TripAdvisor Advertising – CPC Case Study and ROI
A great guest post by Piotr Majdan from Mirai Espana, that takes a deeper look at the performance of TripAdvisor PPC (not to be confused with Business LIstings) activity. Piotr had also published a case study on the ROI of TripAdvisor Business Listings as while back. These conclusions were derived by Mirai after investing €27,000 with 58 hotels:
Your direct rates, your hotel’s website rates, can now appear on Tripadvisor dealing face to face with intermediaries such as booking.com and expedia.com. Should you join this program? What can you expect regarding the required investments and the return you will obtain? Does this return affect your hotel’s position within your city’s ranking? After a comprehensive three-month study, we have got answers.
Tripadvisor’s CPC (Cost per Click) program will generate new bookings in most of the hotels’ websites, mainly for the best rated hotels, but it is not predictable when it comes to cost and can generally be expensive “commission wise”.
In any case, “high” commission is a relative concept and should always be compared with the margin you get through intermediary sites (IDS) or classical tour operators . It still might be worth it for many hotels. Here is how we got to this conclusion.
In May 2010, Mirai pioneered the testing of the Tripadvisor Business Listing. Once again, we are the first ones to explore the new opportunity given by Tripadvisor – their CPC program. The difference between them is that the former is based on a fixed fee and the cost of the latter is variable depending on the traffic.
Other companies on the market offer this service (sometimes with a set-up fee or monthly fixed payment) directly to their clients promising new bookings. Before doing so, we at Mirai, have conducted a test to check the return you can expect by participating in this program. We invested €27,000 in 58 of our clients and analysed the results.
So what is the CPC program and how does it differ from Business Listing?
Business Listing allows you to add a link to your website, as well as the contact information (Blue).
Are we over-complicating the issue of Privacy?
This recent article on Forbes has sparked a fair bit of interest and controversy – “How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did“. Essentially the piece is about how Target uses clever data mining techniques to discover (and sometimes predict) user behaviour and circumstance (as evidenced by the aforementioned case where they were able to predict a pregnancy…and recommend suitable baby products to the customer).
Seth Godin followed this news (not sure if there was a connection) with a great blog post about “the illusion of privacy” which made a great point…despite all the hullabaloo about privacy (or lack thereof) these days, perhaps what we’re most concerned about are unexpected surprises. This makes a lot of sense…after all, we only want so much “privacy” in our lives. Wikipedia defines the term privacy as “the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively.” We constantly reveal details about ourselves selectively in the hopes of rewards (think loyalty programs, credit cards, shopping cards), access to free services (think Facebook…or even Google) or a personalized experience. So what we’re really afraid of are people or companies that appear to know things you didn’t selectively choose to share…or perhaps didn’t realize they had access to.
Case Studies and ROI – TripAdvisor Business Listings
A recent blog post and case study shared by Mirai, on TripAdvisor’s Business Listings option introduced earlier this year. Many hotels have jumped onboard and many others have held off till better information is available about the Return on Investment on these (often pricey) listings.
TripAdvisor Business Listing – not for everyone
On May 6th 2010 in its press release Tripadvisor announced that over 12 000 hotels around the world had subscribed to its Business Listings service and added their urls, emails and telephone numbers. Five months after the launch Paris has taken the leader position wih 13% slice of the total listings with urls, followed by Rome, Florence and Venice.
It looks like a great business for Tripadvisor! According to cautious estimates, the above numbers can mean at least 5 million euros in revenue generated by the new feature. But is it really worth for a hotelier to pay from 400 up to 10 000 Euros per year? Since TripAdvisor launched the service we have received many enquiries from numerous hoteliers, keen to boost their direct sales by placing a link, asking whether it pays off. We decided to check it.
Rethinking Hotel Guest Satisfaction and Hotel Website Analytics
I want to share two very simple but powerful ideas that could radically transform the way the hotel industry utilizes measures like the hotel guest satisfaction index, web analytics, etc.
Pivot – Perhaps the early future of web and media browsers
(This was too good not to share!) Microsoft seems to have plenty of nifty innovations up its sleeve! In this new video, Gary Flake (Technical Fellow at Microsoft, and the founder and director of Live Labs) demos Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online.
Hotel Internet Marketing by 2013 – Are we on Track?
