How Your Hotel Can Win in a Mobile First World

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June 20, 2017 by

The world has gone mobile and it shouldn’t come as any surprise. How many hours do you clock per day on your mobile device? Google has been vocal about the importance of mobile for years and it’s something that GCommerce has been preparing clients for since the first iPhone was released (that’s dating back to 2007 for quick reference).

First, a quick history of a few of Google’s mobile-ly motivated actions. In 2013, Google Adwords transitioned to Enhanced Campaigns, effectively taking away the ability to target a campaign to only one device type. Why? Because they want you to deliver the same experience to every consumer, no matter what device they are using. It also forced advertisers to start playing in the mobile space, where most saw lower conversion rates and poor revenue performance. In May 2015 Google confirmed that more searches are on mobile than desktop. Then, in the fall of 2016 Google announced they will be rolling out a new mobile-first index.

What does this all mean for hotels and how can your hotel succeed at (mobile) marketing? A successful marketing strategy these days means optimizing for all devices and understanding that consumer behavior is different depending on what device they are using at that time. We’re here to outline the steps for your hotel to achieve a successful marketing strategy for all devices.

STEP 1: THE FOUNDATION OF SUCCESS IS A WELL OPTIMIZED, RESPONSIVE WEBSITE

If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website it’s the first, most important step you should take in your hotel’s digital marketing strategy. Most KPIs funnel from traffic sent to your website. Take out your smartphone right now. Go to your hotel’s website. Can you easily navigate and find the information you need to complete the action you want visitors to take whether that’s an online reservation, click to call or important information such as location, directions, photos and more?

MAKE IT RESPONSIVE – In the early days of smartphones, many businesses turned to mobile websites to display unique, different versions of their web pages for mobile. New technology and Google’s directives are favoring the structure of responsive sites.

  • Responsive websites give you the control to use the same page URL for any device but the design/presentation of the page is automatically adjusted depending on the device it’s being viewed upon. This means you don’t have to manage two sets of page content.
  • Google is moving to mobile first indexing – if you have different/less information on your mobile page version then it could hurt you in organic rankings
  • Take a look for yourself using a tool such as Screenfly to view your website across many different device types

MAKE IT FAST – page load time is extremely important for website performance and search engine rankings. Consumers have come to expect page content to load instantly, and when it doesn’t they bounce. Kissmetrics completed a study that found 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less and 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. On top of that, Kissmetrics found that a 1-second delay in page response time could result in a 7% reduction in conversions. COMMIT THE BUDGET NECESSARY FOR IMPLEMENTING WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT IMPROVEMENTS FOR PAGE SPEED – you are certain to make your money back in no time.

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OPTIMIZE IT – set up your site for SERP success with well-optimized pages that include:

  • Optimized page titles, meta descriptions, and header tags
  • Keyword focus integrated into your on-page copy, alt text and image names
  • Voice focused keyword queries that answer questions and include semantic phrases for your top keywords
  • Keyword rich URL strings
  • Internal links to help visitors navigate easily through the site to find important content

MAKE IT EASY FOR YOUR VISITORS TO CONVERT –The easier you make it to navigate to what your consumers are looking for, the more likely the visitor is to convert. Don’t forget to look beyond your web pages – is your booking engine easy to use on mobile devices?

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  • Follow Google’s mobile-friendly best practices. Test your site here
  • Present a clear path to conversion such as a prominent “Reserve Your Stay”, “Book Now” or phone number with click-to-call functionality
  • Display easy to navigate menu options that present the most important information that visitors need
  • Audit your booking engine path to book to ensure there are no excessive steps or information required to book
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STEP 2: MAKE SURE YOUR HOTEL IS VISIBLE WITH LOCAL SEARCH OPTIMIZATION

46% of all searches on Google are local and in 2015 Google confirmed that mobile search surpassed desktop. Ensuring your hotel is optimized for local is more important than ever. Here’s a breakdown on how to make sure your hotel is visible in local searches:

Make sure you have consistent business information across all major directories, local listings
Optimize local listings including Google My Business, Bing Places
Partner with local businesses/community to gain exposure as well as link opportunities
On-page keyword optimization focusing on local, geographically focused terms
Encourage guests to post reviews through post-stay emails and reminders on property

STEP 3: DRIVE QUALIFIED TRAFFIC THROUGH A MIX OF MEDIA CAMPAIGNS ON MOBILE

Set up and optimize media campaigns for mobile devices driving exposure and generated qualified traffic to your mobile friendly website. Channels include:

