sense in this at all, for the hotel anyway.

But wait, this is getting even better - there are adverts there too on the results page, for both website addresses! Now that is hilarious because the hotel is just allowing someone else to bid on their name and drive up their own pay-per-click advertising costs in response. They’re bidding against themselves! An auctioneer’s dream. No wonder pay-per-click can make so much money for the search engines if people allow that to happen. Guess this hotel doesn’t know too much about online marketing. They really should be talking to experts about protecting their brand online for the long haul, because this marketplace is just getting more and more competitive all the time and customers are getting much more savvy.



Anyway, that’s their problem. I don’t have time to be trying to figure this out, and there’s no button on Google for “Will the real Green Fingers please stand up!”. (Mental note, I should patent a “Will the real … please stand up” button before Google thinks of it). Whatever's going on it doesn't look too healthy to me, no reason I should take a chance.

So I type “Hotels Galway” into Google and go find somewhere else to stay. Shame, I liked the breakfast at that place. Maybe the next place will be just as good if not better anyway.


PDF - Bookassist opinion on multiple websites and their potential problems


Dr Des O'Mahony is CEO and Founder at Bookassist

Get your business onto Google Maps

You can add your hotel to Google Maps as a Business so that it shows up if people are searching for hotels, notes Des O'Mahony.

People are increasingly using Google Maps to find local information, first locating the area of interest and then using Google Map "Find businesses" option as shown here.

It is vital that you get your business listed, and it's very simple. It all happens in Google's Local Business Centre.

If you don't have a Google account, do this:
* First, go to Google Maps on maps.google.com
* Either move the map to your hotel's location or use the search to type in your street address and it should locate you properly.
* In the search results column on the left you will see a link that says "Put your business on Google Maps", click on that
* If you have a Google account, log in. If not, take a few minutes to create one.

If you do have a Google account, log in, go to "My Account" in the menu bar and choose "Local Business Centre".

Once in Local Business Centre, choose to set up a new business:
* You will be asked to specify your business's details and contact phone number - this will be used to verify your entry so make sure you are near that phone to complete the process
* Choose your category as "hotel" or other as appropriate - you can add more categories if you cater for other services such as conference, wedding etc
* You should consider uploading high quality photographs to give users a feel for your product, up to 10 are allowed
* Once you have gone through the addition of all information, you will have the option of having the information verified by phone, by SMS or by postal verification - if you choose phone, the system will display a PIN number on screen and will phone the main business number that you gave immediately, asking you to enter that PIN. (You must be able to take that automated call directly as it will not be switchable through a switchboard. But you can give a direct line as your main business number and, once the call verifies you, you can then edit your business profile to switch the main business number to something else.)
* Once verified, you will be quickly live, usually immediately. To check, go back to maps.google.com and use the "Find businesses" option to search for your category in your area, eg "hotel" and you should appear.
* You can edit your listing at any time by logging in and going to the Local Business Centre

Note that if you have a series of offices or hotels, you can set up multiple locations.

Also, in the Local Business Centre you can track access to your listings and see if it is popular. To make maximum use of this, you should ensure you have online reservations as an additional attribute. You will more than likely also see your business listed by other vendors - it is up to you whether you want that to continue or not.

The screenshot above right shows Bookassist being found "locally" in the marketing category.

Dr Des O'Mahony is co-founder and Managing Director of Bookassist

Travel 2.0 issues: How can I listen to online conversations?

"Before you jump in and partake in online social media, you need to first listen to online conversations that involve you", writes Foncho Ramírez

Technorati reported that the year 2008 began with more than 120 million active conversations published online in several blogging networks. Online conversations are more and more crucial for your business. As we know, the best way to start participating in this media is first to listen. But there are thousands and thousands of themes out there, how can I find relevant streams of information for my market and company? How can I start participating in these social networks? Before you jump in and partake in online social media, you need to first listen to online conversations that involve you.

Use a feed reader and sign up for regular updates of your favorites sources of information. A feed reader is a web application which aggregates or gathers together syndicated web content as news headlines and blog entries creating a single location for all your relevant updated news sources.

Go and sign up for one now! Here is a short list of well known free and web based feed readers to join: Google Reader, Netvides, Bloglines. Click on the links, review the services and select the one you like the most.

Now that you have downloaded or signed up for a feed reader you have to add subscriptions from your favorite news sources, such as this Bookassist travel industry blog. Just look for the RSS symbol in any blog or webpage and you subscribe to it as a reader.

The second way to listen your market on the net is to set alerts for your hotel keywords. From my point of view every hotel needs to set alerts: in Technorati for blogs, in Google Alerts for general websites and in Tripadvisor for guest reviews that are related to their hotel. These are the most significant online applications for managing your hotel reputation on the net and you need to know what is there so that you can make sure your image is handled correctly and fairly.

The alerts systems mail you every time their search engine spider finds a new file on the internet with your keyword term in it. This is a very powerful tool and is very helpful for hotels finding hidden clients reviews, comments, questions, special offers, etc. You can set any type of terms like your hotel name, your brand, your closest touristic attractions or even your own name. You can add any keyword term for the search and as many as you want.

This "listening" system will work as your basic collection engine for information in social media. Any time someone talks about you in the net you will be able to hear it and answer it faster that anybody else.

Foncho Ramírez is Senior Search Engine Specialist at Bookassist's Madrid office and is a Google Adwords Professional

Rapping Search?

Search marketing can be intricate and remembering to cover everything can sometimes be a chore. Here's an online guru who uses Rap Music to create detailed checklists to implement search marketing tasks. A nice easy way to remember!

Thanks to Foncho in Bookassist's Madrid office for this one.
See m0serious

Yahoo! to test Google Adsense with search results

Yahoo! has announced that it will start a limited test of Google AdSense for its search service. This will see relevant Google ads being displayed alongside Yahoo!'s own search results. The press release says that the test will apply only to traffic from yahoo.com in the U.S. and will not include Yahoo!'s extended network of affiliate or premium publisher partners. But its an interesting development to see these two working together. A taste of things to come perhaps?

See Yahoo press release

Promoting your hotel online

Ismael in Bookassist's Madrid office circulated this link today for client hotels as a briefing on what you should be doing to promote your hotel online. A good summary piece.

See HotelMarketing.com

Importance of search in all aspects of the Path-to-Purchase

Ciaran Rowe in Bookassist's Dublin office pointed out a nice piece of research from Google UK and comScore that highlights the online search habits of buyers and bookers at the moment, and particularly shows the importance of search engines and therefore the importance of your visibility online as a seller.

From the report:
"On average, customers make 12 travel related searches, visit 22 websites and take 29 days from the first time they search until they make a purchase. Forty-five per cent of transactions occur four weeks or more after the first search."

and:
"38 per cent of transactions happen at four weeks or more after the first visit."

It's interesting that in Bookassist, because of the large number of hotels using our system with thousands of bookings logged daily and the detailed tracking we deploy, we can see very similar long-term behaviour from users and the idea that online users are doing a significant amount of pre-booking research is very clear from our tracking statistics in house. We regularly track bookings many weeks after the initial viewing of properties. Of course this shouldn't be surprising, people often take a long time to plan and make up their minds about trips so it should be no different on the internet. It does mean that careful tracking is very important though when trying to assess the true effectiveness of, for example, pay-per-click campaigns.

The article is well worth the read.
See comscore

Ciaran Rowe is Senior Search Engine Marketer at Bookassist's Dublin office and is a Google Adwords Professional