I came across a piece I’d written about 17-18 months ago on the future of hotel internet marketing. The article talked about 5 broad tech trends that I thought would radically alter the way we approached digital / internet marketing for hotels back at the end of 2008. I thought it’d be fun to take a re-look at the article and see how far we’ve actually come in the last year or more and if those predictions still hold water… here goes:
1. Choice is king.
The clear winners of the online distribution race will be suppliers and 3rd parties that provide the most choice to the customer. “Experience building” will become key to the looking and booking process online. This will mean that successful suppliers (hotels) will have to break down elements of their inventory like rooms, dining, sports, spa and supporting services into individual units that can be booked and packaged both internally and externally. The more elements you provide to what I like to call the “Experience Engine”, the better the choice available to customers to personalize and tailor their experiences. This creation of experience units will also allow tourism industry suppliers to collaborate more effectively online, as well as spur the evolution of 3rd party providers who provide superior experience engines, taking destination marketing to a whole new level.
Open Linked Data and the next phase of the Web
Tim Berners-Lee’s recent speech at TED was released a few days ago…it’s interesting to watch Tim in his nervous excitement. as he asks the audience to repeat “RAW DATA NOW” after him, with a gleam in his eye.
The move towards more open sharing of ‘raw’ data is an inevitable but powerful shift in the development of the web. We’ve all heard about the Semantic Web, but this just won’t be possible without enough credible, pliable data to draw from…
Slides from the presentation are available here:
http://www.w3.org/2009/Talks/0204-ted-tbl/#(1)
Imagine a Web where we can draw on the collective intelligence of our times, when, where and how we really need it…that’s what it’s all about!
Excerpt from TED: 20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he’s building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together. More about WWW and Tim Berners-Lee - http://www.w3.org
Smart Decision Making – The Role of Results and Intuition in Modern Business
In this interview, I have the distinct honor of interviewing Professor Zeger Degraeve, who is the ‘Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Professor of Innovation, Professor of Decision Sciences’ at London Business School. Not only is Zeger a fascinating individual and an insightful teacher, but also brims with a bountiful supply of energy, zeal and experience. Here we talk about the fundamental issues in today’s business environment…the decisions we face, the results we’re held accountable for…and perhaps a clearer way to approach decision making than just relying on gut feel.
[JJ] We face many decisions on a day to day basis, ranging from personal to business…and from the critical life-changing type to the more mundane. Shouldn’t decisions be judged on the basis of the results they achieve?
[ZD] The result is irrelevant … as a measure of decision quality. People, including managers and business leaders typically equate the quality of a decision with the quality of the result. When people observe a good result they conclude that they made a good decision. Likewise, when a bad result is observed, people conclude that a bad decision was made. This is untrue. Decisions and results are two different things. Time elapses between a decision and the realisation of its result. Decisions are made at a specific moment in time. Afterwards, people implement these decisions and the result is observed in the future. The future is uncertain, there are no facts about the future, and nobody has a crystal ball. In the future, events can happen that managers and organisations cannot control. Also, events can happen that managers could not foresee. Such events can cause good decisions to have a bad result and vice versa. Therefore, the quality of the result is not an indicator of decision quality and the result is irrelevant as a measure of decision (and execution) quality.
The new era of Hotel Experience Marketing – Choice is the new King, All hail the King
Following on from the earlier articles, Back to the Future: Meet the hotel guest of 2020 (September 2008) 5 Future Developments that will revolutionize Online Hotel Marketing (October 2008), here are some thoughts on the role of Choice in successful Hotel Marketing of the future. I presented these ideas at the recent Revenue Management and Pricing Middle East Conference in Abu Dhabi…
As we mature into the Web 2.0 world and slowly inch our way to a more Semantic web, technology has made collaboration, connectivity and finding what you want easier than ever possible before. Combine available technology with the challenges posed by the recession and the timing for a Revolution of “Choice” is absolutely perfect!
Today, hotel guests have the option of various online tools that aid transparency, search and booking. However the research and booking process can still be pretty clunky and fragmented. I believe we need to move beyond the era of Search and Booking Engines to building superior “Experience Engines“.
Hotel eMarketing – Beyond Rooms. Internet Marketing for Spas, Restaurants, Offline Tracking and more
“We’ve come a long way, baby” claimed a high-spirited pop idol not so long ago, following up on the claim with an equally upbeat track. And so we have…in the world of Internet Marketing too. From the age of information (think glorified electronic brochure) on the web to the world of snappy online transactions…we’ve now moved into the age of an experiential and social Internet, all great leaps in a relatively short space of time. Hotel eMarketers can lay claim to that cheery phrase too, as far as marketing and distributing hotel rooms on the internet is concerned, in spite of the traditional, people-centric nature of the industry. But despite the eMarketer code to boldly go where no other hotel marketers have gone before, very few venture into the fuzzy world of online marketing beyond rooms.
