Outsmarting OTAs Vol1

Outsmarting OTAs
Volume 1, September 2013

A Complete Guide to Online Marketing & Advertising
for Hotels in the Age of OTAs, Meta Search and Deal
Sites.

Written by John McElborough & Daniel Pelling from
Inbound360

Outsmarting OTAs
Online marketing & advertising for hotels

Page 2
A quick sales pitch

This guide was written by Inbound360 and made
available for free on our website at
www.inbound360.com/hotels/.

We hope it helps hoteliers better understand and
utilise online advertising and marketing techniques
which will make them more money.

Inbound360 provide expert consultancy and
management of online advertising campaigns. And we
especially love working with hotels.

If youre interested in speaking to us about how we can
help promote your hotel or chain online please email
us at talk@inbound360.com or find out more about
our services at www.inbound360.com.

Pitch over, onto the guide

Outsmarting OTAs

Page 3
About the Authors

John McElborough
Managing Director,
Inbound360

John has been building and
marketing websites for over
a decade. In that time he's
consulted for a number of
the UK's top travel brands,
hotel chains and independents helping them to get a
better return on their online marketing. He ran his
own consulting and affiliate marketing businesses
specialising in the travel sector before setting up
Inbound360 in 2013.

Daniel Pelling
Search Director,
Inbound360

Dan is Co-Founder of
Inbound360 and a search
marketing expert whos been
working on search and
online advertising
campaigns since 2005. He has managed paid search
and display campaigns on Google Adwords, Bing,
LinkedIn and Facebook in diverse sectors including
across finance, technology and e-commerce, leading
stratagies which have generated millions in revenue
for his clients.

Outsmarting OTAs

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Contents
Increasing Occupancy & Revenue Via Direct Sales - Its Not Just A
Question of Traffic ........................................................................... 7
Conversion Rate Optimisation ................................................... 10
Look at the OTAs ........................................................................... 10
User testing .................................................................................... 13
Is your analytics package showing you the full picture? ................ 14
What channels and keywords are sending you bookings? ............. 15
Search Engine Marketing (aka Paid Search) ............................. 17
How does your brand look in Google results? ............................... 17
Brand bidding ................................................................................ 19
OTA brand bidding ........................................................................20
Competitor brand bidding ............................................................. 21
Generic keyword bidding ............................................................... 22
Ad extensions ................................................................................. 26
Bing Ads ......................................................................................... 29
Non-hotel and long tail keywords ..................................................30
Retargeting Your Guests To Boost Conversion ........................ 33
Retargeting with display advertising ............................................. 33
Retargeting in search ..................................................................... 36
Meta search strategy ................................................................. 38
Hotelscombined (www.hotelscombined.com) ............................... 39
Trivago (www.trivago.com) .......................................................... 40
Kayak (www.kayak.com) ................................................................ 41
TravelSupermarket (www.travelsupermarket.com) ...................... 43
Google Hotel Finder (www.google.com/hotelfinder/) .................. 43
TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com) .............................................. 45
Hipmunk (www.hipmunk.com) ..................................................... 46
The Rise and Rise of Mobile ...................................................... 48
Mobile optimised websites ............................................................. 49
Mobile Advertising ......................................................................... 50
Other considerations ...................................................................... 51
Search Engine Optimisation For Hotels ....................................53
Keyword strategy ........................................................................... 54
Optimising your site ....................................................................... 55
Building links and business citations ............................................ 56
Local Business Listings (aka Google Places).................................. 58
Social Media Advertising........................................................... 60
Facebook ads ................................................................................. 60
LinkedIn Advertising ..................................................................... 61
Twitter Advertising ........................................................................ 62
Analytics & Measurement ......................................................... 63
Call tracking ................................................................................... 63
B2B Lead Generation track the companies visiting your site..... 64
Multi-Channel Attribution ............................................................. 66
Conclusions ............................................................................... 68
Outsmarting OTAs

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Preface

Hotel marketing is the Internet age is tough. Online
travel agents, meta search engines, deal sites, review
sites, opaque inventory sites theyve revolutionised
travel for guests, but for hotels, especially
independents and small chains the choice of marketing
channels is a minefield.

To stay competitive you need to be selling online and
harnessing these channels but managing inventory
across so many platforms is a job in itself. And thats
before youve even thought about your own marketing.

Over the past decade Ive talked to marketers at all
levels, in a lot of hotels and the same patterns crop up
again and again.

We want to increase direct bookings
through our site but dont know how to get
traffic to come to us directly
OTAs are stealing our traffic, advertising
on our brand name and selling bookings
back to us with crippling commissions
A few bad reviews are killing us on
TripAdvisor
Meta search sites are promoting agency
rates above our own

Sound familiar? Youre not alone in feeling the pinch.
According to HSAMI research
1
only 24% of room
nights at independent hotels booked online were made
via the hotels own websites. Larger chains fare a little
better, presumably due to loyalty programs and
corporate business where discounts are already
applied by proxy.

1
http://www.hebsdigital.com/blog/a-call-to-arms-how-to-
shift-market-share-from-the-otas-to-the-hotel-website/
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In this guide we will attempt to decipher some of the
biggest opportunities for hotels to fight back against
the resellers and provide some practical steps hoteliers
and hotel marketers of all sizes of can take to increase
occupancy via profitable direct bookings which grow
your own business rather than that of Expedia or
Booking.com.

This isnt an attack on the OTAs. I speak to many
hoteliers who see online agents as parasites I believe
this mentality needs to change. OTAs and their
downstream referrers (meta search/ comparison sites,
deal sites, affiliates, Google hotel finder etc) are a
demand driven entity. Guests enjoy the convenience
and savings they offer. Guests have a choice (in fact
probably too many choices) and they choose to book
with the OTAs. Its up to hoteliers to step up to the
plate and earn those direct bookings.

Hopefully this guide will give you some direction on
how you can do just that.

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Increasing Occupancy & Revenue Via
Direct Sales - Its Not Just A Question of
Traffic

One of the biggest misconceptions most marketers
seem to have when it comes to the online-Direct
channel is that increasing bookings is simply a case of
increasing website traffic.

This is OTA mentality but its a fundamentally flawed
concept for hotels themselves. This may seem strange
given that we at Inbound360 are in the business of
online advertising but allow me to explain.

The biggest single issue with virtually every hotel I
work with is not the volume of visits theyre getting,
but rather the % value of those visitors which the hotel
website is successfully converting into direct bookings.

The conversion rate.

Lets illustrate with a hypothetical example (theyll be a
few of these as the guide goes on) and imagine a
unique visit to booking conversion rate of 1%.

Honestly this is probably optimistic, while Ive seen
industry wide averages of 2% suggested
2
I believe this
is artificially inflated by repeat and loyalty bookings
which independents dont benefit from.

At a 1% conversion rate, 100 visitors would drive 1
booking.

Double traffic to 200 visits and you get 2 bookings.

2

http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/recovering-
reservations-from-visitors-who-abandon-the-hotel-reservation-
process/
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But how much will 100 extra visits cost you? Well you
can get some idea via Google Adwords. Most hotel in
[location] keywords are going to cost you between 1-
2 per click on Google Adwords.

So those extra 100 visits could cost 200 (or more
depending on your location). I know some hotels can
still turn a profit on a booking which costs 200 to
bring in but the majority cant.

Advertising prices are dictated by the highest bidder -
literally in the case of Google Adwords, which works
like an auction for the top ad slot but even with offline
advertising a placement basically costs as much as
your competitor is willing to pay for it.

In online travel the OTAs will always have the deepest
pockets for advertising. Contrary to popular belief this
isnt because of the commissions theyre taking from
hotels. Actually even at 15-20% per booking profits are
pretty low given the massive outlay these sites make on
advertising, but rather because an OTA can convert
their visitors at a far better rate than a hotel site.

By their nature OTAs will always convert better if
youre looking for a hotel in London on an OTA you
have a choice of thousands of hotels. If youre looking
on the website of a single property London hotel you
usually have just 1 choice.

