What Is It Really Costing You?

In my post about how poorly corporate websites perform in customer usability tests, I said to ask yourself, “how much is it costing you?” I’ve been thinking about this all weekend. It is like when you have a craving for a certain food and it won’t be satiated until you eat it. The craving lingers and lingers, constantly in your consciousness. Yes, I could have come in to my office, booted up the computer, and gone ahead and written this post in order to clear my mind. I didn’t for two reasons. First, I am at my desk and in front of the computer on average 10 hours a day throughout the workweek. I am loath to do it on my weekends. Second, I felt it was helping me refine my post the more I churned it over in my mind. I’ll let you be the judge as to the success of that decision.

What is it costing you?

Now that is a question isn’t it! How do you know what your website is costing you. There are plenty of analytics and metrics to measure what your site is producing for you but where do you get data to determine what it is costing you? I have developed a formula that will help you determine this. You’ll need a few of your performance metrics.

• Traffic
• Unique visitors
• Conversion rate
• Bounce rate

Once you have aggregated the analytic data, the next step is to see how your site compares to others in your competitive set. But how?

A few terrific resources are Compete.com and SEMRush.com. Each of these sites provide different comparisons for how well your website is performing. Compete gives you traffic comparisons on a graph and then lists specifics about whether your traffic is trending upwards or not; unique visitors, top sites sending traffic, etc. (see picture below)

One of the key data points offered by SEMRush is the amount of keywords, or keyword phrases, being optimized on your site versus your competition. The more keywords being optimized the broader spectrum of opportunities you have to deliver unique visitors to your site. In the picture below, the website is currently being optimized across approximately keywords. (Note: The Hyperdisk Marketing client, Seaisland.com is being optimized for over 1,500 keywords.)

The information you now have at hand allows you to estimate how much an ineffective website is costing you. Using the estimated traffic from Compete, your Bounce Rate, how many keywords your competition is using, and you will soon get a picture of how much your traffic needs to increase. If you multiply that number (an estimate is fine) by the value of each new customer using average purchase or some similar metric,  will deliver to you a relative estimation of how much an ineffective website or emarketing program is costing you.

Of course if you want to avoid all of that work, you can contact me. I’ll provide a free, no obligation analysis for you. Scan this QR Code for my contact information. Talk to you soon!

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Related articles

• Bounce Rate and Exit Rate – What is the Difference and Why They’re Important (directorymaximizer.com)
• Analytics for Local SEO (marketing.yell.com)
• How to Use Your Website’s Data to Expand Your Online Business (smallbizbee.com)

You’ve Never Had It So Good!

 

I recently reviewed what Hyperdisk is, does, who we serve, how we serve them, and some of our successes. I thought I would share a few of the bullet points I collected with you.

Opportunities we address:

• We define success by revenue, market share and comp analysis (not rank!) — realtime reporting
• Schema.org – Double up on search exposure organically in the next 90-120 days
• Immediately grow long-tail and major destination searches
• Improve paid search by 20-30% through SEO…  PPC vs. SEO…  growing electronic share vs. quick sale
• Drive need periods and occupancy for short and long term via Paid Search, Retargetting
• Expand on mobile optimization – $60,000 in revenue for San Francisco client

Our Experience:  No firm that has more experience with Search Marketing for hotels, resorts and destinations

• Satellite partners in Europe:  Hill & Knowlton, Paris, London and local roots in the market…
• UN: International company – Dutch, French, Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnam, English, Spanish
• Every brand, every major market:  30 states + International footprint
• 20% of 5-star hotels / 10% of the top 100 hotels and resorts in the world
• Starwood Hawaii – nearly 1/3 of business is international, Aruba, Caribbean
• SeaIsland.com – over 1500 keywords
• Preferred Hotel Group – worldwide exposure (100+ hotels in Europe)
• Visit Europe (European Trade Commission)
• Larkspur Hotels – major growth in search – up 30% / 8:1 / 40:1 returns
• Joie de Vivre Hotels

We do more than hospitality!

