Many of us in the hospitality industry are not fortunate enough to have an endless marketing budget. In fact, the thought of paying $3,000 each month for pay-per-clicks (PPC) might be a scary thought to some. For travel websites that target highly competitive areas, it is not uncommon to spend anywhere from $3,000-$15,000+ a month per URL in PPC accounts alone. The question is, at what dollar amount is the point where you are putting more into the PPC accounts then you are taking home? And are you maximizing your ROI? The Blizzard ROI Tracker enables you to track PPC campaigns and their successes or failures, which helps answer these questions. Let’s look at an example, using a ficticious client in the hospitality market:
ANALYSIS:
This mock client is not maximizing revenue possibilities with the Winter Park Rental terms, and is wasting money on Rocky Mountain terms.
It is clear that the Google and Yahoo Search Marketing “Winter Park Rental” terms in the PPC accounts are generating most of the revenue. As such, those PPC groups deserve more allocation of the budget. In this instance, only 22 visitors from the Google PPC account generated over $2,800 in revenue. Allocating an extra $1,000 to the “Winter Park Rental” adgroups in the PPC accounts each month would be a worthy trial.
We also see that the broad “Rocky Mountain” terms, while getting traffic, are not producing online bookings. There is a very high bounce rate coming from the Rocky Mountain campaigns as well. Lowering the cost-per-click of these terms, or moving them into their own campaign with a lower budget, would not be uncalled for.
It is impossible to strategically reallocate the PPC budget without analysis similar to this. If you do not know what terms or groups are producing revenue or producing an action, how do you know if you are maximizing your ROI? You don’t.
ARE YOU MAKING MORE THAN YOU ARE SPENDING?
While Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc. has a service to track phone calls from lodging websites, we do not know how many people actually end up booking through a call. However, we can still get a general idea whether or not the cost for pay-per-clicks is worth the return. With the proper tracker, we can see how much you made vs. how much the pay-per-click accounts charged within a specific amount of time.
Are you maximizing your ROI in the pay per click accounts?
Katie White – Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.
