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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 www.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 (www.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 http://www.ibbp.com and http:/www.BnB4sale.com.
See also www.ibbp.com and www.BnB4sale.com quarter-page advertisements
in this issue of Arrington's.
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