As a hotel theres little you can do to redress that
balance but theres certainly elements of the OTAs
strategy you can learn from, for example:

Major OTAs have refined their booking
process based on data from millions of
customers. Study it, learn from it, copy it!
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An OTA knows that a new customer has
residual value after their first booking,
whether thats in terms of repeat bookings,
word of mouth or contributing a review.
OTAs understand the true value of website
visitors and customers so should hotels.
OTAs arent exclusively reliant on the
most expensive sources of website traffic.
They use search marketing extensively but
also receive downstream traffic from
affiliates, meta search sites and
Tripadvisor which converts at a better rate
and they pay for only on a performance
basis.
OTAs invest millions in search marketing,
giving them a huge pool of data that lets
them optimise their campaigns for the best
converting keywords and adverts. Hotels
can unlock at least some of this data.

So the first thing to understand is that traffic is
probably not your problem or your answer.

I would almost always recommend a hotel look at their
conversion rate before they start signing over cheques
to Google or any other advertising platform. Making a
relatively small investment in improving your
conversion rate, if only by a half a percent will have a
significant, compound effect on your bottom line when
it comes to advertising.

Well talk more about the specifics of conversion rate
optimisation for hotel websites in the next section.
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Conversion Rate Optimisation

Conversion Rate Optimisation (or CRO) is probably
one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented of
all online marketing disciplines. For many people who
have come across it, and even for many who profess to
be experts at it, CRO means split-testing- the practice
of testing how well one version of a page converts
against another. The hope being that by tweaking the
look or content of a page it can be made more
appealing to visitors and encourage them to convert.

Split testing can produce very good results. It can also
produce no results or even negative results. For most
hotels my first bit on conversion rate optimisation
advice would be to forget about split testing. Its the
sort of thing you worry about when youre already
getting relatively good conversion rates and want to
squeeze another 0.1% out of it. The truth is that most
hotels I look at are achieving such poor conversion
rates to begin with that youd be running split tests for
the next 20 years to push the conversion rate needle by
half a percent.

Luckily there are some very simple things hotels can
do right now to improve their website conversion
rates.

Look at the OTAs

As weve already discussed OTAs are masters of
conversion. Some sites are better than others,
Booking.com and Agoda probably being the best
examples I usually recommend studying.

If youve never done it before (and most hoteliers I talk
to havent) try booking a night at your own hotel on
Booking.com. Then try and book the same room on
your own site. Better still watch a friend as they try the
same thing. Notice how Booking.com lets you find and
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select a room with just a couple of clicks and reserve
the room with just a few details? Thats because the
fewer steps between an enquiry and a confirmed
reservation the faster the booking process and the less
likelihood of the user making a mistake and becoming
frustrated.

Figure 1 Booking.com only ask for the most essential details to confirm a
reservation

Figure 2 A daunting looking set of required fields on this hotel site

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Notice they dont try and upsell bottles of champagne,
afternoon tea or spa treatments before theyve even got
the customers email address? Thats because these
extra steps confuse visitors and lead to higher
abandonment rates.

Website: Would you like to add airport transfers to
the booking?

Visitor: I better check with the wife, Ill come back
and finish this later!

See how the checkout pages look exactly the same as
the rest of the website and the visitor stays on the
www.booking.com domain throughout the process?
Sending your visitors off to a third party site with your
logo and colours may be the simplest solution but it
confuses visitors and makes them uneasy about
handing over their credit card details.

Study the booking processes of the OTAs who send
you the most bookings these are the sites which your
potential guests are most likely to have visited before
and be familiar with. Make your own reservation
process as similar as you can to the OTAs and your
visitors will jump the learning curve and feel more at
home booking on your site.

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User testing

Using OTAs yourself is a great way to get a feel for the
comparative weaknesses on your own site but if youre
familiar with your own website youre going to find it
easier to place a booking than a real guest would. You
need objective feedback from members of your target
demographic.

I always rave about a service called usertesting.com to
the point my customers probably think Im earning a
kickback from them (Im not).

This service, and there are others like it, lets you watch
real website users trying to complete tasks on your
site. So for example ask them to try and book a double
room with single occupancy on 15
th
October with
breakfast included starting from your homepage.

Youll find yourself screaming at the screen while you
watch the footage back the button is there, just click
that button. No not that one!

If youre trying to get management buy-in to upgrade
your website booking system there is no better way to
do it than to show the owners footage of 5 guests trying
and failing to complete a simple reservation on your
current system. Youll have sign off by the end of the
meeting.

User testing is also great for uncovering qualitive
assessments of your website which you could never
gain from crunching data in Google Analytics like this
photo makes the rooms look cramped. Its details like
this which are too easy to miss for a busy hotel
marketer but which can make a profound difference to
how well your site converts.

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Is your analytics package showing you the full
picture?

Website analytics packages like Google Analytics are
powerful tools in the hands of marketers who
understand them but too often I see hotels making
decisions based on their web stats without fully
understanding them or in many cases even having the
software setup correctly.

If youre selling rooms online you need your web stats
to tell you;

How many bookings youve had
What rooms they booked
How much they spent

Google Analytics can do this, even if youre using a
third party reservation system where the booking is
completed on another site. If the software vendor
youre using for your booking system tells you its not
possible, or that its going to cost you extra to set it up,
its time to change vendor.

Without this information youre in the dark about
where your bookings actually originated from and
what ROI youre getting on different direct marketing
channels.

Figure 3 Transactional data is essential if you want to make decisions
based on your analytics

Outsmarting OTAs

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What channels and keywords are sending you
bookings?

Assuming youre able to track reservations in your web
stats software you should be able to see exactly where
the guests who did book direct on your site actually
found you. Like a digital version of the old how did
you hear about us survey question.

Armed with this report you should be able to establish
which channels and referrers are sending you actual
paying guests. So lets say youre paying 50 a month
for a business listing on Tripadvisor and its sent you
2000 worth of bookings in a month, then youll
probably want to keep paying for it, if its sent none in
the past 2 years then thats something you might want
to review.

These reports are even more powerful when it comes
to looking at your search engine marketing
performance because you can uncover the exact
keyword variations which are sending you bookings
and any keywords which send traffic but which dont
convert into bookings.

As we said at the top, traffic isnt the answer to your
direct booking woes. To illustrate;

Keyword A sends 100 visits a month at a
cost of 100
Keyword B sends 20 visits a month at a
cost of 20

Keyword B sends 2 bookings a month, keyword A
sends none.

Take your budget from keyword A and use it to
increase your position on keyword B and youll be
spending less, getting less traffic but getting more
bookings.

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This isnt anything revolutionary, in fact it seems
blindingly obvious, yet its something that we still see
in Google Adwords campaigns on a regular basis.
Companies throwing money at keywords which have
never and more than likely will never lead to a
booking. Like a luxury hotel that has its adverts
showing against keywords like cheap hotels in or a
hostel which lets its ads show against luxury hotels
in.

Conversion rate optimisation is only in part about
what happens on your website. If the people who
arrive at your site are the wrong people you can have
the shiniest site and most seamless reservation system
in the world and youll never convert those visitors into
guests.

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Search Engine Marketing (aka Paid
Search)

At Inbound360 paid search engine marketing
particularly on Google Adwords is our bread and
butter. Weve worked in some competitive spaces but
in terms of volume and sophistication of the
competition there is no market tougher than hotels.

Despite this the fact remains,
search engine advertising
works for hotels when
implemented correctly.

Where many hotels go wrong
is that they expect Adwords
to provide instant
gratification. 5 years ago it
might of but in this day and
age it takes time and
refinement to get a campaign
to produce positive results. Most new accounts we
setup produce negative ROI in the first months. It
takes time to gather data and a big enough sample of
visitors to draw accurate conclusions about which
adverts and keywords are doing the business and
which are failing to deliver.

How does your brand look in Google results?