Billion dollar brands: Abraxis, Allergan, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson

You’re not going to believe this

One of the first things I tell people is, “You’re not going to believe this.”  They always respond with, “Yes I will.” And when I tell them they always say, “I don’t believe you.” I wonder why I keep telling them. Reminds me of the saying, “A definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over yet expecting a different result.” At least here I can show actual data from independent and very credible sources that support what I am telling these people. The problem is that people  will still say they don’t believe me.

Is it considered bragging if there are numbers to support your claims? You’ll find below a typical increase in performance once Hyperdisk Marketing begins managing the digital assets for a client. Notice the nearly $13,000.00 increase in revenue from the 3,900 visits to produce a PPC ROI of 467%. Yes, I think that is definitely something to brag about.

And on the organic search side of things, the following chart was produced by Compete.com and after only 30 days of working with the account. Our client is the blue line. Their main competitor is the green line. We first instituted our search marketing program for them in March 2011. You can see the result.

Do you believe me now?

Advancing The Revenue Revolution: Why You Need Revenue Performance Management | B2C Marketing Insider

Anything I can add to this would be superfluous.

Advancing The Revenue Revolution: Why You Need Revenue Performance Management | B2C Marketing Insider.

Over 1.5 million Unique Visitors per Month

 

I’d like to do a full analysis at some point, but for the record, our websites are conservatively producing over 100 million dollars in revenue for our 50 major accounts…  Our websites produce well in excess of 1.5 million unique visitors per month.

That does not take into account additional revenue via Calls, Leads or Indirect (that would probably put it more like 250 million+)…

Pretty amazing when you think about the impact of our efforts in just dollars and cents.

OTA’s, PPC and SEO

A blog post titled, “How to Utilize OTA’s as Marketing Channels,” Scott Van Hartesvelt wrongly proposes hotels list OTA (Online Travel Agents) commissions as an expense in the budgets currently being prepared for 2011. His premise is that the OTA’s are not as expensive as they are being perceived and are, in fact, less expensive than booking through the hotel’s own site! Since the 2003 industry awakening report by Smith Travel Research, that the most profitable channel for a hotel to sell a room is directly through their own website! And their have been many recent articles disclosing up to $5.4 billion of revenue has been drained from the hotels to the OTA’s during the recent recession. The surprising this is that Scott’s company supposedly does online marketing for hotels!

I believe the basis of Scott’s argument is that OTA’s are an essential channel of revenue for hotels. The fallacy of his argument is that he assumes that all of the “uncommitted” searches click on PPC (Pay-Per-Click) related terms and that increases the cost of acquisition. The fact is, and Google execs confirm, that less than six percent of searchers actually click on sponsored links. Organic placement, i.e. those that are not sponsored, cost the hotel virtually nothing and consequently the ROI is much, much higher. A well-developed and consistently managed search optimization program will produce greater results and be sustainable over the long-term. OTA’s, however, do spend tremendous amounts of marketing dollars on behalf of their partner hotels. They should be a part of the marketing mix, just not at the high level that many in the industry seem to be relying on at present.

OTA Leakage – How Much Profit Have You Lost?

When Smith Travel Research first released data on the impact of OTA’s on the hospitality industry back 2003 it generated a lot of activity both online and offline. The hotel brands spent thousands of dollars on advertising campaigns designed to drive business directly to their corporate websites. The launch of the “Best Rate Guarantee” dates back to that time. The profit loss estimated by STR then was $1.4 billion.

Guess what? It has happened again. Only this time it is to a much greater extent! Can you say $5.4 billion (as estimated by HeBs)? There are many reasons for it.

The question is, what is going to be done about it this time? The Best Rate Guarantee has already been done.  Any more ideas?

What about maximizing revenue production directly from the hotel’s website across all market segments? A close examination of a wide variety of hotel sites exposed clear and present opportunities to do just that. The addition of micro-formats and RDFa programming are two items that would greatly enhance visibility and distribution. The inclusion of Google3D is a technology that has been available for several months yet not widely used in hotel marketing. These are just two examples that would greatly improve performance and allow a hotel compete vigorously with the OTA’s.