PAID SEARCH
Use mobile bid adjustments to ensure visibility and conversions at the most efficient CPC
Enable location extensions to be eligible to show in Google Map/Local ads when people are searching for “hotels near” terms
Enable call extensions to allow your customers to click to call and drive phone call conversions
FACEBOOK: We see higher CTR on mobile than desktop and many of our clients are seeing a vast majority of their conversions coming from mobile devices.
Facebook’s Q1 2017 report showed that more advertisers are jumping on this trend; mobile ads made up 85% of Facebook’s q1 revenue.
In fact- many agencies are preaching “mobile first” even when it comes to FB ads (i.e. shorter copy, make sure images look good on a small screen, etc.).
EMAIL: a good mobile experience is also crucial to email marketing efforts:
Mobile represents roughly 54% of all email opens (according to litmus).

STEP 4: UNDERSTAND PERFORMANCE THROUGH KPIS AND CONVERSION TRACKING – are you tracking all points of conversion? Across all channels and all devices?

It’s important to understand that conversions on mobile devices may differ from desktop or tablet. Mobile phones are used intensively for research while desktop and tablet are still the main devices used to book online for hotels. Conversion types you should be using to measure mobile success include:

Phone calls
Look-to-book
Online reservations
Text to book
A major issue for many hotels is the inability to attribute phone call revenue to specific media campaigns or channels. There are a few solutions to track phone calls, from basic reporting that allows you to track the number of phone calls with duration and area code to solutions that can attribute booked revenue to specific campaigns. Some of our favorite solutions to help you track phone call conversions for hotels include:

Navis – an advanced phone call tracking solution that integrates with your reservation system to not only track revenue back to specific campaigns but improves your call conversion rate and deliver exceptional guest service.
Pros – advanced reporting including revenue booked over the phone and online attributed by campaign and by channel, improves guest experience drives higher phone call conversion rates, allows reservation agents to have specific notes on past guests and previous calls tied to same phone number
Cons – more expensive to set up, requires full integration into your operations reservation process and system
Phonalytics – provides a secure, easy-to-use Web-based control panel that shows all call attributes by customer name or ID, staff member, department, location, call time, call status and call duration
Pros – tracks phone calls and stats across multiple channels
Cons – doesn’t automatically track direct revenue from call bookings by channel
Google Adwords Call Tracking – the easiest and least expensive (free through your Google Adwords account) option, Google Adword’s call tracking allows you to track calls generated directly from your ads and calls generated after someone lands on your website and then calls you from the number displayed. This call tracking is easily set up through GTM and tracks by using dynamic phone numbers associated with each paid search campaign and displayed to the consumer on your paid search ad and on your website.
Pros – free, tracks calls – including duration, area code and if the call was answered or missed
Cons – can’t attributed direct revenue bookings, doesn’t record phone calls for reservation training or insight

CONCLUSION

What it all boils down to is that you need to optimize your online presence for an all-device world, taking into deep consideration the device types that are sending the most traffic to your website. Mobile, tablet and desktop traffic all play a role in the online lives of consumers and they expect a high standard of performance no matter what device they use. Optimize your hotel’s website for mobile but remember that all device types play a role in the online success of your business.

Behavioral Data & Advanced Retargeting Tactics Allow for Increased Success

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May 9, 2017 by

GCOMMERCE INCREASES HOTEL WEBPAGE’S CONVERSION RATE BY 230% BY UTILIZING BEHAVIORAL DATA & ADVANCED RETARGETING TACTICS

In March of 2016, The Lenox Hotel launched a new website. After the launch, representatives from the property worked with GCommerce to identify specific areas of their website that could be improved. The Lenox Hotel is a part of our Premium Insights Program, which provides additional consulting and analysis of traffic and campaign data for websites. Utilizing our resources from Premium Insights, we were able to work along with The Lenox Hotel to identify opportunities for the packages and specials offered through the website. On their previous site, they had a special offers page with some basic deals and packages that they offered for their guests. As the new site did not have anything similar, we decided to look into this further. After analysis of traffic behavior from the old website in comparison to the new one, it was determined that it would be worthwhile to build a new page to detail specific packages available for guests at The Lenox Hotel.