If youre a hotelier, how do you feel when you see a
search results page like the one on the next page?
If youre interested in
starting a Paid search
campaign or would like
an impartial review of
your current campaign
performance, email
talk@inbound360.com or
visit:

http://inbound360.com/ppc/
Outsmarting OTAs

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Thats your brand. A name youve spent years
developing. People are searching for it and companies
who you are paying commission to are all over the
page. In affect you are paying for an entire page of
results in Google when really you only want one.

Of course the real winners here are Google, theyve
created an eco-system whereby they can earn money
Outsmarting OTAs

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every time anyone, anywhere types the name of a hotel
into their search box.

But can you do anything about this?

Well yes there are steps you can take to protect your
brand in search results and maximise the amount of
traffic thats ends up on your website but they do cost
money. So first you need to make a business decision
about how much of a problem you actually think
scenarios like the above are.

At the end of the day if someones searching for your
hotel theres a good chance youll get that booking.
Whether it comes via an OTA, a meta search site or
direct. If youre spending more money getting that
traffic to your website rather than the OTAs, you need
to be sure that cost is justified by increased revenue
because bidding on your own brand is pretty much a
zero sum game. It doesnt increase the total number of
bookings (occupancy), it just changes the place where
the booking is made.

So yes you can increase revenue here by poaching
direct bookings, which would otherwise end up coming
from in through an OTA but its unlikely to increase
your occupancy at the end of the day.

Brand bidding

Some hotels are loathed to spend money bidding on
their own brand name. Particularly as they should hold
the top position in Googles organic results for their
hotel name. We tend to find however that brand
bidding not only lifts the conversion rate of an
Adwords campaign (as youd expect) but also helps
bite back at the booking share which goes to OTAs.
Again to reiterate, this strategy will not increase
occupancy so if this is your goal above and beyond
revenue (usually for internal political reasons rather
Outsmarting OTAs

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than sound business ones in my experience) then
bidding on your own brand might not make sense.

The goal with brand bidding is to bid for the number 1
position, even though this is likely to result in higher
costs. This has 3 effects;

It increases your likelihood of getting ad
extensions showing, which minimise the
likelihood of visitors ever seeing an OTA ad
It drives up costs for the OTAs to bid on
your brand, thus increasing the likelihood
that they will stop advertising on your
keywords altogether*
Improves your account quality score in
Google Adwords, which may help your
average cost per click to fall.

*This is an interesting nuance of the way large OTAs
manage their campaigns. Most will be using bid
management software with bidding rules which
prevent them overpaying to bid on any particular
keyword

If youre aggressive about brand bidding you may want
to look into running multiple adverts on your brand
keywords, directed at different sites. For example you
could advertise your listing on your local tourist board
where you dont pay a commission on bookings.

Again this is one area where you an afford to assert a
bit of muscle in your advertising because your brand
keywords should convert at a good rate assuming your
rates are matched to those available on OTAs.

OTA brand bidding

Another way to take a bite back at the OTA's is to
capitalise on their own brand loyalty. For example
show your adverts for a navigational search like "[hotel
name] + booking.com" or "[hotel name] + Expedia"
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Show your book direct for best rates advert and tempt
some of that traffic away from the OTA. Including
phone numbers in these ads can work well, for
example, call us for our best rates.

Figure 4 The Hilton show their advert, along with phone number to
searchers looking for their listing on booking.com

Competitor brand bidding

Competitor brand bidding for hotels is a real fifty
shades of grey area. A lot of hotels like the idea of
showing an advert when a visitor searches for their
rival down the road. Competitor brand bidding is ok
when theres not much competitor on brand terms as
this keeps the bid price low. However to advertise on
your competitors brand terms youre going to be
competition against the OTAs and meta search
engines as well as the hotel itself, so the bid price is
kept artificially high by the level of interest in the
keyword.

Whats more because your advert is pointing to a
completely different hotel to what the searcher is
looking for your conversion rate will be the lowest on
that page of results, while your bid price will probably
be one of the highest because Googles quality score
system looks at the relevance of your landing page to
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the searched keyword and a lower quality score means
a higher bid for the same position.

With this in mind I would personally recommend
actively avoiding your adverts showing against other
hotel names. We upload a list of names of other hotels
and set them as negative keywords to prevent adverts
showing for these competitor brand terms.

The exception to this rule is where your hotel is in a
hyper local area and there are maybe only a couple of
accommodation options in the town. In these cases it
might make sense to advertise on other properties
names. This is particularly the case if occupancy is
generally high in the town and theres a good chance
the competitor wont have availability.

Generic keyword bidding

Of course the real make and break of a search engine
advertising campaign comes in appearing against
generic searches potential guests are making in Google
for a hotel in your area, research terms where theres
no intent to book at a certain hotel.

Buying terms like hotels in [city] and [city] hotels
are the golden geese of the OTA search strategy.
Because OTAs have such a large selection of hotels
they can serve up a good user experience for these
searches and convert this traffic well. The bid price on
these keywords is high, but then so is the value.

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Figure 5 The big OTA's love these "hotels in [city]" keywords

To put this in context booking.com is one of the
worlds top spenders on Google Adwords, estimated to
have spent in excess of $40 million
3
on Google ads in
2011 and probably far more in 2012/13. So they have
deep pockets and a sophisticated strategy. The same
goes for the other major OTAs and meta search sites
are also getting in on the act, Kayak having a huge
Adwords budget in the US and Trivago advertising
extensively on generic city level keywords for searchers
in Europe.

So you cant out muscle the OTAs in Adwords, but can
you outsmart them?

The thing weve found with PPC ads for hotels is that
theres a click through rate ceiling only a certain
number of searchers will click on and go on to book on
a hotel website. Regardless of advert position the % of
visitors who will click on hotel adverts vs OTA adverts
always seems to be smaller (the click through rate or
CTR as its known in Adwords). This is both a good and
bad thing for hotels. On the plus side it means that as
long as your advert makes it clear youre a hotel, rather
than a booking site with multiple hotels on offer you
can bid for high positions and usually spend less than
an OTA because youll have a lower CTR.

3
http://www.wordstream.com/articles/google-earnings
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However because your CTR will be lower, your quality
score (the score Google gives your adverts and landing
pages) will also be lower than an OTA, so you may
have to bid more for a higher position in results.

Strategically going after the top keywords in your local
market may not be the best starting point for your PPC
campaign unless youre a big, well-known chain brand
or famous hotel in your location. Its expensive and
unless youve really got your website conversion
working at a very good rate, youll struggle to make a
positive ROI.

Figure 6 Well known 'destination' hotels like the Wynn in Vegas can get
away with bidding competitively on generic terms, but most will struggle
to make this protitable.

The reason for this is that very generic location +
hotel keywords dont give any clues to the guests
specific requirements. For example a guest looking for
a low end 50 night bed and breakfast may use the
same generic keywords as another guest whos actually
looking for a top end luxury suite. An OTA can
accommodate and convert both these visitors as they
have a full spectrum of hotel types, your single hotel
website cant.

Therefore my recommendation to hoteliers when
starting a PPC campaign in a reasonably popular area
is to start by dominating the keywords which spell out
exactly what your hotel is offering. So for example,
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Instead of advertising on hotel in Brighton;

A low end hotel might advertise on cheap
hotel in brighton or bed and breakfast
brighton

A high end hotel on 5 star hotel in
brighton or luxury hotel in brighton

For mid-range hotels its trickier, we try to
concentrate on the hotels USP or style so
maybe its a boutique hotel in brighton or
a brighton hotel with free parking or a
hotel on brighton beach

Theres several advantages to this approach over just
broadly advertising on anything hotel + location
related;

Bid prices may be lower as theres less
competing advertisers, for example if
youre advertising on cheap hotels youre
not going up against luxury hotels. Less
advertisers generally means lower bids for
top spots.
A searcher entering your site on this level
of keyword is pre-qualified by their search
term, few people search for a luxury hotel
if they cant afford it or a hotel on the
beach if they actually want to stay up a
mountain.
OTAs are less sophisticated in their
advertising and landing page strategy at
this level. They still do a pretty good job
but at this level a handcrafted keyword list
and advert can trump the formulaic
approach OTAs have to use to their ad
management (remember theyre
advertising in thousands of cities, so those
adverts arent written by hand)

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Figure 7 At this level of keyword OTA's aren't serving up precisely
relevant adverts, presenting an opportunity for a local hotel to capitalise
on
If youre based in a smaller location though, by all
means go after these very generic keywords from day
one.
Ad extensions

Heres another thing the OTAs are very good at in
their search advertising, but most hotels fail to
capitalise on. Ad extensions are additional bits of
information you can add to your advert to enhance
how its displayed in Google search results. They can be
used to improve your click through rate in adverts,
build trust before the visitor even clicks on your advert
and, probably most importantly, make your advert
stand out on screen.

