Natural Search &
Online Tourism Consultant

• 24Nov

  8 Tips for your Hotel Website

  Accommodation Websites, Google, Hotel Internet Marketing, Tourism No Comments

  No website is the same but users expect to find generally the same information on each hotel website they visit. Here are our top tips for your accommodations website.

  • Make sure you include your telephone number, address and postcode, many of your visitors will be using sat nav to find you and a postcode makes that very easy and saves you having to guide them in.
  • Use a simple email address; you would not believe how many users create a typo on words like accommodation@yourdomain.com or reservations@yourdomains.com, and if that happens you don’t get the enquiry. Keep it short like stay@yourdomain.com, eat@yourdomain.com, info@yourdomain.com
  • Test your email addresses and website contact form regularly to make sure it’s working.
  • Get professional photos of your accommodation/business, high quality images will drive more enquiries…it is a guarantee.
  • Make a gallery available on your website in small but high quality formats (try and keep image sizes below 300kb)…a great example is at http://www.theperen.com
  • Make use of high quality (sometimes free) content providers…most of them just want content so if you write an article about an experience some of your customers had they would be likely to take it and run it on their websites. Even if you look at it as a free link, which is crucial for search engine ranking on your given terms.
  • When your listing your business with 3rd party sites make sure you give a good account of what it is you’re offering and upload images…it is likely more people will be looking at their website than yours if it’s on a tourist information website.
  • If you’re paying for advertising make sure you are getting a return on your investment; You can measure this by using tools like Google Analytics (your web designer/developer will be able to advise you on this). It’s a free product from Google and just involves installing some tracking code on each page of your website. You’ll then be able to see exactly how many visitors are arriving on your website and what sources are driving the most traffic to your website. At our website using Google analytics we can even tell you how many phone calls we have delivered to your business.

  If you want me to audit your online prescence get in touch

• 23May

  Google Adsense linked to your Analytics account now in UK Accounts

  Google, Google Adsense, PPC No Comments

  Google have now removed their Adsense reporting from Beta and as of this morning is available to link with UK Analaytics Accounts. After signing into Adsense you will be promoted to link your accounts. The top content report shows your most visited AdSense pages and how you’re monetizing them. For example, you can see what pages have the highest clickthrough rate (CTR) or highest eCPM.
  

  Use Analytics’ detailed traffic analysis to gain insight into and improve your AdSense performance. they’ll break down performance in some new ways, showing earnings and ad impressions based on user visits, the top sites referring users to AdSense, and the geographical areas where your visitors are located.

  

• 13May

  Google’s new search options

  Google, Natural Search No Comments

  Google today announced the launch of Google Search options, a tool that will allow users to dig deeper into their search results for a more customizable search experience. The search options, available right on the results page, lets users sort and reshape results and explore their queries to quickly and more easily find what they need.

  Search options will allow users to break out their results in several ways, including:

  • Show only pages with a certain type of content. Limit search results to see only videos, forums or reviews for a given search. For searches about films or novels, you’ll now be able easily to search for reviews; or you can view only pages that contain videos in them.
  • View related searches. With this tool you can view a list of related searches or have them graphically represented using the Wonder Wheel feature.
  • Organize by date. Find the most recent results, by limiting your results to pages from the past 24 hours, past week or past year.

  Search options might be particularly helpful for searches that are hard to express with keywords (such as “Show me discussions about ‘the Oscars’ in forums”) or when you want to explore topics more broadly or refine them (for example, “Show me queries that typically branch out from ‘Renewable Energy’”).

  

  Be sure to try out the Wonder Wheel great for finding related keywords!

  

  Search options is a further way to give users the power to customize the way the use Google,” said Juergen Galler, Director of Product Management at Google. “We’re always thinking about what we can do to improve the search experience, and we think this launch is a good step to help users get quickly and easily to precisely the kind of information they seek.”

• 09Apr

  Google Event Tracking Hack

  Google, Google Analytics 2 Comments

  If like myself Google Event Tracking is not yet an option in your Google analytics account profile (Whats with the delay Google!?!) then a colleague of mine found an easy hack to add the functionality to your profile. Simply hack the URL to include the events folder and away you go.

  https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/events?id=yoursiteID

  To all those wondering if historical data is being recorded by Google even though its not yet visible in your accounts…yes it is. I installed event tracking on a website without it yet being available in the analytics profile and it’s recorded back at least 4 months since we first included it in the HTML.

• 02Mar

  Citys.info on Web Analytics

  Google, Google Analytics No Comments

  This is the process of collection, measurement and analysis of user activity on a website to understand and help achieve the intended objective of the website. Analytics play a crucial role in any online business for their ability to monitor visitors as they pass through and interact with a website, without them it is difficult to make informed decisions based on user’s feedback, in this case that feedback is navigation paths, conversions and click through rates.

  <!– Start of Google Analytics Code –>
  <script type=”text/javascript”>
  var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.”
  : “http://www.”); document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost +
  “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
  </script>
  <script type=”text/javascript”>
  var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-26676-4″); pageTracker._initData();
  pageTracker._trackPageview();</script>
  <!– End of Google Analytics Code –>

  This is an example of the tracking code that runs on each and every page of the website to enable Google to track user’s movements. Note: The user must have Javascript enabled to run this code.

  This shows an overview of the traffic on Swansea.info for the period 1st September 2008 until 1st October 2008. The traffic does fluctuate quite a lot day by day but there is a reasonably consistent trend over the time period.
  It also reports on Visits (9319), Page Views (24,239), Page views per user visit (2.60), Bounce Rate (58.42% and is how many times a visitors lands on a page and leave straight away without looking at another page on the website.

  

  A recent article by (Dainow, 2008) says “Google Analytics should not count a bounce as a visit”. But that is how a lot of people use web sites: they enter a specific search in to Google and hit each item of the search results in turn. Just because people do not go beyond the entry page does not mean it is not a useful visit. Maybe the author is focused on conversion-funded rather than ad-funded sites. Omniture’s HBX analytics counts bounces as visits and it is fair for Google Analytics to do the same. That said, he is right about Google Analytics artificially deflated visit-time stats. Google counts a bounce as a visit of zero-seconds duration and includes it when calculating average visit duration. Omniture HBX simply ignores bounces in the visit duration calculation. This means HBXs average visit time is always higher (and more sensible) than Google’s – especially where the bounce percentage is high.

  It also reports on the average amount of time a user spends looking at the content (1minute 37 seconds) and also what percentage of the traffic are new visitors in this case 78.91% will not have seen the site previously in the reported period.

• 27Feb

  Citys.info on Internal Search and Google Custom Search Engine

  Google, Google Analytics, Natural Search No Comments

  As websites have become complex (take Amazon which has millions of pages) users will use the internal search tool to find what they want. Internal search usage numbers are easy to retrieve using Google Analytics Site Search tool combined with Google’s Custom Search Engine (CSE).

  

  This shows the statistics from the site search report in Google Analytics.

  The CSE will index 100% of the sites content if provided via an XML feed (Google has 2 indexes, 1 for regular search and one for its Custom Search Engines). This was the easiest way to gather user search data and didn’t involve developing a search function. The benefit of using the CSE is the results are algorithmically generated not just a simple SQL query based search, this results in far better targeted results.

  Site Search is of great value to copywriters and web masters. Being able to understand the user when engineering information architecture is a crucial step in the future success of a website and one of those steps is analysing Site Search.

  The data is usually quite difficult to come by as the information contains sensitive business information. If you have a similar website in the same market, this insight gave an understanding of what the user expected to see from the Mumbles.co.uk brand. Based on those results determined the information architecture for the new Citys.info internet franchise and what order to put on channels i.e. Hotels, Restaurants, Bars, and Beaches. Instead of offering content which the user might not have wanted to read by understanding the site search results it gave a voice to the user. By further analysing site search data, it will give good content suggestions which otherwise might not have been thought of. This is effectively a vertical search marketing and content suggestion tool in the hands of every webmaster.

• 25Feb

  Citys.info on Generic Domains

  Domains, Google, Natural Search, PPC 4 Comments

  The choice of domain name is critical for business. The generic domain name is something that a lot of people strive for and the Citys.info internet franchise is no different. Depending on the market the decision to go with a generic or a branded domain is a tough call to make. In a lot of markets the generic domain name offers instant product or service recognition and will give confidence to the user as to what content they will find when they click on the link. This helps to improve click through rates on a multitude of on-line areas from organic SERPS, PPC listings and blog links amongst others.

  The ranking benefits of having a generic domain cannot be underestimated either. Search engines rely on text links from external sources as a voting mechanism to credit sites as being authentic high value sources of information. When an author of content links from one website to another the text that is linked is known as the anchor text.

  When read in context the links give the user a very clear guide as to the subsequent content they will find. Search engines use this text in helping them to better understand what information the linked too site is about. This helps improve rankings for the keyword phrases in the anchor text for the linked to website.

