Integrate Your Google Webmaster Tool Data into Google Analytics

October 14, 2011 By Trent Blizzard

Connecting your Google Webmaster Tool account and your Google Analytics account provides better reports in your Google Analytics AND more convenience. This feature was released last week on the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

I especially like having the “Queries” report right in Google Analytics which shows how many impressions my website received in Google search results (by Query), the Click-Thru-Rate and the average ranking. Pretty Handy.

Here are the step-by-step instructions… with a caveat: you must be in the “new version” of Google Analytics, not the old. If your screens look different, you are in the old version. The login to the new version is at the very top of your page.

Here are the step-by-step instructions to integrate these two accounts:

1) Login to Google Analytics and click on the gear to the right of the reporting tabs:

Run a Contest or Promotion on Your Facebook Page

June 4, 2011 By Trent Blizzard

Many hoteliers are struggling with making their Facebook presence more effective. Running a contest or promotion on your hotel’s Facebook Page is a great idea for hotel marketers who are looking to nudge up the effectiveness of their Facebook marketing results.

Contests can help you:

Garner a larger fan base.
Improve the interaction you have with you current fans.
Give you a golden opportunity to collect emails and mailing addresses of your fans.

The problem that a contest may pose is that it can attract unqualified Likes… people entering your contest just to win may not have any intention of becoming a customer.

In order to mitigate this problem (if you think it is a problem), consider the following:

How you promote your contest. Are you promoting it to the general public or are you promoting it to past guests, current fans, and potential guests?
What you give away. An iPad can bring out the monkeys and pornstars. A free nights lodging or weekend spa treatment at your property will only attract people with an intention of actually staying with you.

Blizzard can help you setup your contests right in your Facebook Page. Check out our sample contest to see what we can do for you. In this case, we have made the contest so you must Like us before you can enter the contest.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Facebook, Marketing Musts

PadiAct: A Tool to Grow Your Email Signups on Your Website

May 18, 2011 By Trent Blizzard

Getting more of your website visitors to self-register for your email newsletter is a pain-point for many business websites. One easy solution you may want to try is to use a “popup” inviting visitors to sign up for you newsletter. Of course, you shouldn’t overdo it and irritate your users, but you should probably at least test this more aggressive tactic.

For a quick and easy tool that delivers “popups” on your website, check out PadiAct.

PadiAct makes it easy to setup, configure and install this functionality right into your website. Some advantages of PadiAct:

Direct connect Constant Contact, Mailchimp and more to push you subscribers right into your email system.
Reporting and statistics on your success.
Configure to “pop” after a certain # of page views, visits, and more.
Configure to slide in from the bottom, slide from the side, or pop up and cover your page.

Here is an example screen-shot of the pop up style window:

I really like the idea of a dynamic popup type call-to-action over a static “email signup” area taking up prime real estate on the website. PadiAct also offers pretty cool segmentation and targeting cirtieria like referrer, # page visited, certain pages visited, geography, etc.

It looks like they will be adding some new features soon too that would be great… we would like to see multiple campaigns that go beyond Email… for instance, maybe ask someone along the way to Fan me in Facebook (or “like”… whatever), sign up for my RSS feed or accept a special offer.

PadiAct is $25 for small business size use and offers a free 30 day trial.

Filed Under: How To: Tips & Tools, Marketing Musts, Toolbox

Google Analytics URL Builder

May 10, 2011 By Trent Blizzard

Tracking your referral sources accurately in Google Analytics is a big deal.

As the marketing person for a resort, you may increasingly rely upon the reporting that Google gives you to evaluate how your marketing efforts are working.

The problem with relying upon referral reports in Google Analytics is that:

Some or all of the data gets lost (Twitter can have this problem).
The referral website actually has several websites and your traffic gets spread around so it be hard to calculate.
The referral website has a paid and free component (like LinkedIn and Facebook) where your fee-based advertising gets lumped into the free version.
You are doing email marketing and the emails aren’t being tracked.
You are not tracking your 301 redirects or domain forwarding usage.

My favorite tool to solve this problem is the Google Analytics URL Builder which quickly and easily appends “campaign” data the URL I use in some of my (Blizzard Internet) specific advertising campaigns.