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New-Website-Packages-Page-1024x520

As you can see above, the new website packages page featured more photos around the specific packages along with unique and descriptive content for each with a more clear call to action for the user. We also worked with the property to develop a schedule for specific seasonal offerings (fireplace packages in the winter, aquarium in the spring/fall, etc.) to be displayed on this packages page. We then attempted to drive traffic around the specials that were being displayed through targeted advertising. We were able to further qualify the audiences we were targeting for these specials advertisements with Remarketing Lists for Search Ads and Remarketing for Display Ads with ad verbiage specific to the individual packages being displayed at that time. This allowed us to target our ads to the individuals that were most likely to book a package through the website with ad verbiage around the content they would be viewing.

Our initial results show that efforts to boost package exposure on the website paid off in a big way. The table below shows behavioral statistics for Sessions that interacted with each of these respective pages. Overall, we didn’t have too many more sessions interact with the page on the new site, an increase of just 16%. However, we did see a 285% increase in transactions, resulting in a 206% increase in revenue. The slight increase in traffic along with the huge increase in conversion means the eCommerce conversion rate increased by over 230%. We also saw the average session duration increase by nearly half a minute.

MARCH 1, 2015           TO FEBRUARY 29, 2016                        MARCH 1, 2016                      TO MARCH 1, 2017

SPECIALS PAGE                                                                                    SPECIALS PAGE

Sessions:                             7,033                                                                 Sessions:                                      19,807

Avg. Session Duration:    00:05:49                                                       Avg. Session Duration:             00:06:12

Conversion Rate:               2.65%                                                             Conversion Rate:                         8.78%

Transactions:                     451                                                                    Transactions:                                1,739

Revenue:                             $421,992.04                                                  Revenue:                                        $1,293,174.70

In conclusion, our results show that adding additional imagery and content to The Lenox Hotel’s new packages page along with specifically targeted remarketing advertisements to the most qualified audiences resulted in drastic increases in the eCommerce conversion rate, transactions, and revenue for users that interacted with these pages. We look forward to continuing our partnership with The Lenox Hotel to further identify areas of improvement for their website and business.

Interested in learning more about our Premium Insights offering? Great! Click below and let’s chat about how to take advantage of your analytic data.

How To Build Well Optimized Landing Pages to Increase Conversion Rates

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April 17, 2017 by

Imagine that you’ve become aware of a sale on batteries at a new superstore in town. You arrive in this superstore to purchase those batteries, but there’s no sign; nothing telling you where to go, nothing even acknowledging that batteries are even in the store. And then, slowly but surely, you begin to consider that maybe your former battery supplier isn’t so bad, why not just go back? Surely the price difference is worth the time you will save. This sense of unfamiliarity and confusion that is off-putting to the most interested of potential buyers isn’t limited to brick and mortar, it happens every day on websites too. Often times, when a business links users to their website homepage, they risk high bounce rates. Homepages aren’t enough, 96% of first-time site visitors aren’t ready to convert, they are interested in what you’ve offered them, but it takes some additional lifting to move them down the funnel.

This is where dedicated landing pages become exceedingly useful, they inform and persuade your site visitors to take specific desired actions. Staying true to the above analogy, consider how much easier it would be to walk in and have those batteries sitting at the register for you, correct price and all. This is what well-designed dedicated landing pages help accomplish. They simplify the process of conversion for the user by eliminating excess noise, therefore leading to higher conversion rates. Want proof? PPC Hero conducted a study on the use of designated landing pages by A/B testing a homepage versus a designated landing page. They experienced a 131% lift in conversion rate and a 4.46% lift in revenue. Now, these numbers can slide around depending on whether you are doing a lead generation or click through landing page and, of course, what industry you are in, but overall, the statistics lean towards overwhelming support for dedicated landing pages.

What is a landing page? A landing page is any webpage that your visitors arrive at after clicking on your advertisement, whether that’s social, display or even email. Landing pages can be anything, a homepage, a lead gen page or even a booking link. However, a dedicated landing page is specifically dedicated to whatever promotion or information brought the visitor to your site. For example, you are running a bed and breakfast package promotion, you have both social and display running for this promo. Visitors are interested and so they click through the ad, arriving at a specific page detailing the bed and breakfast package and including a “book now” link as the sole call to action. This user is moved down the funnel to conversion through the use of consistent messaging and imagery by way of a dedicated landing page. Below is a photo comparing the link between a social ad and a dedicated landing page:

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This guide introduces you to fundamental benefits of designated landing pages and some best practices to increase the impact of your digital advertising.

