Author Posted on Categories Analytics, Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Vacation Rental Marketing What is a content audit and how can it help you increase website traffic + conversions. Let’s start with the definition: A Content Audit is a way to get rid of under performing low
Author Posted on Categories Analytics, Email Marketing, Industry News There are many moving parts to GDPR, but the three main points are listed below:
Users must consent to the processing of their personal data and companies must explain how data is collected and the intention for utilizing data.
Users have the right for their personal data to be deleted/forgotten.
If a website experiences a data breach, it must be reported within 72 hours.
We know GDPR can be confusing, but for our customers primarily operating and marketing within the United States, this is what GDPR means for you:
=&0=& We have created a new privacy policy that can be adopted by our customers. This revised privacy policy was specifically developed in response to GDPR, providing website users with more in-depth information on how their personal data may be collected and used.
Readily Available Contact & Data Controller Information:=&1=&=&2=&
Opt-Choice for Email Marketing: Upon completing a contact form on your website, users should have the ability to opt-in if they wish to receive further emails from your company.
Author Posted on Categories Analytics, Vacation Rental Marketing We have done a case study of a vacation rental client of ours. Sample client launched their first website with ICND in early 2010. The website was clean, modern for the time, and we even developed a mobile site where their guests could book online (which was relatively new technology in 2010). In 2013, we decided it was time for an upgrade. While a mobile site is great, a responsive website is even better. Instead of having 2 sites, you now have one which responds to the viewer’s device. It’s easier for updates, and Google also prefers it. Computer screens are now wider than they were in 2010, so we designed the new site to be wider as well. We also assured that there was a prominent quick search box above the top fold. After all, the main goal of a vacation rental website is to get your viewers to search for a vacation rental, and ultimately book.
In the beginning of 2014, we started to see a hit in online traffic. This client had been on a steady marketing plan for years and there had been no major change in marketing strategy. We pushed to get the new website live, hoping that we would see a turn around in traffic and revenue upon launch. The new website went live in May of 2014. After 3 short months, we have seen some great increases! Now they are well above their numbers for 2013!
The image below shows their organic traffic for March 1 2014- August 13 2014 and March 1 2013- August 13 2013. The orange line shows 2013 traffic, the blue one shows 2014 traffic. You will notice that prior to the website launching, they were gaining less traffic this year than they had last. As soon as the website launched, 2014 traffic began to show as more than 2013.
Your website is the face of your company, so it is important to keep it up to date. Not only will it impress your viewers and potential customers, it will also impress the search engines, leading them to view you as the leader in your industry!
Author Posted on Categories Analytics, Email Marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Vacation Rental Marketing Studies have shown (Framingham Heart Study) that men who regularly vacation are 32% less likely to die of heart related illnesses compared to men who do not take a regular vacation. What’s worse is that women who don’t vacation twice a year are 8 times MORE likely to suffer from a heart related illness. These studies reinforce the notion that happier, healthier people across the board, know that rest and relaxation are vital to their health.
The question is: are you capturing every demographic the correct way?
Today’s marketing tools make it easier than ever to target specific demographics:
Facebook Targeted Ads– Facebook ads have come a long way in terms of targeting. Users of Facebook today are revealing more and more information within their own profiles that Facebook has tactfully gained access to who each user is. If one bedroom condos are a large part of your inventory still in stock, the ability to create an ad specifically toward those in relationships with less than 2 children as well as including the unmarried and married with less than 2 children, ensures that those in your target segment are the only ones who are viewing such an ad.
Facebook Post Targeting– Did you know you can cater a post to specific demographics? Much like Facebook ads, specific post targeting allows you to display certain posts to current fans that you wish to capture. Suppose there are a number of units you’d like to see booked for an upcoming weekend. Depending on your vacation rental price points, wouldn’t it make sense to target to those solely within a day’s drive? Creating a targeted post highlighting this facet has the potential to yield higher results.
Segmented
Author Posted on Categories Analytics, Vacation Rental Marketing As a company with lots of vacation rental clients, we’re well versed in methods that vacation rental managers use in their own marketing tactics, both online and offline. While we’re largely concerned with online visibility, we also are aware that many conversions, advertising and promotion happen offline. From phone call conversions to brand awareness and local advertising, many vacation rental managers are struggling to accurately measure all of their efforts. It’s something we see everyday.
For some industries, it’s pretty easy to measure advertising spend. With many companies only spending dollars on pay-per-click and other digital marketing efforts, they can track all their efforts in a analytics tracking suite like Google Analytics. For online-only businesses, digital ROI is pretty easy to measure.