The hotel brands also need to allow franchise hotels to develop and launch vanity sites.

Note: A case study on the effectiveness of vanity sites, not only for the hotel but the brand a well, is available by emailing sales7@hyperdisk.com

The OTA’s are a valid channel for selling room nights. It is just that they are the least profitable method of selling them and consequently, should be a low tier (bottom tier we think) option for selling.

Its Time To Sharpen Your Saw

Hospitality marketing consultant, Neil Salerno, quotes Stephen Covey’s famous book, “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” in a piece for ehotelier.com titled, “It’s Time for Hoteliers to Sharpen the Saw.” He puts forth very compelling points regarding online marketing, the economic downturn and the tentative recovery he equates to cutting down a tree using a dull saw. He also asks questions that should be considered by many directors of sales and marketing, and corporate vice presidents of marketing in the hospitality industry.

Neil states, “The Internet and other forms of electronic marketing are critical elements for success now and into the future.” We agree except that we feel it is mission critical and has been for quite a while. If “other forms of electronic marketing” means mobile, we suggest he fell quite short on the emphasis here. Mobile marketing will soon eclipse computer use of the Internet according to comScore (see previous post on mobile marketing).

Neil continues, “Now, is the time to make an assessment of the production from your website. Start with the number of reservations received versus website visitors. Is your website attracting relevant visitors; are you receiving site analytics to help fine tune your website?”

These are all excellent questions yet need to reach deeper to get an accurate analysis of how visitors are interacting with your site. What is your Bounce Rate? Are you driving the visitors to the pages you wish them to go? What revenue is being generated outside of room nights? What is your traffic count versus your comp set? Have you implemented geo-locating code on your site to maximize Search Engine visibility that now relies on HTML 5?

“When was the last time you did a thorough review of your website for updates? Is it time for a new website to boost sales?” is perhaps Neil’s most important question. During the difficult period of late 2008 and all of 2009 nearly everyone either cut or froze marketing budgets. They typically put website redevelopment on hold until the booking forecast and revenue generation improved. Now is the time to rectify this situation. In the world of Internet marketing as little as six months is a huge time-lapse let alone over a year. The aforementioned HTML 5 has been implemented by Google, Hootsuite, and mobile applications making it essential for your hotel to have it incorporated into your site. And that is just one development!

With all of the major researchers (Smith Travel Research, Forrester, PhocusWright, etc.) forecasting a recovery in 2010 you cannot delay in have answers to Neil’s very timely questions.

Mobile Marketing For Room Nights

There are expected to be over 1 billion people with smartphones by 2013. What impact does that have for mobile marketing and booking room nights at hotels? Take a look a few current statistics:

• nearly 200 million smartphones are currently ready to book rooms
• Over 30% of smartphone users use them to access social media
• Nearly 5% of all hotel traffic is now mobile

And consider this report,

According to the “Deloitte Hospitality 2015: Seven key trends to shape future success” one of the most important factors is technology; and more specifically mobile technology. It states,

“…to be successful in 2015, hospitality companies must invest in technology. The battle to drive bookings through proprietary websites will continue, but all major operators will also develop applications and websites for mobile devices to meet consumer demands.”

Here is what a customized mobile app can do for you:

• Guest service functions
• Pre-arrival and in-room offers
• Integrated social media tools and tracking
• Mobile marketing outreach and targeting

Even with all of this, many hotels have yet to implement a strategy or invest in mobile technology. Market share and more importantly, revenue, could potentially be a risk. Don’t let this happen to you.

Hyperdisk Marketing produce emarketing revenue results for hundreds of high-end hotels throughout the world. We now develop comprehensive mobiel marketing programs that drive sales, improve branding and extend marketing potential.

Contact us if you would like a free mobile marketing analysis sales7@hyperdisk.com

UPDATE: State of mobile just released by comScore

Smartphones

Mobile usage on track to eclipse desktop usage