If you are investing in SEO, PPC and affiliates as part of your hotel ecommerce campaigns, what focus are you placing on the traffic once it hits your website? Too often we see a lot of money spent on offline marketing campaigns that aim to drive traffic to a website, with little or no thought given to user interaction when that traffic hits the site.

So how do you ensure or at least maximise the opportunity to convert visitors to your website to bookings. Part of the solution starts with understanding how people interact with your website, how they get there, what they do on there, and how they leave.

To collect this information there are a number of options in the market place, from six figure fully customised platforms to free tools such as Google Analytics. Google Analytics is one of many programs & interfaces which allows you to insert code into your website to track how visitors interact with your website, in an great amount of details. But it’s what you do with this information that makes the difference.

So where do you start? There are a plethora of blogs, and some excellent articles and tutorials out there. Google has some great courses that you can run through to get some background information. But also consider that the majority of large international hotel chains and retailers have ecommerce departments that present these reports, so employing the services of a professional agency may also be key.

Try looking at and understanding how many people to your site are repeat visitors, how many pages are they looking at on site, how long are staying on your site for and what countries are they viewing from?

Acting on the results that are presented to you or that you have developed is paramount to increasing your onsite conversion rates. Changes to the layout, content, location of buttons and colours can all effect your conversion rates.

If you would like to learn more about analytics and how you can get involved to improve your, please feel free to get in contact should you wish to increase your conversion!

So all that is left for the ref to blow the whistle and for Australia to claim the William Web Ellis trophy on 23rd October, or will that be New Zealand, or England !!

We love the feature whereby when you are searching in a location the ability to define the area that you would like to search, using Google maps and the shape tool. A tool that you can drag and adjust so that the area you want to stay in is included. Particularly useful as sometimes the location areas set by online travel agents are too large, or you would be happy considering staying a bit further out.
Another key benefit of the system is it allowing you to select a list of hotels compare and shortlist then. This is enhance with a neat feature from Google that compares the price that is shown, to the average price over time indicating the percentage change up or down, this representing the value you are achieving at that property at that time.

While Google Hotel Finder has only been rolled out at this stage for hotels in the USA, it raises some interesting questions that need to be considered for when Hotel Finder comes to a city near you, which we all know will be soon!

- Channel Management: Google Hotel finder aims to serve availability and cost in real time. Are the OTA’s that you are listed with working with Google? Do you have a strategic approach to channel management and how will it fit into Google Hotel Finder?

- Are your hotels images up-to-date and relevant? Google pulls a selected number of images into the results.
- Reviews? Collates the reviews in similar way to business listings for all to see, are you confident in the management of your online reputation?

- Average Rates? Specials and offers are now going to need to be more transparent than ever as the comparison feature compares today’s listed rates to average rates over time.

All in all it’s pretty exciting to see how and if Google’s foray into the travel sector will fare, only time will tell, but we think that those that embrace this first and work with Google are going to see results not only on Hotel finder but increased visibility in site rankings and overall hotel marketing efforts.

If you like to have a chat about how you can prepare for Google Hotel finder or how you increase your hotels presence online, strategies for selling through online travel agents or just a general catch up let us know, we would love to hear from you!

As always we welcome your comments.

1. Don’t Overpromise – Great photography for your products and a service is a must, more and more people are researching and shopping over the Internet and photos and images sell your products and services. However a misleading photo is the first step to disappointing your customer. If you show them a photo this is what they believe and hope that they will receive. Don’t mislead them at this stage and you’re on the right track to managing their expectations.

2. Great Customer Service – There are a thousand adages for customer service and anyone of them would do here, but at the end of the day there is nothing really that can compete with great customer service, not the flashest marketing, packaging and photos can compare to the service that your customers receive when they walk in the door or buy your products. Get this right and you will exceed your customer’s expectations.

3. Know Your Customer – A couple of quick questions that give you an indication of why they are using your services, take a note, remember and then plan! If you know they are coming to your hotel for a birthday a quick note in their room or on check in can do wonders. Then follow up for next time, that way if it’s unprompted it will go a lot further.

4. Deliver on Your Promise – If you say you do something or are something, be it and do it! It’s simple but not delivering on your promises is the single biggest reason for people becoming disenchanted with your products.