There are 4 ad extensions I think all hotels should be
using in their PPC campaigns. If youre not using
these, ask your PPC manager why;

Location & Call Extensions

Add your address and phone number to your listing
making it more visible and encouraging calls. On
mobile ads this can be used to show searchers how far
they are from your hotel. This is a great extension for
Outsmarting OTAs

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hotels because OTAs cant use it, so your advert will at
least look different.

On smartphones your advert will have a click to call
button next to the advert so potential guests can ring
you direct from the search results with one click, a
great value add against OTAs, most of whom dont
push phone bookings.

Seller ratings

Seller ratings are what give those little 5 gold stars you
see under the adverts of most OTAs.

Figure 8 Virtually all OTA's have these ratings on Adwords

I dont think the seller ratings are particularly useful
for searchers but they are effective for advertisers.

To clarify these arent hotel reviews, theyre reviews of
the website itself, left on various third party review
sites.

I would recommend collecting reviews on a site like
Trustpilot, Review Centre and Feefo. I know most
hoteliers are obsessive about collating positive reviews
on TripAdvisor and with good reason but you only
need 35 reviews on Trustpilot or one of the other sites
which Google shopping use to aggregate their reviews
and you can get 5 gold stars under your adverts, just
like you see on the OTAs ads. This should improve
your adverts click through rate.

Sitelinks

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Sitelinks are those extra links you see under an advert
when it appears in the top 3 spots in Google ad results,
see an example below:

Figure 9 A good use of sitelinks promoting the benefits of booking with
holidayextras.co.uk

Sitelinks are only going to show if youre bidding for
the top ad spots so if youre bidding low you wont
benefit but if you get an ad showing in the top rack
with sitelinks you can both increase your click through
rate and also help pre-qualify guests before they click.
So for example, sitelink messages I might use for a
hotel ad would include:

Book direct for best price
Rooms from 99/ night
5 minutes from airport
Free cancellation

The trick with sitelinks is to use them as an extension
of your advert to help tell the full story. You cant get
much information into the text of the ad itself so use
sitelinks to bullet your USPs, reasons to book direct
rather than via an OTA and set price expectations.

You definitely want sitelinks setup for your brand
bidding campaigns as well where the goal is to bid for
the number 1 position and occupy as much screen real
estate as possible.

Offer extensions

Offer extensions are another great value ad you can
use in your campaigns which OTAs will find it hard to
Outsmarting OTAs

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introduce into their own advertising, thus making your
ad stand out from the crowd.

Offer extensions display alongside your advert and
provide a discount code or barcode for guests to use on
your site or when they check-in to receive a discount.
So you could use this to drive walk-ins by advertising
within a local radius to mobile devices, or provide a
coupon for a 10% discount for visitors who book
online. This would allow you to keep your online rates
in parity with your OTA rates while subtly under-
cutting the OTA rate via the discount code.

Bing Ads

Although yes you absolutely want to spend the bulk of
your time, energy and budget on Google, dont
overlook Bing advertising entirely. Bing Ads have a few
advantages over Google Adwords which mean it might
be worth considering;

Lower competition for ad space
Lower average cost per click
Higher % of business users (some
businesses will have Bing set as default
search engine)
No Hotelfinder equivalent and less visible
local listings means ads get more attention
Ads are barely distinguishable from
organic listings (seriously, its even harder
to spot an ad on Bing as it is on Google!)
Ads also appear on Yahoo search
Ads appear inside web search on Facebook
(realistically, few people actually use it)
Virtually no small chains and independent
hotels seem to be doing it at the moment
so there may still be some first mover
advantage.

If youre managing advertising campaigns manually
keeping 2 campaigns running on different platforms
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obviously creates additional work/ time/ expense so
consider using just your most valuable and successful
keywords and adverts from Google on Bing.

As your keyword strategy wants to be as niche as
possible, while still maximising potential traffic youre
better off taking your best converting keywords from
Google Adwords and importing them into Bing ads
(where theyll spend 10% or less than what they spend
on Google) rather than investing that budget on
advertising on boarder and lower converting keywords
on Google.

If management time is a factor dont test new
keywords and ads on Bing, just test in Google and then
copy over.

Non-hotel and long tail keywords

Clearly your highest converting keywords are going to
be those which show an expressed interest in booking
a hotel so hotel in X or better still a brand term
where the searcher is looking for your hotel
specifically. But bear in mind that the bid price for a
keyword is going to go up inline with how much money
it can make for a hotel or OTA so clearly youre not
alone in wanting visibility for these most lucrative
terms.

Therefore its worth exploring other angles with your
keyword strategy where conversion rates will be lower
but clicks might cost you in the pence rather than the
pounds.

Events

If popular events or conferences are held nearby your
hotel you can run ads on the event or venue name,
anyone whos searching for that event is probably
going, and if you set ads to show only to people who
are a good distance away from the hotel, you can bet
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many of them will need a place to stay. Its speculative
but it can work. Especially as these keywords have
little or no competition.

Figure 10 Nobody is advertising on the keyword Oktoberfest so if you had
a hotel nearby you could probably get clicks for just a few pence

The really nice thing about events is you know when
the searcher is going to be travelling. That means you
can serve a very specific ad including exact rates on
those dates and pause your campaigns once youre full.

Local attractions

As with events you can piggyback off searches for local
attractions or landmarks. If people are visiting, and
theyre not local, they might need a hotel, so show
them an ad.

Destination terms

Figure 11 There's plenty of major cities and towns who have no
advertisers on their names at all

If youre happy to speculate and experiment with your
advertising theres a lot of potential in advertising on
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very board tourist information type keywords. For
example if I were a hotel in San Francisco who have a
lot of guests from the UK I could create a city guide to
San Francisco and advertise on broad terms like San
Francisco to searchers in the UK. The traffic from this
campaign is unlikely to convert well for first time
visitors but if youre getting international visitors to
your site for a few pence a time then you may well be
able to make a strategy like this work.

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Retargeting Your Guests To Boost
Conversion

Retargeting has been available for a while now but the
technology has really picked up steam since Google
started offering their 'remarketing' service within
Google display network, and now in search result
pages.

If you're not familiar with retargeting, here's how it
works in a nutshell;

A user visits a page on your website.
You set a tracking cookie on that users
computer
When that user goes to visit another site
which is displaying adverts from an ad
exchange that supports retargeting you can
display an advert to that user, encouraging
them to come back to the site

The power of this technology is that you're only
showing adverts to people who you know are
interested in your hotel (because they've already been
on your website) so it doesn't matter what website
your advert appears on, you know it's only going to
reach a relevant audience.

This has a couple of very useful applications for hotels.

Retargeting with display advertising

Conventional wisdom suggests that most hotel guests
won't book their room the first time they go online,
especially if they're planning a big trip. People
research, talk, make plans, research again, check
prices and finally book.

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That's why we say it's so important for hotels to
dominate their brand keywords in search, because
most people will make up their mind about a hotel and
worry about where they're going to book it right at the
end of the process, returning to Google and typing in
the hotel name.

Figure 12 I've been looking at hotels near Heathrow on HotelsCombined
so they retarget me which this advert while I'm reading the Telegraph

So although only a small % of guests actually book on
your site, you'll probably find a much healthier
number of those have visited your site at some point
during their research. That might be to;

Look at photos
Get the address/ driving directions
Check your rates
Get additional info about the hotel, for
example the spa or golf course which you
mention in your description on the OTA's

It might actually make sense to hold some info/
photos back from your OTA'S so potential guests are
more inclined to visit your site? I'm sure your OTA
account manager would argue differently but it's
something to think about!

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Once those visitors have been on your site you can set
your retargeting cookie on their machines. You can
now show adverts just to these people who have
looked, but didn't book.

You can display retargeting adverts on a huge range of
websites, including Facebook and many national
newspapers. Unlike conventional banner advertising
your messages should be relevant for someone who
already knows about you so you should use a highly
tailored ad designed to return them to the booking
process. Incentives work really well for this, here's a
few examples:

You looked at a standard room, book now
and we'll upgrade you to a suite for the
same price

Lunch is on us - book a room today and get
a free lunch at our restaurant

We've dropped our prices for the date of
your stay, book your room now.

Our Facebook fans get an extra 10% off,
like us and book now.

(The last one youd want to display on Facebook)

You can use the same technique to display adverts to
guests who have completed a booking, driving them to
leave you a review.

"We hope you enjoyed your stay at our hotel. Could
you spare a minute to leave us a review on
tripadvisor?"

You'd have to be careful with this, you don't want the
ad showing to guests who haven't stayed yet, but
there's lots of interesting possibilities for hotels to use
retargeting and right now, virtually nobody is taking
advantage of them (except the OTA'S!).
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Retargeting in search

In addition to displaying adverts using retargeting on
publisher sites (sites displaying adverts) you can now
also use retargeting in Google's search results pages.

This is relatively new and some advertisers are
misusing it at the moment however hotels should
definitely be looking into it, for 2 very good reasons;

It allows you to show an advert to people
who looked at your site then searched in
google for a competitor (I.e they're
researching local alternatives)
It allows you to advertise on generic search
terms like hotels in [location] or even
hotels and bid aggressively, but just
advertising to past visitors who have
already shown an interest in the site.

So youre probably thinking something along the lines
of that sounds great, but arent I just showing ads to
a lot of people who didnt like my site enough to book
the first time. In some cases this will be true, but
theres plenty of reasons a visitor to your site might not
of converted the first time around and if theyre not
interested, theyre unlikely to click on your ads and
cost you money.

Id advise segmenting your retargeting lists rather than
applying the same retargeting settings to everyone who
hits your site ever, for example you might want to
segment your website visitors into 4 retargeting lists;

Browsers theyve viewed the site but havent done
an availability search or showed any obvious signs of
being close to booking. Theyre your lowest value
prospects for retargeting, but still better than a cold
lead.
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Price checkers theyve done an availability search
on your booking system and seen prices, but havent
gone any further. Theyre at the research phase so
youll want to entice them back with an offer.
Abandoned bookers theyve entered your
reservation funnel but havent completed their
booking. These are your highest priority targets to get
back to the site as theyre the closest to booking.
Successful bookers theyve completed a booking
and hit your success page so put them in a separate
list, you might want to run a re-engagement campaign
with them but dont show them sales messages.

With this segmentation you can produce different
advert creative to target potential guests at different
stages of the buying cycle and also, crucially adjust
your advert bids dependant on how likely they are to
convert.

For example I might bid 25% more for an advert to be
shown to my browsers list than to someone who
hadnt ever visited my site before but Id happily bid
100% more to get one of the abandoned bookers back
to my site because I know they have the highest
probability of booking.

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Meta search strategy

In 2009 I spoke to a large hotel group in the UK and
asked them what their meta search strategy was. I
got blank looks from the online marketing guys and
proceeded to explain what meta search was

Actually not much has changed since then despite
meta search becoming much, much bigger in the past
few years.

When 2 of the biggest meta search engines get brought
out by OTAs (Kayak selling to Priceline, Trivago sold
to Expedia) as well as Google and Tripadvisor entering
the meta search arena you should really start to take
notice of it as a channel.

Meta search engines for hotels, if you havent come
across them, are sites, which search for prices on
multiple hotel booking sites simultaneously returning
multiple prices for the same hotel from different
agents. They may also be known as comparison sites.

They present an attractive proposition for guests as
they offer a wider choice of hotels than you would get
on a single OTA site and they can help you find the
cheapest rooms by returning live rates and availability
from the major OTAs rather than searching around all
the OTAs looking for deals.

However because meta search relies primarily on rates
and availability delivered via feeds from OTAs and
they earn commission based on confirmed bookings at
OTA sites, they dont usual show prices available direct
with the hotel, even if that rate is cheaper.

With more guests starting their searches on meta
search websites instead of on Google or by going
directly to an OTA site, having visibility on meta
search could become as or more important than your
visibility on Google search or the OTAs themselves.
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Although most meta search traffic is driven directly to
agents rather than to your own site, meta search
websites only take a small commission from the OTAs
(typically around 5%) and dont increase your costs.
So, gaining visibility on meta search sites may be a way
to increase your OTA visibility without sacrificing a
larger % to the OTAs or dropping your prices.

Below well introduce some of the most prominent
meta search sites in the English speaking markets and
look at how their rankings work.
Hotelscombined (www.hotelscombined.com)

HotelsCombined is one of the most sophisticated and
user friendly meta search sites and their technology
also powers the hotel search you see on lots of other
travel sites across the web including
travelsupermarket, Skyscanner and Ryanair.

Results are sorted by recommended by default. This
score appears to be a combination of aggregated
reviews from OTA sites and the level of discount
available (calculated by the difference between the
highest and lowest prices available on OTA sites they
work with).

Listing a broad range of rooms on OTAs will help your
listing appear to offer a bigger discount, for example
list your most basic rooms with a no-frills, no
cancellation package and also your very best, most
expensive room with everything included to create the
bigger possible low to high price gap. Where the meta
search engine finds an expensive room at one OTA and
a cheap room at another it will assume its found a
good deal to show the searcher, although in reality
theyre not comparing like for like packages. This
approach can work with a number of the meta search
sites were looking at here.

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Figure 13 A large difference between the cheapest and most expensive
rooms available through OTA's make deals stand out on
hotelscombined.com

You can get a link added to your official website on
your listing page by emailing
hotelier@hotelscombined.com - they may ask you to
link back to hotelcombined from your own website.

Figure 14 You can add an official site link to your hotelscombined listing,
although this may drive little traffic

Trivago (www.trivago.com)

Trivago is the leading hotel meta search site in Europe
and has been investing very heavily in TV advertising
for the past couple of years. They also advertise
extensively on Google Adwords and have an aggressive
SEO strategy.

By default results are sorted by popularity. This
formula isnt disclosed but it appears to be a
combination of review scores, price and conversion
rate so as with hotelscombined, having low and high
rates listed on OTAs will make your Trivago listings
appear as good deals, which may improve your
visibility in their results.
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Figure 15 High and low price is calculated from the highest and lowest
available rate at any given time so hotels with wider price ranges may
fare better

Trivago do list hotel contact information (website and
phone number) however this is well hidden under the
hotel information area. You should however ensure
details are kept up to date.

Kayak (www.kayak.com)

Kayak is the market leading meta search site in the US,
theyve got less traction in Europe but are set to
become more aggressive in these markets. Unlike
Hotelscombined and Trivago they offer flight, car
rental and package deal search as well as hotels.

Hotels are ranked in Kayak by the somewhat
ambiguous relevance, for which you can read likely
conversion rate on OTA sites.

Review scores come into this so soliciting guests for
reviews on the OTAs they booked with rather than
Tripadvisor may be worthwhile. As with the other
meta search sites, Kayak highlight deals which look to
be below market rate by measuring rates available
across OTAs for similar rooms. Theoretically therefore
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keeping your rates higher on one OTA (one which
doesnt send you many bookings) would increase your
aggregate market rate and make your rates on other
OTAs look like better deals.