  The decision to go with a generic or a branded domain is a tough call so testing the performance of both would be useful. The Citys.info internet franchise team conducted tests to see the performance differences in branded versus a generic domain through the Google Adwords platform. This allows an advertiser to bid on terms that users search for in the Google Search Engine. After submitting an initial bid, Google will then give a quality score (a list of variables that affect the cost per click aka CPC) for the keyword selected. The higher the click through rate on the advert the higher the quality score the lower cost to bid in the higher positions. So there is a direct cost implication in an advert not performing well in its click through rate.

  The Citys.info platform is an affiliate of the Vue Cinema network and one of the revenue channels is selling cinema tickets. So the test also encompassed a feasibility study to see whether bidding on these terms was cost effective in achieving a target CPA.
  Shows an advert displayed around the keywords “Vue Cinema Swansea” and Vue Cinema Cardiff”
  

  Shows what the search results pages looked like at the time of the trial for the Swansea.info version of the test.
  

  The adverts were run simultaneously over a 3 week campaign and the results were vastly different, the two domains Swansea.info and netcardiff.co.uk were run with the same advert creative and a maximum cost per click of £0.10. netcardiff.co.uk received a CTR rate of around 13% where as Swansea.info was consistently receiving a CTR of 56% which is an almost unheard of figure in any main stream PPC campaign.

  Given the exact wording and exact same levels of competition that both adverts received the only conculsion that can be made from the test is that the domain name played a very important part in securing the click from the user resulting in a quality score of 10/10 on Swansea.info and 7/10 on netCardiff.co.uk.

• 23Feb

  Citys.info on Understanding Web Analytics

  Google, Google Analytics, Natural Search No Comments

  On a day to day basis web analytics are a window in to what has been happening on a given website.  Data generated by the user is reported in very simple terms and decisions can be made around that data based on the behavioural patterns of users. Different websites even if they appear to be exactly the same and in the same sector can throw up different search reporting trends and it is in this analysis that the power of analytical data comes in to its own.

  With a first page ranking on a generic term such as “Mumbles Hotels” or “Mumbles” the user is at stage one of their search and although reasonably narrowed down to Hotels in Mumbles they might be open to 3 or even 5 star accommodation and are likely to look through multiple pages before they find their desired outcome.

  Take the 6 search terms below mumbles, the mumbles, China China Swansea, mumbles Swansea, Mumbles Wales and mumbles hotels. Each tells a very different story about that user’s interest in the content based on the data available.

  The keyword “Mumbles Hotels” is a reasonably generic term although the user has narrowed down a place and a product they still have the type of product such as 3 or 5 star hotels. It is fair to say that user would look through a variety of hotels listed on the website before they made their decision. It appears given the level of page views for that term at 7.46 per visit that is the case. Also note the very low bounce rate at 8.24%. So 92.76% of users look at more than 1 page of content on that search term.

  Bounce rate is a very good indicator of how users react to the content offering when initially put in front of them. That search term would also suggest that the user is in “buying mode” and is thinking about conducting a transaction so giving them “call to actions” to send the hotels an enquiry would be a good idea on this content.

  This shows the top keywords and associated data driving traffic to Mumbles.co.uk

  

  The keyword “china china Swansea” (the name of a Chinese restaurant) gives a very different insight in to those particular users’ intentions. The low page views per visit at 2.18 suggests a very short visit and from the average time at 56 seconds that is true. The bounce rate is the highest in the list likewise the percentage of traffic that is a new visitor.

  When the page is analysed the intentions of the user become clear. The page in question is a listings page for the restaurant and contains information like address and telephone number for reservations.

  China China had a very poor launch strategy when the restaurant was opened and took over 6 months for any listings to appear in the likes of Yellow Pages or Yell.com. The listings on Mumbles.co.uk have been online since day one of the restaurant opening and were indexed by Google shortly after.

  Being first with information is a helpful step in ranking well in any search engine: industry leaders will often have information first and Google will reward with good listings. The search engines are also in competition with each other after all if the user consistently finds more up to date information else where there is the potential for them to swap search engines.

  

  Even different search engines will return a different type of user. This shows Google, although driving vastly more traffic to Mumbles.co.uk, users from Yahoo are far more engaged with the content and look at 21% more pages than an average Google user. Yahoo also delivers traffic which does not bounce as much as Google.

