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:

Is your Travel Marketing Adjusting to Falling Gas Prices?

June 30, 2011 By Carrie Hill

Pink Elvis car

Gas prices are finally dropping, locally we’ve seen about a $.20 decrease in the last few weeks. Nationally the consumer confidence that gas prices will continue to drop is at a 10-week high. Decreasing gas prices mean more travelers willing to take that road trip, either for the long weekend or the week-long family vacation. Are you taking advantage and marketing to your drive-to market?

Segmentation of your marketing strategy is a proven method for making potential guests feel like they’re being spoken to directly, as opposed to lumped in with the other 10,000 people you’re marketing week-long, fly-in deals around.

Drive to marketing can generally yield shorter, but much more frequent stays. Keep in mind that someone who can come spend 4 to 5 days at least two to three times a year is going to make your business more money than that one family that came for 6 or 7 nights. They’re generally easier to market to, and tend to be louder brand advocates in your social networks.

Getting ready for some drive-to marketing:

Put together an editorial calendar that features events and happenings that will attract your drive to market
Figure out who they are. Use Google Analytics and Google Maps to figure out the radius of your drive to market, generally a 4-hour or less drive in every direction.
Figure out the towns and cities that are within that radius and make a note of those towns and/or zip codes
Find those towns and zip codes in your Analytics, which ones make you the most money?
Use your list of towns and zip codes to do a few things to get ready to market:

- Pull those towns and/or zip codes out of your email marketing list into a new “drive to” group
- Find the major online and offline publications that exist within your drive to market
- Create Landing Pages that offer deals to those major drive-to markets. Make them personalized to your visitor’s location like Domain.com/Raleigh or Domain.com/VirginaBeach

Now you can start marketing

List your major cities and see about buying advertising in major publications (online and offline) that will drive visitors to your location-specific landing pages
Run Paid Advertising campaigns in Adwords, AdCenter, and Facebook that target your drive-to radius with keywords like “Long Weekend vacations” and such.
Send out email blasts to each major city area that offers special drive-to deals and lands users on their local landing page
Use your local Facebook network to “get the word out”
CONSIDER using a local deal site like LivingSocial or Groupon. There are A LOT of downfalls to this tactic, so do your homework carefully.

Filed Under: How To: Tips & Tools

How Much Content Should I Have on My Homepage – Matt Cutts Weighs In

June 8, 2011 By Carrie Hill

For those of you who don’t know, Matt Cutts is the head of the Web Spam team at Google, and does a lot of liaison work with the Webmaster/SEO community. He’s definitely worth listening to when it comes to deciding what will and will not work in Google.

Today’s video from Matt goes over how much content you should have on your homepage. He says “I wouldn’t have 20MB of content -that’s too much.” He goes on to say that the content on your homepage is how Googlebot determines what your page is about, and then determines what keywords you’ll rank for. This is especially vital for those that might have split homepages or landing pages….Vacation Rental & Real Estate – or messages about activities conflicting with your homepage content and calls to action about what your business does to make money.

Check out the video below and do a word and theme check on your homepage, what do you think? Too much or too little?

Filed Under: How To: Tips & Tools, SEO

AirFareWatchdog – Get Alerts to Find the Best Deals to Your Destination

May 19, 2011 By Carrie Hill

As an online marketer, we look for different targeting and segmentation tactics that are designed to increase reach and conversion rates.

A very effective and flexible tactic we’re testing these days is targeting Vacation Rental & Hotel deals to markets that offer inexpensive airline fares into the destination we’re marketing.

The hardest part of this tactic is figuring out what airlines are running the best rates and when. It can be time-consuming to search different deal sites. We set out to look for a way to bring the deals to you without much work.

We found help in the form of a website that watches for deals that coincide with trips and destinations. It’ll take you about 5 minutes to sign up for alerts from Airfarewatchdog.com!

Not only can you get tips on flights from SPECIFIC markets, you can subscribe to “Arrival City Fare Alerts” for our local airports. This way you’ll get notified every time airfare goes on sale TO you, regardless of the flight’s city of origin.

You can set the frequency of alerts to your email, and can even suspend alerts if you’re to busy to deal with promoting them, or on vacation and want to limit email to your inbox.

Some things you can do with location specific deals:

Target PPC ads to the departure city.
Send an email blast to subscribers who are located near and around the targeted departure city.
Buy ads in online newspapers and magazines that serve that particular area.
You CAN buy print advertising, but it’s expensive and usually takes some time to set up and get running. You need to be flexible and quick to get the targeting and ads set up.

Check out the configuration below and sign up for alerts that will help you build deals and market them to specific locations quickly.

Filed Under: How To: Tips & Tools, SEM, Toolbox

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

Tools to Secure Your Content from Scrapers and Stealers

April 27, 2011 By Trent Blizzard

There are a number of tools out there to help protect your website and its content from:

Screen Scrapers who are grabbing your content and using it on their website.
Unauthorized use of your text or photos.
Competitors who are stealing your content and using it on their websites.

Copyscape will search for copies of your pages on the web. It is for plagiarism checking and searching for duplicate content. You can just do some on-the-fly searching by putting in your website URLs. Or, you can sign up for their CopySentry program which for about $.25 cents per page and it will do a weekly search of the internet and notify you of new instances of your copy being stolen.

Photos are a harder nut to crack.