Kayak also push bookings on sites where they have
direct relationships with the OTAs, for example they
offer direct bookings on the kayak.com domain for
Expedia (through EAN), Booking.com and GetaRoom.
This is far better for the meta search sites than pushing
traffic directly onto the OTAs to complete bookings
because it means they can retain customer details.
Therefore make sure your best OTA rates are pushed
via either booking.com or Expedia for a better chance
of bookings via Kayak.

Figure 16 Unlike other meta search sites on Kayak you can complete the
booking process without leaving the Kayak.com website, although the
actual reservation is still with the OTA, in this case Expedia ~ Hotels.com

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Hotel website and phone numbers are listed more
prominently on Kayak so check your details are listed
correctly.

TravelSupermarket (www.travelsupermarket.com)

TravelSupermarket use HotelCombined technology for
their hotel search so rankings on here are the same as
hotelcombined above.

Google Hotel Finder
(www.google.com/hotelfinder/)

Googles own hotel meta search technology is in its
infancy but given its a Google product its likely to
become much better and more popular in the coming
years.

The rankings here are a bit mysterious at the moment
and I would expect likely to change. Core hotel
information is taken from Google Places listings so
make sure your local business information in Google is
kept up to date. Central locations from city centres (as
defined by Google maps) seem to play a large role in
the relevance sorting and results may also be
weighted in part by your Google places rankings which
Outsmarting OTAs

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are influenced by local business citations on third
party sites and by reviews from Google users.

Clearly you can do little about your location but if
youre fairly central it may be worth encouraging some
guest reviews on Google. Most hotels dont have many
(if any) Google reviews so this will at the very least
make your listing more prominent in hotel finder
results.

You would assume Google will eventually go down the
same route as other meta search engines in harvesting
guest reviews from OTAs rather than relying on their
own review system, but for the time being if you invest
some energy in collecting a good number of Google
reviews, this could be a quick win.

Despite Google using your Google Places listings for
their hotel finder results your actual hotel contact
information is right at the bottom of the hotel listing
page

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Instead Google are trying to push affiliate links with
the OTAs. Chains like Hilton have supplied their
prices directly to Google (these are affiliate links still,
with Google earning a commission).

TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com)

A lot of hoteliers havent heard of this site, but
apparently theyre quite big in the hotel reviews
game!

TripAdvisor until recently had monetized their hotel
listings/ review pages with a combination of display
advertising and pop-ups which opened multiple OTA
sites at the same time. Theyve now rolled out their
own meta search system which displays live prices on
your reviews page. As with other meta search sites
theyre sucking their prices live from OTA feeds, or in
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the case of large chains direct relationships with the
hotel websites.

Figure 17 Intercontinental are providing direct prices to TA here, but
most hotels won't have access to this technology yet

Unlike other meta search sites price doesnt factor into
rankings on TripAdvisor though so the usual rules of
winning at TA apply here good reviews, and lots of
them.

Hopefully Tripadvisor will build a scalable way for
smaller hotels to display direct prices alongside OTA
prices (like the Intercontinental example above) by
partnering with reservation system vendors, but for
now TA are only talking to big chains with live price
feeds and affiliate programs about showing direct
prices.

Hipmunk (www.hipmunk.com)

Hipmunk is a fast growing meta search mobile app
and website for both flights and hotels. Its quickly
building up a strong following in the US and major
investment in the business means theyll be pushing
harder outside the US soon.

Hotels are ranked in Hipmunk by their own ecstasy
score;

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we recognize that price isn't the only factor that
goes into buying hotels. We sort by "Ecstasy," which
is a combination of price, amenities, and reviews.

Hipmunk uses Tripadvisor for its reviews data so
improving your TA ranking will likely help your
Hipmunk position. The amenities you list in your OTA
descriptions could also help, free parking and free wifi
seem to be the most desirable features so if you offer
those make sure theyre listed on Expedia,
booking.com etc so Hipmunk can pick them up.

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The Rise and Rise of Mobile

If youve read anything about tech or digital marketing
in the past years (or have travelled on a bus) youre
probably aware that a lot of people now have smart
phones. I wont quote too many numbers here as
theyll be defunct by the time I finish this chapter but
at the time of writing
4
61% of mobile users in
developed countries accessed the internet on their
phones.

Its fair to say that most of your guests now have
internet enabled smart phones and regularly use them
to access the web in one form or another, whether
thats full browser searching or accessing social sites
and other services via apps.

OTAs have brought into the mobile game in a big way;

Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com,
Priceline, Orbitz and most of the other
main players have smart phone optimised
mobile sites as well as iPhone apps.

Kayak, Trivago, Hotelcombined and other
hotel meta search sites also have mobile
optimised sites and apps.

In April 2013 Booking.com reported
5
that
their mobile bookings had tripled to $3
billion in 2012 compared to the previous
year.

The rise of mobile has also spawned a new model in
the hotel market with the emergence of last minute
hotel apps like HotelTonight (www.hoteltonight.com)
which offer selected hotels at discounted rates for

4
http://econsultancy.com/uk/reports/mobile-statistics
5
http://news.booking.com/booking-com-mobile-bookings-
triple-us/
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guests looking for (you guessed it) a hotel room
tonight. Not a new concept, but one that is inherently
better suited to a mobile application than a traditional
desktop site. Its yet to be seen whether this model is a)
scalable and b) sustainable but its more evidence, if
you needed it, that mobile is going to become harder
and harder to ignore.

Mobile optimised websites

The first step to take in getting your hotel mobile ready
is to ensure your website is optimised for small
screens. The OTAs have led with this so guests are
going to expect hotels to follow suit. If a guest cant
book on your site on their phone they know they can
go to the OTA and have a mobile friendly experience.

A mobile optimised site with navigation designed
specifically for touch screen smart phones is ideal but
can be expensive so first simply ensure your current
website works properly on the most popular devices
(iphones, iPads, popular Android phones like the
Samsung Galaxy). If your hotel site uses a lot of
features like flash and complicated javascript for image
galleries or certain video formats the site may not
function properly on phones. Get the basics right like;

Making sure phone numbers and email
addresses are written in normal text rather
than images and positioned near the top of
the page so its easy for guests to contact
you with one click on their phones.
Make sure you have a direct link to Google
maps as embedded maps dont tend to
work well on phones.
Make sure your site doesnt rely too
heavily on downloads like PDFs. For
example restaurant menus should be on
normal web pages in text, not a scan or a
photo of your actual menu.
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Your booking system works properly on a
phone. Things like date pickers can be
particularly troublesome to mobile users.
If the res system just doesnt work, at least
leave a note for mobile visitors to call for
reservations, rather than letting them try
and fail to book online.

Mobile Advertising

Once your site is optimised for mobile devices there
are numerous directions you can take to get mobile
traffic to your site.

Mobile search is perhaps the simplest and most
effective mobile advertising route.

With Google Adwords new enhanced campaigns you
can now target mobile devices only, to searchers in a
specific area and at particular times of day. This can be
a powerful way for hotels to replicate the last minute
booking effect of apps like HotelTonight as you can
target visitors looking for hotels in your city, with
specific last minute offers, for example;

25% off a room for tonight

Given that these adverts are limited to a very specific
set of web users the rates you advertise to mobile users
can remain semi-opaque.

Extending your adverts with call extensions can also
help. Mobile users may find it more convenient to
make their reservations over the phone call
extensions let them call straight from a search result
screen, giving you an advantage over OTAs, who dont
push phone sales.
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Figure 18 Google Adwords ads can also protect your brand from OTA's on
mobile search by encouraging direct call's
Other considerations

Customers are likely to be reading emails
on mobile devices so ensure your email
messages work properly in mobile email
browsers.

Google rank sites in organic results in
mobile search differently to desktops so
mobile optimised sites are likely to rank
higher than sites which dont work on
phones. Another reason if you needed it to
sort out the mobile version of your site
ASAP.