1. User Reassurance

Consider our battery sale example used above. Imagine you had walked in and there was a visible, informational sign about the battery sale upon entry into the superstore. The sign corroborates the information you saw in the advertisement, leading you to feel more comfortable in your new environment. This is a very basic example of “message match”, a term that basically just means that your messaging is consistent across channels. If you’ve advertised a bed and breakfast package on social media, your landing page serves as a home for specific messaging about that bed and breakfast package. The messaging shares similar copy, keywords, and creative that makes a user feel more at ease with their new website experience. While social and display advertising serve as a snapshot of your offering, dedicated landing pages can serve as home base, providing supplemental or critical information to the package that may not have been included in your snapshot.

2. Visitor Attention Ratio

Aside from message match, dedicated landing pages serve as a way for businesses to manage what is known as the “visitor attention ratio.” Essentially, what this ratio is, is a comparison of how many interactive elements (ie. links) versus how many specific conversion goals (ie. book now button) are present on a webpage. A homepage typically exhibits a visitor attention ratio of 40:1. In simple terms, this means that for every specific conversion opportunity, there are 40 ways to leave the page (or be distracted from the conversion goal). Bottom line? Homepages are distracting. Take, for example, the below image of Topnotch Resort’s home page:

The homepage (excluding header/footer) exhibits 13 interactive elements versus 3 CTAs. There are so many opportunities for a visitor to become distracted from your initial messaging, leading them to different pages and lowering their probability of conversion. Alternatively, look at this landing page for their “Get Dirty” package:

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This dedicated landing page simplifies everything for the user by providing ONE conversion CTA: “Book Now” and 0 interactive elements (excluding header/footer). Here, the user is provided more information about the package and then directly given the opportunity to book.
In the hotel industry, often times links are sent to booking engines, this is not a designated landing page. At GCommerce, we advise against this as it can cause a couple of problems: first, the message gets lost as soon as they click through, which can disorient the user; and second, for display advertising, you MUST link to a landing page. Booking engines are not considered “crawlable” by SEO spiders and, therefore, are not valid links. It’s a safer bet all around to just create a designated landing page that features a “Book Now” button that links users to the booking engine.

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3. Best Practices

So now that we know why designated landing pages are fundamental to the success of your campaigns, how should they be built? Unbounce has supplied 5 steps to creating a successful landing page:

  • Your Unique Selling Proposition
    • Communicate what makes your offer unique immediately and clearly. You can do this through a headline, subheader, reinforcement statement, or closing argument. It’s estimated that you have 5 seconds to convince your user that you are worth their while and your USP is the quickest way to do this.
  • The Hero Shot
    • Use compelling imagery to convey a visual representation of your offer. Whether this is a photo or video, make sure it’s quality is up to par and that it is experiential. Supply imagery that helps your users imagine themselves at your property.
  • Benefits
    • If your users aren’t aware of what benefit the offer provides them, how well do you think it’s going to sell? Make this information clear and easy to find for the user. Use bullet points or numbers to show what’s included and why it is the right offer for them. Avoid paragraphs or thick walls of text that can make a user become disinterested in what you have to say.
  • Social Proof
  • A Single Conversion Goal – Call to Action
    • Offer a single CTA above the fold. Using more than one CTA distorts the visitor attention ratio we discussed earlier. In hospitality, your CTA is typically going to be “Book Now.” Insert a colorful button that allows users to click through directly to your booking engine. Remember, your designated landing pages are valuable tools in persuading your users to take a single, desired action, so make that action clear through a single and effective CTA.
  • Message Match
    • Earlier, we discussed how important it is that a user feels reassured on your website through the use of message match, so naturally, it is essential that we include this as a best practice. Make sure that your information supplements your campaign but still matches the initial verbiage and keywords. You can tell visitors more details about your offer, whether it’s what’s included, applicable exclusions, how to book, or where to direct questions to, it’s always important to provide more information without losing your initial voice and tone.
  • Naming Convention
    • Have a care in how you name your landing pages. Often times, what you name your landing page is visible to the public. For instance, in the above Topnotch example, you wouldn’t want to name your landing page “Get Dirty Landing Page” because your link will look something like “topnotchresort.com/get-dirty-landing-page”. Which just looks ridiculous. Keep it simple and relevant, without referring to it as a landing page. For instance, a good landing page name is simply “Get Dirty”, which would display as “topnotchresort.com/get-dirty”. It’s short, it’s sweet, and it gets to the point.

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