Tineye is a tool that will help you find images on the internet that are the same as or very similar to yours. It is far from perfect though.

Watermarking your images is a great way to start protecting them. [Read more...]

Filed Under: How To: Tips & Tools, Toolbox

Email Marketing Basics – Cleaning Your List

May 19, 2010 By Carrie Hill

Recently the Blizzard office has moved to Constant Contact as our Email Marketing service of choice. They have a great platform, easy to use features, and the ability for clients and project managers and experts to collaborate on all blasts to send more solid messages to subscribers.

With these great features comes a few frustrations. We have run into a few instances of lists being a bit “dirty” and ending up with a few too many spam reports according to Constant Contact’s rules.

Constant Contact has a loose rule of around 1 per 100 email addresses in any particular send, we have seen lists closed down for less than that. Constant Contact has pretty standard spam rules, and whether you’re working with them or MailChimp, VerticalResponse, or iContact, you’ll probably have the same issues if you’re working with an old list or one you’re not sure about the origin of.

If your list is flagged as spam, these companies require you to show proof of subscription for a percentage of the list. Every person I’ve talked to at Constant Contact has given a different percentage, so if this does happen, you’re going to hope you get someone in a good mood on the phone when you call for your list review.

We have been struggling with a way to clean up these lists BEFORE we load them into Constant Contact, and with trial and error we’ve come up with a pretty successful way to ensure our lists are clean and less likely to raise red flags with your Email Marketing provider.

Step 1:

Make sure the subscriber list is as updated as it can be in the CURRENT email marketing program and also in Constant Contact

Step 2:

Draft a blast in the CURRENT program thanking them for participating and asking them to reconfirm their desire to receive messaging from the client. Ask them to “click here to Update subscription” or “Click here to Unsubscribe” within that email with big easy to read buttons. Anyone who wants to update their subscription will be taken to Constant Contact to do so, where we’ve already uploaded their information and they just need to update and/or confirm it.

Anyone who wishes to unsubscribe will do so within the CURRENT email marketing program that doesn’t have as strict rules when it comes to spam reporting.

Step 3:

Once we have a satisfactory open rate, the list of unsubscribers can be exported from the CURRENT email marketing program and then applied against the list in Constant Contact. Anyone who wishes to stay will have already updated their information in Constant Contact.

I imagine we’ll get an open rate of around 20 to 30%. That 20-30% could make or break our list when it comes to our first send with Constant Contact.

Recently the Blizzard office has partnered with Constant Contact as our Email Marketing service of choice. They have a great platform, easy to use features, and the ability for clients, project managers and experts to collaborate on all blasts to send frequent, solid messages to subscribers.

Constant Contact has a loose rule of around 1 per 100 email addresses in any particular send, we have seen lists closed down for less than that. Constant Contact has pretty standard spam rules, and whether you’re working with them, MailChimp, VerticalResponse, or iContact, you’ll probably have the same issues if you’re working with an old list or one you’re not sure about the origin of.

We have been looking for a solution to clean up these lists BEFORE we load them into Constant Contact, and with trial and error we’ve come up with a pretty successful way to ensure our lists are clean and less likely to raise red flags with your email marketing provider.

Step 1:

Make sure the subscriber list is as updated as it can be in the CURRENT email marketing program and also in Constant Contact.

Step 2:

Draft a blast in the CURRENT program thanking them for participating and asking them to reconfirm their desire to receive messaging from the client. Ask them to “Click Here to Update Subscription” or “Click Here to Unsubscribe” within that email with big easy to read buttons. Anyone who wants to update their subscription will be taken to Constant Contact to do so, where we’ve already uploaded their information and they just need to update and/or confirm it.
Anyone who wishes to unsubscribe will do so within the CURRENT email marketing program that doesn’t have as strict rules when it comes to spam reporting.

Step 3:

Once we have a satisfactory open rate, the list of unsubscribers can be exported from the CURRENT email marketing program and then applied against the list in Constant Contact. Anyone who wishes to stay will have already updated their information in Constant Contact.

I imagine we’ll get an open rate of around 20 to 30%. That 20-30% could make or break our list when it comes to our first send with Constant Contact. When the line between good and bad is blurry, we need all the help we can get to make sure we’re doing things to help our marketing, not hinder it.

Benefits to Having a Clean Email Marketing List

You’re only marketing to those who WANT to hear from you, and not wasting time on those who don’t.
You can ask for more information as you clean your list, such as city and state, family or romance, etc. This tactic can help you segment your list. A segmented list lets you speak to your potential and past guests on a more personal level. For example, you can send specials and packages designed for drive-to or fly-to guests based on where they live.
You wont get in trouble with the email marketing programs – which wastes a lot of time trying to FIX, instead of spending that time making money.

Learn More about Email Marketing!

Email Marketing Basics: Designing Blasts that Convert
Tuesday, June 1st, 11 AM MDT
Learn tips and techniques to simplify your email marketing design and increase your click-throughs and conversion rates.
Sponsored by Mouse On House

Email Marketing Basics: Segmentation and Targeting Your Email Lists
Tuesday, June 8th, 11 AM MDT
Learn how to segment and target your email lists for better conversion rates.

Need help getting your email marketing program off the ground? Blizzard has a new plan that’s designed just for you. Call or email our team today for more information!

Filed Under: How To: Tips & Tools, SEM Tagged With: email marketing