If you push to get mobile numbers from
customers when they book online you can
use SMS on the day of check-in to upsell
additional services like restaurant
reservations and room upgrades. This is
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more effective than trying to reach
customers via email as theyre likely to be
in transit.

Sending an SMS after check-out and
prompting a review is also a nice touch, use
it in addition to email to maximise reviews.

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Search Engine Optimisation For Hotels

Search engine optimisation used to be a relatively easy
and usually cheap way for hotels to get traffic direct to
their websites. Various factors have conspired to make
SEO less appealing as a channel however:

Organic (free) listings for hotels being
pushed down the page further below paid
ads, local listings and hotel finder results.
So a first page SEO result for a good
keyword probably sends you less traffic
this year than it did last.
Aggressive competition from OTAs and
meta search engines which dominate
Google results. Google now wants to rank
brands, so the Expedias of this world are
always likely to outrank local hotel
websites.
Links, which have always been at the heart
of Googles ranking algorithm, can now
harm a sites ranking as easily as they can
help it. Many hotels who have paid search
engine optimisation companies have been
penalised by Google for link spam, putting
them in a worse position than when they
started.
Local business listings are taking over
hotel search results and replacing hotel
websites in the search results.

Despite this, SEO should probably still play a part in
your hotels online marketing strategy for 2014 and
beyond.

Free listings on Google still send more traffic to
websites than any other channel so its hard to ignore,
just make sure youre doing it the right way.

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Keyword strategy

What keywords do guests use when searching for your
hotel? hotels in [your city]? Yep probably. But I bet if
you do a search on Google for that keyword, unless
youre based in a very small town, you wont see many
hotel websites listed in the normal organic search
results.

Google have pushed most hotels to their local listings.
These listings do still have some visibility, theyre near
the top of the page at least and they click through to
your website directly. However, you dont get a snippet
under your listing like a regular organic listing and
Google have started showing price links from
hotelfinder directly under your places listing, directing
more traffic to OTAs rather than your site.

As hotel finder picks up steam realistically Google are
going to be more inclined to send more traffic to your
hotelfinder page than directly to your website further
diminishing the returns on your SEO.

I wouldnt be surprised if links to hotel websites
disappear altogether from organic search results over
the next few years.

So what can you do with your keyword strategy. Heres
a few ideas;
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Focus on your hotels main features and
characteristics, for example 4 star, cheap,
luxury, swimming pool, spa hotel,
romantic, boutique, parking.
Look for opportunities for optimise for
peripheral services at your hotel like
weddings, conferences, spa day guests and
restaurant bookings these may provide a
better return from your SEO budget than
going up against OTAs for hotel keywords.
Get specific with your location so
Knightsbridge hotel rather than London
hotel for example.
Think about other keywords your guests
may be searching for at the same time as
booking a hotel. You probably dont want
to turn your hotel site into a local travel
guide but maybe you can optimise for
notable local events.
Think internationally. If youre based in a
metropolitan area theres a good chance
visitors to your city arent all searching in
English so have a properly translated local
page for popular languages among your
guests. Non-english SEO is generally less
competitive than English.

Optimising your site

Ensuring your website is optimised so it can be easily
read by search engine crawlers and so that its using the
most appropriate keywords for your hotel is a
fundamental requirement for every site owner. Even if
youre not pursuing an SEO strategy per se, getting
your on-page SEO sorted is a worthwhile one-off
process.

Your homepage is your priority if youre a single
property hotel, if you have multiple properties and
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only one site make sure each hotel has its own area of
the site.

You want a page for every service you offer, for
example weddings, spa, golf course. If you have a
restaurant which is open to outside guests I would
consider having a standalone site for this as anyone
searching for local restaurants is less likely to visit a
hotel website than a restaurant site.

The single biggest mistake most hotels make with their
SEO? Not having their keywords in their website copy!
Its not rocket science people, if your website says
were a boutique hotel in London somewhere on your
homepage that goes a long way to helping Google
figure out that you are indeed a boutique hotel in
London and ranking you accordingly. You dont need
to pay an SEO company to do this for you, just read the
copy on your site and make sure it actually describes
what you are.

Building links and business citations

Figure 19 Genuine links on sites like theaa.com which also list your
business details and send traffic will help you rank

Google uses a slightly archaic system to work out how
to rank websites in its index they look at the websites
which link to your site. The better the sites linking to
you, the higher youre likely to rank.

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This gets a bit more complicated when youre talking
about rankings for Google local listings rather than
normal organic listings in Google, theres other factors
at play. But still, improving your link profile is a good
place to start when trying to improve your rankings.

Be wary of any link building services which you can
outsource cheaply offshore, you want links from real
websites which your guests are visiting. Heres a few
ideas for ways you can build real links to your hotel
site;

If youre running Google Adwords on the
display network you can use data from
your advertising to see which sites are
referring traffic to your site and approach
those sites to try and setup links.
Approach any prominent local travel
guides, blogs or tourist information sites to
see if theres an opportunity or them to link
to your hotel
Research events happening near your hotel
which your typical guests might be
interested in and see if they have a page
recommending accommodation on their
site
Talk to the organisers of any events or
conferences happening at your hotel and
get them to link to you.
Offer discounted rooms to parents of
students at the local universities and
colleges.
List all your external suppliers (security,
cleaning, web designers, caterers, IT
support, reservation software etc) and try
and get links from their sites, for example
by supplying testimonials.

Link building should be a creative process so treat it as
such. Brainstorm ideas and reasons that website
owners would link to you and think about content or
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promotions you could run on your site which might
attract links.

Avoid any links which come as a result of a direct
payment like an advert. Also avoid links on sites which
you can go on and submit yourself, like in forums or
blog comments these can get you penalised by
Google.

Local Business Listings (aka Google Places)

Googles local business listings are the best free gift
Google still give to hotel sites. They allow your site to
be found in Google maps searches and also appear at
the top of organic search results for hotels in your city.
Here are some tips to make the most of your listing
and give it the best possible chance of ranking:

Ensure you have claimed your business
listing and have control over it.
http://www.google.com/local/add/busines
sCenter

Ensure your business details are all up to
date

Make use of all the fields Google gives you
to add information about your hotel.
Upload as many photos and videos of your
hotel as you can, fill out extra fields like
payment methods. The more complete the
profile the better.

Dont try and add extra keywords into your
listing title or description, this is more
likely to hurt than help you rank in local
search.

Check your map marker on Google maps is
positioned correctly.

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Get guests to complete reviews of your
hotel on Google. This may be counter
intuitive to your instincts to get reviews on
TA but just a small handful of reviews (and
they dont seem to even need to be good
ones!) on Google are likely to help your
listing rank.

Ensure wherever your hotel is listed online
with your name, address and phone
number, consistent details are being used
and the same format and spelling is used
everywhere. Google uses these local
business citations to verify you are a real
business, in much the same way they use
links, so you need consistency.

Wherever your hotel is mentioned online
try and ensure they reference the proper
name (as it appears on your local business
listing), full address and phone number as
well as a website link.

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Social Media Advertising

As you may have noticed, social media sites have
become really rather popular over the past decade! The
biggest players, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and
YouTube all now offer their own advertising platforms.
Each has its own set of features which could present an
opportunity for your hotel to reach a new audience and
drive bookings (or just reach your existing audience in
a new way).

My first piece of advice before you do anything with
social media in the title. Start by asking why?

Why are we doing this?
What do we hope to achieve?
How do we know if its successful?

Too many companies jump on the social media
bandwagon, usually because the CEO has seen a
presentation by some business guru who insists the
key to successful sales is to have a million followers on
Twitter.

Social media sites have a big audience, and levels of
data on their users which give them a very interesting
advertising proposition but dont forget, nobody ever
went on Facebook or Twitter to book a hotel room so
approach social media advertising with the same
scepticism you would any other form of display
advertising.

