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Creating a Successful Website

How's Your Innternet Return?

You're planning your inn's budget for the year, and you need to decide whether the advertising dollars you forked out last year paid off. Should you renew with all of the Internet guides or should you focus on some other method of Internet advertising? And how can you even precisely track each guest to an online advertising source?

Donna and John Morris, Heritage Inns, Denton, Texas, track the origin of Internet contact either by asking their guests to recall the guide on which they saw the Heritage Inns listing or by checking online bookings sources. The Internet sent them 130 guests last year, but the Morrises can attribute only 30 (23%) guests to specific guides; the remaining 100 guests simply referred to the Internet in general as a source.

One of these days new technology will enable you to track the origin of a contact more precisely. Meanwhile, only a few sources clue you in on which online methods are worthy of your hard-earned marketing dollars:

• Precise memory of the guest upon making a call, emailing(1), booking, or arriving.
  
• An online booking system from companies like www.Inntopia.com (2) or www.Webervations.com.(3) Such companies send confirmation from the URL originating the particular booking.
  
• An email form, filtered through an online directory system such as www.accommodationsbc.com, rather than email directed to innkeepers. Travelers have to fill in the form to contact a B&B.

These techniques are a good start as they enabled Donna and John to attribute about one-quarter of their Internet-referred guests to a specific source. The most successful sources don't need any further evaluation, and no doubt the Morrises will continue promoting their inn with them. However, none of these methods will ever be able to track all the Internet sources that led guests to your inn.

So, is there a better way to go right now while you're working on the budget? We did some research on a fair price for online guide service and developed a few ways to gauge the effectiveness of an Internet ad. We picked one for this article as the most user friendly!
The method relies on the fair value of a unique visitor, so you might like to know what we're talking about before you get started. The term unique visitor is just a friendly ææ and short ææ way to refer to each IP address recorded in the website's log file. Fair value we talk about below.

Comparing guide performance to the rates of industry leaders
When you pay to be listed in Bed and Breakfast online directories, you essentially pay for targeted traffic -- travelers seeking a B&B in your area -- in hopes that they will convert into guests. So, you need to know how well-paid guides are doing relative to other website traffic generators: free and pay-per-click search engines, free BB guides, etc. Well, you can sort of figure that out if you compare the rates per click of GOTO.com for search words that are most relevant to your location with the rates of online guides that you list with.

First, always ask the guides to provide you with statistics for your listing. You need to know how many unique visitors your listing registered per year. If they give you page views, simply divide that value by the number of pages that that guide created for your inn to get the number of unique visitors. Then, divide the annual fee by the total number of unique visitors, and you get the cost per unique viewer. Suppose, for example, the guide costs you $100.00 a year, and your listing was viewed by 500 unique visitors. The total cost per unique viewer: 20 cents ($100/500= $0.20).

Second, compare this rate to the per-click rate of GOTO.com.(4) Why GOTO.com? Because GOTO.com is becoming a major player in delivering the largest targeted audience to websites by offering businesses the opportunity to pay their way up on the search results. Their affiliates, including AOL, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Lycos, Alta Vista, and now DirectHit, will also post the top three paid search results before the "general public links."

Here's an example of how our mathematician worked out the fair value comparison. In the example, you'll use GOTO.com to get the price per click, and you'll adjust that price to reflect its percentage of the total value (statisticians call the adjustment a "weight"; cynics call it a "fudge factor").

Ready? Sharpen up your pencils, order up GOTO.com, and fire up your gray matter.

1. Type "yourstate bed and breakfast" on the GOTO.com search engine. Write down the price per click for the top link. Give it a 40% weight. For example:

"Texas Bed and Breakfast": cost to top placement, $0.23; times 0.4, for a weighted value of $0.092

2. Type "yourcity bed and breakfast". Write down the price per click for the top link. Give it a 20% weight. For example:

"Denton Bed and Breakfast": cost to top placement, $0.02; times 0.2 for a weighted value of $0.004

3. Type "Bigcitynearyourinn bed and breakfast" and write down the price for the top link. Give it a 40% weight.(5) For example:

"Dallas Bed and Breakfast": cost to top placement, $0.06; times 0.4 for a weighted value of $0.024.

Note: Yourcity and bigcitynearyour inn could be the same, so the weight would be 60%.
Add the totals to see how you'd make out with goto.com. For example, Denton, TX cost per click - or unique viewer- is about 12 cents:

.092 + .004 + .024 = $0.12.

(FYI, the value for San Francisco is $0.23; for Seattle, $0.17; and for Richmond, VA, $0.12)
Sounds good, but keep in mind that these rates change daily as the number of bidders fluctuates. And be aware that if you drop all online B&B guides to go to GOTO.com only (which is never a good idea!), you will have to spend hours monitoring your website placement. However, you might get a cheaper rate per unique viewer (compared with Internet bed-and-breakfast-guide rates) for some geographical locations (specifically, low competition and low profile areas), but the cost will most likely be more expensive for larger and more popular travel destinations.

Bottom line? Unless you want to be the Amazon.com of the B&B industry that is, being overly successful in attracting new customers but continuing to pay more for each acquired customer than was brought to you in revenue you want to know how many unique visitors the paid guides sent you and what the fair value of each visitor is.

Perhaps one of these days you will be able to precisely track the number of guests (and revenue) to a particular Internet source. Then it will be an easy decision to drop some media as unsuccessful and remain listed with others as warranted by their results. But for now, if only few or none of your guests remember where exactly they found your inn on the Internet, the number of unique visitors to your comprehensive listing or website remains the most relevant measure of how well a particular guide is serving your inn.

You can also use this comparison to decide which other guides merit your investment.
Helpful hint: Be sure to ask each guide you list with to provide you with statistical data. And since the number of hits is the least accurate measure of traffic, always ask for data on unique visitors.
________________
1When a potential guest specifies the source in email or when email subject line automatically features the source as we do it at IBBP: "I found you on IBBP.com".
2 Inntopia.com creates the URL tracking option upon request; webervations.com has this feature built in specifically for this purpose.
3 IBBP is a partner with both Inntopia (www.inntopia.com) and Webervations (www.webervations.com). See ibbp.com/inntopia.html to learn why we chose to partner with them, how we view both systems, and which system will work best for a particular inn.
4 For a discussion about tracking unique visitors, please see Yvonne Tornatta's article in the January issue of Arrington's Bed and Breakfast Journal: p. 11. Measuring Hits, Page Views, and User Sessions.
5 For fairness and validity, be sure yours is a comprehensive listing. That is, it should include most of the information ææ photos, rates, descriptions, phone numbers, email, weblink, reviews posted by other guests, etc. ææ guests usually seek before deciding to make a reservation; in other words, listings that may not necessarily send a viewer to your website but may send a guest to your inn.

Leeza Morris holds an MBA in finance and marketing from University of Portland, Oregon, and is involved in international marketing, bed and breakfast online promotion, and research on business and marketing valuation models. Since 1998 she is co-owner and co-operator of the award-winning travel guide, founded by Yvonne Tornatta in 1995 - International Bed and Breakfast Pages (ibbp.com).
For more information on International Bed and Breakfast Pages, contact Leeza Morris at 4451 FM 2181 Suite 100 #149, Corinth, TX 76210; tel. (940) 497-2156; fax. (360) 574-4767;, email: sales@ibbp.com. Visit the sites at https://ibbp.com and http:/www.BnB4sale.com. See also ibbp.com and www.BnB4sale.com quarter-page advertisements in this issue of Arrington's.