Integrate Your Google Webmaster Tool Data into Google Analytics

October 14, 2011 by 1BlizzAdmin

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 1BlizzAdmin

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 1BlizzAdmin

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 1BlizzAdmin

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

Best of Online Marketing from VRMA

April 26, 2011 by 1BlizzAdmin

This post began as a presentation given at two recent Vacation Rental Manager Association conferences.

The goal was to create a list of great online marketing examples to help other vacation rental managers plan their next great website or marketing effort.

So without further ado…

A Showcase of our favorite Online Marketing examples by VRMA Members

Your Website matters, especially your booking engine.

We looked at 10 vacation rental websites and found that 73.4% of the guest’s website interaction happened in the booking engine (measured by pageviews).

Certainly it is worth it for the average VR manager to pay close attention to the usability and overall effectiveness of their booking engine.

Next we used BlizzardTracker to determine that in March 2011, 68 vacation rental manager websites averaged a 36% bounce rate:

Of those websites, 29 were engaged in eCommerce with a .42% conversion rate on average. In other words, they got 1 online booking for every 233 visitors to their website.

Anything you can do to get that bounce rate down and that conversion rate UP is good.

Here is a sample sales funnel where you can see, for this particular VRM, a .68% conversion rate, with the sales funnels starting at the property page. (At bottom of the chart it shows a .63% funnel, but that is starting from the search results page, which was cropped from this image.) [Read more...]

Filed Under: Design, Facebook, Perfect By Design, Trophy Case

5 Ways to Improve Your AdWords CTR

March 29, 2011 by Danielle Rozga

Click-Through-Rate (CTR) in Google AdWords is important not just as a benchmark for how well your ads are doing in terms of clicks and impressions, but it’s one factor that may gain you better positioning and lower cost per click prices, and is a component of Quality Score.

Here are 5 ways to improve your CTR:

1) Theme, Theme, Theme!

Keep your ad groups tightly themed.

Group like keywords into one ad group. For instance, if users are searching “Napa Valley Vacation” and “Napa Valley Lodging,” keep those terms and their “siblings” in two separate ad groups – vacation and lodging.

Write your ad(s) to include those specific terms in the copy.

The specific search terms will then be bolded in your ad in the search results, catching the user’s eye and helping to increase CTR.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: PPC Pointers, SEM

Best Practices for AdWords Sitelink and Product Extensions

March 25, 2011 by 1BlizzAdmin

If you spend time in AdWords then you know that there are countless ways to enhance your Google ads.

Don’t get overwhelmed, one of the easiest (and most profitable) enchantments you should spend on time is AdWord’s Product and Sitelink Extensions.

Do it right from the start – learn the best practices for using the extensions in Carrie Hill’s newest Search Engine Land Article – How To & When To Use Product and Sitelink Ad Extensions.

While you are in learning mode, check out How and When to Use Google’s Ad Extensions and How to Increase Your Click Through Rate with Ad Sitelinks.

Filed Under: PPC Pointers