Facebook ads

Figure 20 Nice use of Facebook retargeting by Expedia
Outsmarting OTAs

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Facebook is the worlds biggest social network and they
now have a fairly sophisticated advertising platform
with several different formats of ad. By far the most
effective of these are adverts placed in the Newsfeed.
These in-stream adverts (which also show on mobile
devices) are 49 times
6
more likely to be clicked than
those little ads you see on the right hand side when
you view Facebook on your desktop.

Standard right-hand-side ads have extremely low click
through rates (as does all display advertising)
however, Facebook receives a LOT of page impressions
so even if youre getting a 0.01% CTR you can get
Facebook traffic to work.

My recommendation for hotels is to use Facebook
primarily for retargeting visitors who have already
visited your site. Show them a deal or extra incentive
to get them back to the site and close the deal.

Facebook browsers are not engaged shoppers. Theyre
looking for photos of their friends and sharing the
latest top 1000 list from Buzzfeed. Theyre not looking
to book a hotel, however they are online and not busy
(theyre on Facebook after all!) so a well timed
reminder to take advantage of a deal on that hotel
room they need to book can and will convert.

LinkedIn Advertising

LinkedIn, the business social networking site offer
their own basic, but effective advertising. Unlike any
other ad platform LinkedIn lets you target
advertisements by job function. Why might you want
to do that? Well if MICE business is important to your
hotel LinkedIn will let you target potential buyers like

6
http://blog.adroll.com/facebook-exchange-news-feed-
numbers
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Page 62
conference organisers or exec PAs. Want to promote
your wedding venue? Then target wedding planners.

Twitter Advertising

Twitter has a relatively new platform for advertising
but early results suggest its proving an effective,
alternative way to engage customers in a variety of
industries. Can it work for hotels?

Its early days for Twitter ads so anything you do at this
stage will be experimental, however experience has
taught us that being an early adopter of new
advertising channels puts you ahead of the curve the
adverts themselves have a certain curiosity in their
early days, as time goes on and advertising gets more
heavy, users learn to filter out messages theyre not
interested in.

Some potential applications for Twitter ads;

Twitter users are a mobile audience and
their ad platform offers Geo-location
targeting users in a certain geo-graphic
area this could have applications for last
minute bookings or promoting F&B deals.

Keyword targeting lets you promote tweets
to anyone who is talking about hotels in
your area

Interest targeting or keyword targeting can
also help you reach certain niche audiences
who may be interested in your hotel, for
example local bloggers or people interested
in events running near your hotel.

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Analytics & Measurement

We discussed analytics briefly in the Conversion Rate
Optimisation section and touched on revenue
reporting and how its essential to making your direct
booking strategy a success. However Analytics goes
much deeper than just revenue tracking. There is a
huge wealth of knowledge you can gleam from your
website analytics data to help inform your marketing
decisions and improve the performance of your
website as a whole. In this section we will touch on
some advanced uses of Analytics data which will help
give you greater visibility of your websites
performance and insights about how it can be
improved.

Call tracking

I believe one of the greatest weapons hotels have in
their fight against the OTAs (if you choose to see it as
a fight) is the phone. None of the major OTAs want
you to phone them, their business models after all are
based on customers booking online instead of over the
phone. So Id definitely advise encouraging calls at
every possible opportunity.

The problem with phone leads historically was always
that you never really knew what marketing channels
led to the call. If the call handler remembered to ask
how did you hear about us the customer would rarely
know and certainly wouldnt remember all their touch
points;

Well I first read about you in this magazine, then I
Googled hotels in London and saw you listed on
Expedia, searched for your name, visited your
website along with a couple of others, read your
reviews on tripadvisor and finally got your number
from the Yellow pages [Said nobody, ever]

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Now thanks to the miracle of technology and the
relatively low price of phone numbers, its possible to
track phone calls and associate them with website
visits, and its generally very easy to implement. Heres
how it works:

A visitor comes to your website from a
Google search an theyre shown a unique
phone number.
They visit a few pages or maybe leave and
come back later, theyre still shown the
same number
Eventually they decide to call and book
The unique number they ring is forwarded
seamlessly through to your usual phone
line (or call centre) and the call is
attributed back to the website visit in your
analytics package.

We recommend all hotels implement this technology
and proactively push for phone bookings in your
advertising and website messaging. Its a great USP for
booking direct rather than via an OTA.

The only problem with this system is it only tracks
calls where the guest got your number directly from
your website, so if they find your number on TA or
Google maps for example theyd ring your usual
number and it wouldnt be tracked.

B2B Lead Generation track the companies
visiting your site

For hotels which offer MICE services getting relevant
B2B traffic to your website is a constant struggle.
Theres very little traffic out there in this market, but
you know what traffic you get is high value as new
MICE accounts could be worth tens of thousands. One
solution we recommend to hotels looking to increase
their MICE business is a tracking system which tells
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Page 65
you the names and contact details of companies who
have visited your website.

Several solutions such as www.leadforensics.com and
www.A1webstats.com make this information available.
They rely on mapping the IP address of your visitors to
a database of company IPs which is not 100%
accurate, but which can work very well (in the UK at
least).

Figure 21 A1WebStats lists all the identifiable companies who have come
to your site, along with their website and phone number

This is potentially very powerful information in the
hands of an effective and pro-active sales and
marketing team. Make it a daily process to go through
your website visitors from companies, search linkedIn
to find a suitable contact person at the company and
give them a call.

One thing youre likely to find is that you get a lot of
normal hotel guests on your website from company IP
addresses (people researching their travel plans at
work) so for this strategy to work you need to look at
the landing page and referring keyword reports
available in these tools and make a judgement call
about whether that visitor is interested in B2B
services, or just looking for a hotel room. The main
clues are:

Theyve entered the site via a MICE related
keyword i.e. meetings rooms in London

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Theyve entered from a referring site like a
venue directory youre listed in
Theyve viewed the MICE information
pages on your site

Multi-Channel Attribution

Figure 22 A few examples of MCA paths in Google Analytics

Multi-channel attribution or MCA sounds daunting,
and indeed it is a complex area of web analytics,
however the basics are important for hotels to grasp.

Under a standard attribution model, like that you find
in the conversion and ecommerce reports in your
Google Analytics, the last-click (the most recent
channel the visitor used to find the site) takes the
credit for conversions. So if a visitor came to your site
3 times;

1
st
read email and clicked on link
2
nd
clicked on display advert on Facebook
3
rd
Searched for hotel name and clicked on
Adword advert then booked

The credit for that booking would go to the Adwords
advert because the last click before the booking was on
an Adwords ad. However, its fair to say in the example
above that your email marketing and Facebook
advertising probably also contributed to that booking,
but with last click attribution you might think that the
Adwords advert is working but the other channels
arent. But without the other channels the Adwords ad
wouldnt have worked.

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MCA looks at all the channels, which contributed to
the booking, helping you to understand how your
different advertising and marketing channels are
working together, or not.

If youre making marketing decisions based on web
analytics, make sure youre looking at the whole
journey using MCA. Very few guests who choose to
book on your site are going to book on their first visit
so last click attribution is fairly useless for hotel
marketers.

Google analytics now supports multi-channel
attribution meaning you can get this data for free
without any additional website tracking so ensure you
read up on and use these reports in your marketing
measurement.

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Conclusions

Theres a lot of information in this guide and weve had
to skimp on the detail in places but hopefully youve
found some insights into the opportunities presented
by online advertising and how the OTAs are using it to
their advantage.

The good news is that none of the techniques
discussed in this guide are beyond the reach or outside
the budget of even small hotels.

Despite the title of this guide, I dont believe the end
goal for hotel marketers is to beat OTAs, nor is that
realistic. But you should be looking to readjust the
balance to a point where OTAs are a complimentary
channel of bookings, rather than your only lifeline.
Ultimately this is going to bring more stability to the
hotel business as a whole.

For comments, questions or help with any of the ideas
discussed in this guide or for a no-strings-attached
discussion about how Inbound360 can help advertise
your hotel online email talk@inbound360.com.

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Outsmarting OTAs

Volume 1, September 2013

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