5. Be Honest – Don’t try and pull the wool over people’s eyes, probably the single biggest way to ruin your reputation in the market place and for people to feel deceived and unhappy with your product.

Managing peoples expectations is something that needs to be considered carefully, but if you plan for it, and put yourself in your customers shoes, then you are well on the way to managing your customers expectations for the better.

Many of our clients feel that they need a presence on twitter, but are unsure of why, what to do and their goals. From our experience with working with past sector clients have these top 10 tips for twitter ranging from best practice to strategy.

1. Have a Goal – Seems simple, but if you are going to enter the world of tweets, re-tweets  and twitter have a think first, and decide your desired output and results.
2. Set out a Strategy – From how it’s going to be managed, to the tone of your messages, the frequency of tweets, and the communities that your voice will be heard in. Having a strategy in place from the forefront will ensure that you are consistent in your message and stay true to your goals.
3. Design your page – Your page is an extension of your brand and should reflect this.
4. Following – You probably know half a dozen people and companies that you deal with that are on twitter, start following them, then think about who else you work with follow them, then think about the communities you are involved in and, start following them! Before long you will get some followers and gain momentum.
5. Retweeting- Is the process of passing on another person’s message. Retweet information that your followers will find interesting. But do your homework; make sure that the information you retweet and person that put that message out is aligned with your brand. Also remember that RT is great but it is no substitute for great new content.
6. Replying – followers will occasionally send you messages using the ”@” symbol at the start of the tweet then your username, i.e @_elementary. Remember if the @ symbol is at the start of the tweet only that person will see it. If you add more people after then they will see it as well. If you start a tweet with anything other than the @ symbol then all your followers will see it.
7. Link Shortening – Try and link to something if you can, preferably something on your website. Then, when you do link to something, use a link-shortening tool like bit.ly. That way you can track the amount of clicks on that specific link.
8. Twitter Manager – There are numerous programs to support you and they are a great way to manage your twitter accounts. You can save searches, monitor keywords, reply to messages and post tweets all from the one platform. Do you homework on these first, some are free and others are free then you need to pay extra for additional features.
9. Trending – Topics that have more people talking about then others will “trend” and will be displayed on twitter in your sidebar. Want to get your topic trending? It’s not as easy as it seems, offline and online promotion across multiple platforms will be needed and sending the message to people that you think will RT (retweet) can all help.
10. Hash tags ‘#”  - are a great way to monitor a conversation. Want people to ask you a question or become involved in a conversation? Create a hash tag that is simple, and short.

We hope that you have found this helpful and insightful. Twitter is a great tool and overtime can be an effective channel to advertise and broadcast your message. Happy Tweeting !

Well is this going to be the case?

Product placement has always been de rigueur in films, and in the United States and Australia product placement in television has been the norm for quite sometime. So will we notice the difference? For one, there wont be that annoying blurred out t-shirt or mug on a judges desk, so to begin with we think you are going to notice but after while it wont even register.

But being marketers we wont to know where the opportunities are right? And being focused on hotels, are there opportunities for you to feature your venue ?

Essentially featuring your hotel, bar or venue in any television show is sponsorship, so a strategic approach needs to be taken. The television show and its demographic needs to complement your marketing strategy as there is little point in having your hotel appear in Home and Away when the majority of your customers are listening to Radio 4…

So before considering turning the lobby into a television set ask yourself, will appearing on the next episode of that famous soap add value to your brand, or will it barely be noticed by an audience focused on other things.

Thanks for reading and as always we look forward to your comments.

Our Internet shop front, www.elementary-agency.com is a place for you to get an idea of who we are, the work we do, and who we do it for, and because we love social media here at Elementary Agency, you can find links to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. However the thing that excites us the most (on our new webiste !) is our blog. We are really excited about writing, passionate about sharing news and views, and are genuinely interested in joining the conversation. But we promise that it’s not just going to be Marketing and Social Media! We here at Elementary Agency have a vibrant and cultural office, so you can expect that we will be sharing what we are talking about, whether it is sport, weekend surf conditions or the office playlist!

So, the weekend beckons, its round two of the Six Nations and a new era of Elementary Agency!

Thanks for reading, and we look forward to sharing the next update with you soon.

Andrew and Nick