  Understanding users and how they are interacting with content allows for informed decisions about potential strategy changes such as content or more relevant links around the content. For example with a restaurant page on Swansea.info a SQL query is run which generates 6 restaurants underneath the listing so it is easy for the user to move onto related content, the more targeted the options the more likely they are to click on it. This also gave a great opportunity to develop a good internal linking strategy on Swansea.info around the restaurants channel.

  Giving users related content to generate page views is completely the opposite of websites which operate on a conversion basis (CPA – cost per acquisition). The last thing a CPA business model wants is for users to be distracted from the goal, usually financial (also known as the conversion funnel) so the closer the user comes to the end result, the less options are available to navigate away

• 22Feb

  Citys.info on Search Engines and New Websites

  Google, Natural Search, Uncategorized No Comments

  Here are some other examples from Webmaster Central which gives an insight in to how Google treats new websites. There is often the discussion (Wallace, 2005) that the sand boxing (a testing/validation environment) of new websites takes place that are entering the index. This is highlighted in the following graphs which show Mumbles.co.uk, an established site and well respected in Google, although varying greatly on a daily basis is reasonably consistent from month to month.
  This image shows the number of pages crawled per day by Google Bot on Mumbles.co.uk

  
  Figure 61 shows the number of kilobytes downloaded per day by Google Bot on Mumbles.co.uk
  In contrast Tenby.info is a recent launch for the platform, notice the gradual increase in the amount of pages that Google crawls, this is to do with the sand boxing that Google implements with new websites that enter its index. This image shows the number of pages crawled by Google Bot on Tenby.info

  

  Sand boxing
  When attempting to be indexed by Google and before any kind of rankings are awarded the search engine will want to know the source of information is a credible one and understand what type of content is being offered. This is known as the sand boxing period and will result in any version of the Citys.info internet franchise being put in to one of hundreds of categories, hopefully all sitting in travel/tourism. This means hopefully competing with like for like websites on competitive terms.

  Various sources believe this categorisation is a manual process which can take up to 3 months. It is realistic to think this is the case and would keep the quality of the index high allowing for benchmarking in analytics packages against other websites in a sector.

• 19Feb

  Citys.info on Conversion Tracking

  Google Analytics, Natural Search, PPC No Comments

  When analysing data produced by users navigating a website, it is essential to not only understand their behaviour but be able to measure KPI.

  Unless data is available documenting how the website is performing, how can the internet franchise owners be expected to sell against that data. Savvy advertisers will easily be able to trip up a site owner about facts and figures and quote competitors information if they have not been shown how to interpret the site KPIs and analytics data.

  Recording data about the sites performance over a period of time allowed for trending information to be analysed such as brand specific traffic. This might give an inclination of how a specific area was performing on the wider tourism map then by looking at the sector as a whole this might be a common trend. As seen below there is a gradual rise from March peaking at the school holidays and Easter and reaching a peak again in July when the schools finish for their summer holidays falling off dramatically in early September. This is a classic tourism yearly trend model for any UK seaside resort.

  
  One of the great things about an online business is its ability to be measured and during the development of the Citys.info internet franchise some advanced uses of Google analytics were implemented to try and measure KPIs on a site wide level from accommodation enquiries right through to premium advert performance.

  In Google Analytics there is a function to create “Goals”. Goals are achievements that have been made based on a set of pre defined variables. Maybe a user clicked on a call to action they can then be measured against an older version of that same call to action or maybe a user has clicked on a form and made a hotel reservation. As well as goals these are also known as conversions. The website converted someone to do something and it has been tracked in the analytics.

  Conversion tracking can take many forms and become very complicated for example if the keyword “Majorca Holidays” is bought via Google Adwords taking the user to holiday information page for Majorca. Although all the functionality and call to action might be there for the user to complete that booking transaction they may just be researching the market to see what is available and what prices are like. This research may go on for weeks maybe months until the user finally navigates their way back to the original keyword they used some period of time ago and bought the holiday, this is known as an assisted keyword conversion and requires complex tracking software usually in the form of a cookie (a text file assigned to a users browser triggered by visiting a web page).

  With Citys.info due to the nature of the content and the lack of paid traffic it is not really necessary to track the conversion down to that granular level. It is important to track hotel enquiries to individual hotels and hotel content in general purely from a sales perspective in giving customers an update on how their listing is performing. At a top level, looking at all the hotels on the website and to get a total number of enquiries for any given time frame some event tracking can be configured in Google analytics.

  We have worked extensively with Citys.info to implement KPI measurement to a very granular level. Get in touch to see how we can help you.

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