LONDON—Tailoring a hotel company’s online presence to meet the evolving requirements of search engines is an unrelenting task—one made all the more difficult without an understanding of the latest changes to the digital landscape.
Search-engine experts attempted to ease the burden by sharing some of those developments with hoteliers during the World Travel Market in London.
Arianne Donoghue, head of pay per click for U.K. search marketing agency Stickyeyes, emphasized the increasing relevancy search engines are placing on social network activity.
“Marketing has recently become very complicated. ‘Social’ as a medium is very two-way, and if you get it right there’ll be a healthy bottom line. It’s present in every part of our lives, which makes it a really good way to reach as many people as possible,” she said.
Donoghue said social media is now integral in all four stages of the buying cycle: researching, buying, retention and advocacy.
“Increasingly,” she added, “the value of the social interaction is visible in many direct ways; on sales, via attribution software and through an uplift on search behaviour and click-through rates.”
Paul Hill, sales director at Stickyeyes, added, “It’s important that you’re engaging across all media, including social. If you place your brand with the right audience, social also helps with post-sales, establishing the brand and creating brand ambassadors.”
“Virgin were quick off the mark,” she said. “Within 30 minutes of initial announcements, they were very visible online, they were very helpful. It won Virgin a lot of goodwill and trust.”
Virgin Australia announced via Facebook as well as their website that it would be assisting Qantas travellers. A special page on the company’s website gave a 20% discount for stranded passengers and announced an additional 3,000 seats in airlift. Virgin also used Twitter to full effect, injecting humour by tweeting photos of their planes taking off.
As Donoghue pointed out, the initiative also meant more than 20,000 people booked flights home with Virgin. Donoghue compared this with Qantas, “who were getting 1,000 tweets a minute on the Saturday night with no response.” The company’s Facebook page told of problems but no apology and no real information about what to do. Updates were short and one of them referred to the volcanic ash cloud. Rubbing salt in the wounds, Qantas was quick off the mark to response to U.K. broadcaster Stephen Fry, who, with more than 3 million followers on twitter, was evidently seen as high priority, Donoghue said.
Donoghue emphasized, “You need to make sure you are building the foundations of your brand. Make sure that you have the channels there and they are available to use. If your customers are saying they need something, then you make sure you are providing that for them.”
Google Travel’s focus
Also presenting at the conference was Nate Bucholz, a director of travel for Google U.K. He pointed out that “of the 29 million people in the U.K. travel market, 77% of these people are going to use search at some point. We are happy to see that search engines are a very central part of booking travel.”
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Google’s Nate Bucholz discussed the increasing importance of mobile technology during a panel at the World Travel Market. |
Google’s findings showed on average U.K. travellers visit 15 sites and can spend up to 50 days searching before booking travel. Only 16% purchase within 24 hours, while an additional 64% will purchase within 30 days.
“Someone may have already booked with you, but ancillary products are huge and you need to take advantage of this,” Bucholz said. “People are one-and-a-half times more likely to make a purchase if they clicked on that page. The point is you need to be really scientific with your analytics and also with (search engine optimization) so you know how to allocate your subjects.”
The increasing importance of mobile technology is also something Bucholz said is a focus for Google.
“This year 17.6 million people in the U.K. accessed the Internet using their mobile phones … Household ownership of smart phones is now 45%, where it was only 36% in April. Twenty percent of the travel queries we now get on Google are now on a mobile device.”
Bucholz also said it’s essential for providers to think about how people are using mobile technology.
“EasyJet found 38% of bookings they got from a mobile device were for departures within 10 days.” For the hotel market: “ebookers found 70% of the bookings were same-day check in for hotels—a lot of these people were within a couple of miles from this hotel,” he said.
Hotel Finder
Google’s Hotel Finder came out in July 2011 in the U.S. and recently has introduced international destinations. Bucholz said the site is still a work in progress.
“We found with travel that our one-size-fits-all approach didn’t work very well,” he said.
Google changed its approach by looking at how people interact and refining the tools accordingly.
“We found that people tend to book or find a hotel by creating this big master list and narrowing it down. So we have short-listing available, everything is really fast, really instant,” Bucholz said. “A feature called Tourist Spotlight, by geo-tagged photos online, enables Google to analyse where a visitor might want to go in a city, and hotels are then pinpointed on a map.”
The panel’s final speaker was Jon Myers, director in account management for Yahoo! U.K. and Ireland, who shared initiatives Yahoo! is implementing to encourage search engine use for brands.
One of the key strategies is “branding for search marketers,” in which Yahoo! puts official marks or logos of companies into search results. “We know that this is going to drive sales and your brand,” he said. “Users looking for a specific brand know where to click, and brands stand out on the page.”
Yahoo! also launched “rich” ads and search this year in the United Kingdom to see how it could further take rich media and bring it to the engine findings.
“It effectively allows you to play video within the search engine results page, giving you that huge branded exception on the page. It allows you to post offers and really sell from this particular spot.”
Yahoo! found during a 60-day campaign that brand click through rates increase by 300% and brand conversion increased by 83%.
Other Yahoo! initiatives include the recently updated image search function, which allows direct links with a user’s and that user’s friends’ Facebook photos.
“We are also uploading this in conjunction with Flickr, so if you’re uploading photos of your hotel or resort and tagging them, well, they will come up in the image search,” Myers added.
Again, mobile was seen as key to the future of conversion rates, particularly when it comes to travel.
“With mobile, we are finally arriving at the tipping point, and it is very important to think about this. Search Apps, (which are) live in the U.S. and coming to Europe shortly, enable an app search that brings in all of the apps available in the market—Android and iPhone. There is a big adoption of apps in the travel sector, and this will get you up in the search results, too.”