How to Succeed in the Online Accommodation Market

If the advertiser is offering hotel accommodation any ad should be focused on this market sector… ditto for B&B’s, guesthouses, villas etc.

Serious consideration should be given to ignoring the broad generic searches such as "Cape Town Hotels" unless there is a large profit margin to be had or there is an irresistible offer that can be made obvious in the little space available in the ad itself.

In the event of a click the unique selling proposition of the advertiser must be extremely compelling and obvious or else the searcher will leave the page and look at other ads. Remember this type of searcher is at best shopping (ie comparing offers, looking for customer reviews etc) and not yet in buying mode.

Target the market as specifically as possible. If your Cape Town Accommodation is a Hotel in Gansbaai then only advertise to that niche market. The volume of impression will be very significantly lower but the click through rates will be higher and the chances of a conversion will also be much higher so long as the landing page matches the search query and offers value to the searcher and meets that searcher’s particular needs. CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE

For the search query "Gansbaai Hotel" there are only 6 advertisers. Immediately this means the click cost will be much lower because there is less competition. In fact there is only one advertiser SPECIFICALLY and OBVIOUSLY offering HOTELs in Gansbaai. This advertiser also happens to be number 1. This advertiser is going to get these much more targeted searchers’ clicks. The advertiser is a Dutch based organisation called booking.com.

For the search "Gansbaai Hotel" it is probable that the searcher is at least shopping and possibly wanting to book a Gansbaai Hotel. Since there is only one advertiser apparently offering Hotel Accommodation in Gansbaai the search will with a high probability click this sponsored link first and may never return to view other advertisers.

The advertiser in this case is booking.com . This organisation, based upon my involvement with this online market sector, completely dominates the PPC accommodation scene in South Africa. The same organisation has very little SEO presence. Booking.com almost certainly pay dramatically less for a click than other advertisers on the same page for the simple reason Google makes more money from the high click through rate (CTR) enjoyed by booking.com. Because the CTR is so much higher (probably by a factor of 10) Google will make more money from displaying booking.com’s ads in the top position for literally 1/10th what other advertisers might be paying.

IMPORTANT CONCEPT TO UNDERSTAND:

Google aims to maximise its income per 1,000 page impressions. It is not only about the value of a click from Google’s perspective. This is a critically important concept to understand. As a simple example an ad getting a CTR of 3% can pay as little as 1/3rd the cost of a click by a competitor having a CTR of only 1%. In short Google handsomely rewards advertisers with high CTR.

Take a look at the landing page when the above booking.com sponsored link is clicked… CLICK TO ENLARGE

An excellent example of a landing page created on the fly to match the searcher’s query and intent. It will be very difficult for competitor to beat this organisation. Booking.com is quite possibly also paying less for a click than any other advertiser on the page.

This is an example of an excellent landing page. The only content is relevant to Gansbaai… not Cape Town, not Hout Bay just Gansbaai and surrounds.

Booking.com have met the immediate need of the searcher who queried "Gansbaai Hotel", saw an ad targeted to "Gansbaai Hotel" and when the ad was clicked was taken immediately to a page showing "Gansbaai Hotels" … and related Gansbaai accommodation and other Gansbaai relevant information that would appeal to the same searcher.

Why, under these circumstances, would a searcher/buyer want to consider other sponsored link offers on the search results page?

Conclusion

Competition between organisations on the Internet is significant and growing. If any commercial organisation with a serious intent to use the internet to attract shoppers and buyers must be prepared to discover, at a micro level, search terms (keywords) being used by the target market. Once identified these keywords should form the basis for a highly targeted advertising campaign which meets the intentions of the searcher right through to the landing pages… the concept of keyword continuity.

Failure to do this will probably result in the advertising campaign being sub-optimal at best, and a complete loss making adventure at worst.

The biggest single mistake made by Adwords advertisers is to make a searcher who has already completed a search to search again. For this reason alone it is a bad idea in general to send paid visitors to a home page.

A Final Word… It’s Not SEO versus PPC. It’s About Both.

In a commercial environment successful SEO revolves around building lots of well written content supported by good page structure from an SEO perspective and obtaining links (citations as it were) from 3rd party web sites.

Before an SEO campaign can be mapped out it is important to prioritize content creation. This should be done using a well structured and researched PPC campaign because such a campaign will highlight and quantify priorities to be tackled.

The problem with any commercial organisation relying only upon SEO as an online marketing strategy is exemplified by the following image…

The top graph shows daily visitors to a well established (5 years plus) website created by myself employing SEO tactics only. Suddenly without any reason known to myself traffic dropped to almost zero in mid May 2009 and by mid June had not recovered. If this model had been used to drive sales the impact would have been calamitous. The bottom graph shows impressions for a pure Adwords (PPC) campaign over the same period. It illustrates the consistency and level of control possible using Adwords.

Any sound Internet Marketing strategy should be built upon a joint SEO/PPC approach.