So, for my LinkedIn Pay-Per-Click campaign aimed at Hotels… and specifically, the ad where I offer a consultation plan would look like this:

This ad would send traffic to this landing page URL:
http://www.blizzardinternet.com/plans-and-pricing/website-marketing/consultation-plans/ [Read more...]

Filed Under: Analytics, Marketing Musts, PPC Pointers, Toolbox

The Ever Evolving AdWords Platform – Are you Keeping Up?

February 25, 2011 By Carrie Hill

It seems like every week there are new features and formats appearing in our AdWords accounts.

The innovation and ease of use is astounding – IF – you have the time to keep up and keep tweaking your campaigns. Just in the last 14 months we’ve seen approximately 39 new features posts at the Google AdWords blog – that’s a crazy amount of changes to keep up with – 2.75 changes per month!

New features aside, just making sure the basics are set up right can sometimes be challenging. The next month will see 2 new posts coming from me over at Search Engine Land. Part 1 of a 2-part series posts today about taking advantage of Ad Extensions available to all advertisers. Ad extensions were just ONE of the 39 new features mentioned above.

Here are just a few of the bigger developments that came with AdWords recently – are you taking advantage?

Probably the most significant and game changing update came in March of 2010 and has steadily become more and more effective for all advertisers. Remarketing is becoming the new darling of the SEM world. I advise EVERYONE to give it a try. You can learn more about Remarketing for Everyone with Google AdWords or sign up and receive a new eBook: Using Remarketing to Increase Display Ad Results I collaborated on from SearchMarketingNow and Aquisio. It offers a step by step setup guide that is a must-have for anyone new to remarketing.
Manage your AdWords campaign from your mobile phone - live and direct to you anywhere in the world with a cell signal since April 2010.
June, 2010 also brought us the ability to add Ad Sitelinks into all campaigns and adgroups. This gives the user 4-5 links to click inside every ad. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Marketing Musts, PPC Pointers, SEM

Free Email Marketing Template to Match Your Website

February 14, 2011 By Jill Trujillo

Have you been looking for a way to increase your revenue in 2011? When done correctly, email marketing is an affordable way to stay in touch with loyal customers and find new patrons.

We are big fans of Constant Contact, and until the end of the month they are offering a fabulous deal for new clients.

Sign-up for a new email marketing campaign with us using Constant Contact and receive a free email template to match your website!

(Sorry current Constant Contact users, this is only for the new people.)

The deal is only being offered until February 28th, so don’t wait.

If you are interested, give Brian a call at 888-840-5893 ext. 119 or fill out the form on this page and we will get in touch with you.

Filed Under: Marketing Musts

TripAdvisor and Google Places Changes Good News for Lodging Businesses

December 21, 2010 By Trent Blizzard

Back in November we reported that the change in Google Search Results is GREAT news for lodging businesses because it emphasizes the business’s website over the giant lodging directory.

This good news would be bad news for those giant directories like VRBO.com or TripAdvisor.

As a followup, in December, TripAdvisor acknowledged that its traffic from Google dropped by more than 10% since Google made the changes to its search results that emphasized the Google Places content. Curiously, this came on the heels of an October claim that “TripAdvisor benefits from Google’s new Place Search feature” which clearly proved to be mistaken.

We think the individual lodging websites are the ones that took that 10% back from TripAdvisor.

Meanwhile, TripAdvisor had pulled its reviews from Google Places. It used to be that TripAdvisor dominated the reviews at Google Places… now websites like Hotels.com, Yelp, Travel.Yahoo.com, Travelpost, etc. are more important for reviews.

This is probably pretty good news for most hotels and lodging operations for two reasons:

Many hotels had problems with TripAdvisor reviews and rankings and TripAdvisor DOMINATES the spots. By removing TripAdvisor reviews from Google Places, hotel operators have a bit of a clean slate.
Many hotels have been gaming TripAdvisor, but ignoring the multitude of other review spots. Now those other review locations will have a little more importance.

If you currently dominate TripAdvisor in your market… this is all BAD news!

Filed Under: Industry Spotlight, Marketing Musts, SEO, SEO Simplified