However, we have found several tactics for vacation rental managers to keep their online and offline marketing data into Google Analytics. It’s a fairly simple tactic that involves using two primary methods: separate, short domains for advertising and landing pages.
Let me explain.
Most offline marketing campaigns are on print flyers, newspapers, billboards and many other avenues. Nearly all of these advertisements usually have your website in the bottom of the ad – and that’s impossible to track. People who visit by directing entering your website into their URL bar are counted as direct visitors, with no more information about where they came from available for you to see.
If your website does a few hundred or thousand direct visits per month, how can you tell if a new billboard or print ad caused that rise in traffic? You can’t. It all goes into Google analytics as direct website traffic and is no different than people who may have already known your brand or visited your site before. So, marketing managers, when it’s time to renew that billboard or print ad, how in the world can you tell if it worked?
Enter a vanity domain (or many vanity domains). A vanity domain is basically a shorter version (or just alternate version) of your website that you can control and measure easier when it’s only placed where you know about it. For example, if we used http://www.icnd.net as our only domain that we placed on a print ad that was sent to vacation rental managers, we’d know that anyone who used that domain came from that ad. We could then apply the secret sauce of this tactic (google analytics campaign variables) to find out in analytics exactly how many people arrived at our website from this ad.
Here’s the steps we’ll take to measure this:
Author Posted on Categories Analytics, Search Engine Optimization Have you taken advantage of Google E-commerce tracking in Google Analytics. It's a bit of code you have to insert onto your confirmation page after an order is processed that will recognize
Author Posted on Categories Analytics, Vacation Rental Marketing, Web Design Forms are a great way to obtain much needed data from your users but they don’t work if people take one look and back away from them without ever typing a single keystroke. Time and again we’ve
Author Posted on Categories Analytics As vacation rental managers start to feel the lessening of the weight of the world off their shoulders, we urge them to take some time to evaluate their marketing and websites. The off-season is the perfect time to explore, make changes, and gear up for a prosperous 2012 rental year. Here is our list of the top things we recommend you do, if you haven’t already:
1. Install Google E-commerce Tracking to your website. You can’t effectively evaluate your SEO company, email campaigns, and PPC campaigns by the traffic alone that’s driven to your website. You have to be able to track your rate of conversion and your revenue generated from every campaign. It’s so easy with Google E-commerce tracking. If you don’t have it, that is NUMBER ONE! Get Google E-comm set up within your booking engine pages.
2. Look at your PPC vs SEO keyword phrases. You’re paying big money for PPC ads and you’re paying big money to be on the top pages of the search engines for popular keyword phrases. For PPC, you’ll want to check your quality score for your keyword phrases and see if you can improve them by adding quality content to your landing pages thus, making them more relevant to your keyword phrases. You’ll also want to see which keyword phrases you are converting best on (in which you have the best conversion) for PPC and make sure that those are also keyword phrases that you are ranking well for. If you aren’t, you know where to focus in the off season (your off-season focus should include) working on content, backlinks, and blogging. You may also want to explore with PPC other (with other PPC) keyword phrases that you haven’t been targeting through SEO and set up a few campaigns to see if they are a niche you can optimize organically.
3. Call tracking. If you haven’t evaluated a call tracking company you should really get in the game. It’s one thing to be able to track your online reservations, but it’s even better to be comprehensive. Sure, Google may offer this for free in the future (Yes! Please!) but in the mean time you really need a well-rounded approach to tracking your marketing.
4. Evaluate your marketing mix – Social Search and Social Media are getting bigger and bigger. Sorry. You’re not going to be able to avoid it. You can’t hide from it. If you haven’t found a way to make money off of the 4 hours a day your reservationist is spending on Facebook, then it’s time to talk to a specialist. Social Media can be very time consuming, but there are ways to generate fans and followers fairly quickly and there are ways to convert them to reservations.
Remember, it takes a certain number of touch points before you can convert a new customer and you need to cultivate relationships with your existing customers. Email marketing is still producing, but let’s be honest, I haven’t checked my personal email in well over 4 weeks! In addition, the search giant, Google, has recently released Google + to invitation only. It’s only a matter of time until it’s publically released and another avenue you will have to manage and maintain. In addition it’s the first SURE sign of social and search being integrated and that’s even a whole new world for you to keep up with. Check these articles for more information about Social media and Google +.
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