Get Facebook KPI’s with AllFacebookStats.com

August 16, 2011 By Jill Trujillo

Now that you have a flipp’n sweet Facebook page for your lodging website, how do you measure its success?

One tool that will give you great insights is AllFacebookStats.com.

AllFacebookStats.com is an easy way to get KPI’s about your page, benchmark yourself against your competitors and get insights into your fans.

This tool is really easy to setup and you add up to 3 Facebook pages for free.

Here are just a few of the extensive reports that AllFacebookStats.com offers:

Statistics and distribution to understand your fan base.
Performance analysis of different types of content like posts, photos and status updates.
A customizable dashboard so you can easily see that data that is most important to you.

If you like things to be done for you, then you will also enjoy the automatic and customized reporting from AllFacebookStats.com.

Here are a couple of my favorite graphs:

Give it a try – it’s free!

Filed Under: Facebook, Toolbox

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

Diigo: The Ultimate Bookmarking and Sharing Tool for Small Teams

May 17, 2011 By Trent Blizzard

Diigo is an exciting tool for small teams that want to share bookmarks and collaborate.

Each user can not only bookmark pages on the web that interest them, they can highlight text, add sticky notes, and share with their group. You can also tag each post to search it easier.

While lots of bookmarking software will let you share with anyone, or keep it private, very few are good at letting you create a private group where each member can share and collaborate with other members. Additionally, if you want you can use the group widgets to automatically post your latest Diigo content into your website.

Filed Under: Toolbox

Email Center Pro Email Management and Collaboration

May 16, 2011 By Trent Blizzard

Are you trying to use a team to manage in-bound and out-bound emails? One quick and easy solution worth investigating is Email Center Pro which will let you turn an email account in a team account. Email Center Pro has lots of features and is worth investigating. The cost is $19.19 per month per user.

Emails can be assigned to individual account members through an email management dashboard.

Communicate with your team for better customer service: Add internal notes to an email conversation for easy reference

Full Email Activity Analysis reporting with the following reports:

Who is handling the most emails?
Measurements and charts of overall email traffic
Individual user activity and average response time

While this solution may not be right for everyone, it is certainly with checking out for the small reservation departments that characterize many lodging businesses.

Filed Under: Toolbox

Google URL Shortener for Your Long URLs

May 11, 2011 By Trent Blizzard

Now that you are making ridiculously long URLs with Google’s URL Builder you may have a new problem: those long URLs look stupid in many places…

If you want to make a quick short version, go to the Google URL Shortener and turn this link:

http://www.blizzardinternet.com/plans-and-pricing/website-marketing/consultation-plans/?utm_source=LinkedIn&utm_medium=cpc&utm_
content=Consultation%2BPlan&utm_campaign=Hotel

into

this link: http://goo.gl/J6xpw [Read more...]

Filed Under: Analytics, SEM, 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: