• New booking process
• Spotlight on all hotel locations
• Mobile/Tablet optimized site
• Designed for user-friendly experience

Read the official press release here.

Despite that hefty press tag, web usability experts have been reviewing this site and it seems to have fallen a little short of the mark that four seasons set. Specific flaws pointed out by Econsultancy seem to contradict every point that Four Seasons was going for.

• Booking engine not intuitive
• Lack of filters to narrow down hotel selection
• Poor mobile site
• Design without consideration for accessibility

In conclusion, while design is a very important aspect to retain user interest, it’s important to make sure design doesn’t get in the way of ROI.

After writing on the introduction of social extensions within Adwords, I wanted to test how effective these extensions might be in influencing social connections.  To test their effectiveness, I choose four clients running PPC campaign that also had a verified Google+ Business Page and activated the social extensions for one week to compare before-and-after results.

The four clients included two regional PPC accounts (Hotel Groups A and B), a domestic PPC account (Hotel A) and an international account (Hotel B), so all campaigns were unique in their keyword and targeting.

Social Extension Case Study Results:

The results demonstrated that when social extensions were shown, the click-through-rate (CTR) – or the number of times an ad was clicked divided by the number of times it was shown –  was much higher than when ads were shown without social extensions (compared with both historical data and during the test when social extensions weren’t available):

• Hotel A – 4.16% CTR without extensions vs. 6.70% CTR with extensions
• Hotel B – 2.86% CTR without extensions vs. 3.65% CTR with extensions
• Hotel Group A  - 0.31% CTR without extensions vs. 0.85% CTR with extensions
• Hotel Group B – 1.38% CTR without extensions vs. 2.46% CTR with extensions

CPC decreased among locally-targeted campaigns with social extensions, but increased moderately to significantly for non-local campaigns with social extensions.

For Hotel A, once the social extensions were activated, they saw a decrease in their ad’s average positioning along with an increase in click volume.

In summary, some takeaways from this case study suggest that:

• Social extensions adds another, personal level of trust and relevancy to ads
• It is still very important to create compelling ad copy to support social network references
• Google is not yet able to track conversions/revenue made by bookings that saw the social extension, but I’m predicting this feature will not be far behind.

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Contributed by
Jonas Pauliukonis, Sr. eStrategist

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When: Wednesday, February 15th, 2012 – 10:00 AM PST
Format: Presentation – 45 mins | Q&A – 15 mins
Click here to register

Social, Local and Mobile channels are evolving at a rapid rate. With over 300 million active Facebook users on mobile devices and 10 billion app downloads, many that encourage check-ins, SoLoMo is more important than ever before. This webinar will focus on the convergence of SoLoMo (social, local and mobile marketing), how to integrate these popular channels to maximize reach and ROI, and much more.

Panelists:
Meagan Hasenoehrl, Senior E-Strategist, Milestone
Bhawna Sharma, Senior E-Strategist and Organic Team Lead, Milestone

Moderator:
Mike Supple, Sr. Social Media Manager, Milestone

Click here to register

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1. Analyze competition: Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors is essential to any paid search marketing strategy. Once you begin to understand your competitors’ strategy, you can begin to make decisions and changes effectively. Your competition may adjust their paid search strategy in 2012 based on historical data. Right now is a perfect time to outline your strategy for 2012.
2. Refresh adcopy: Now that the holidays are over and December deals have come to an end, it is vital to suspend all holiday-related adcopy, review 2011 adcopies, and create enhanced strategies for 2012. Make sure to refresh any adcopy that has been running for over nine months or adcopy that is not performing well based on CTR. While reviewing the content of the adcopy make sure that the landing page is the most relevant to the ad. Below is an example of an adcopy that should have been suspended right after the holidays, but continues to run – how embarrassing!
   
3. Review and filter keywords: Along with auditing the campaign’s adcopy, it is important to analyze the campaign keywords and negative keywords. You never want to restrict qualified traffic so it is important to review the current list of negative keywords. When negative keywords are used correctly they can improve efficiency and decrease unqualified traffic. It is easy to overlook negative keywords but it is very important to audit them this month.

Conclusion

To keep a PPC campaign effective, it is imperative to evaluate it at major turning points. These turning points may be a change of season, change of calendar year, or just a change in the promotions, deals, or discounts being offered by the business. Stale PPC campaigns are ineffective and a waste of PPC budget. In addition, keeping an eye on what competitors are doing will help get the ball rolling and inspiration to refreshing the ads.

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Contributed by
Amanda Brinkerhoff, PPC Manager
Subina Desai, Sr. eStrategist

Whether you are just starting to set up social media profiles, are looking to optimize and enhance, or have mastered social media marketing, hoteliers and their hotels can benefit from learning ways to encourage their social media following to share published content .

We’ve written several articles regarding why social media presence is a must in today’s online marketing world (see Top 10 Social Media Trends in 2011), and several more on what you can share on these channels (see What to Post on Social Media Channels). Now, let’s dive into how you can encourage your following to click the +1, like, tweet it, or any other buttons for sharing your online content.

Here are 5 tips for encouraging your social media followers to share your content:

1. Understand your audience – this is key when developing a social media marketing plan. Before you can even decide on what content to write, what channels to use, or how to run your campaign, it’s important to know who you’re targeting and what kind of content will grab their attention.
2. Write relevant and engaging content – publishing content just to have activity on your social profile is not enough. Making sure your content is relevant to your audience and engaging will help increase your hotel’s social engagement factor. The higher social engagement is, the more your followers are willing to share your content and the faster your hotel’s brand awareness can spread.
3. Make it easy for them to share – integrating social media sharing tools such as Facebook Like, Google +1, and Tweet badges on your website or blog can help increase content sharing. Be careful not to place too many sharing badges on your site or blog as these can increase your site’s download time – which is an important factor to search ranking. Filter social channels carefully and only include social sharing badges for the channels your target audience frequents the most.
4. Create lists/checklists – people love checklists, especially ones that can help them with their traveling decisions. See bonus section below for a couple ideas.
5. Think outside the “hotel” marketing box - don’t focus only on sharing information about your hotel or your current special. Try sharing informative content that visitors may find useful when traveling to your destination as well.

Bonus: Here are several ideas of engaging content relevant to travel:

• Traveler’s checklists – how to prepare for travel, what to pack, etc.
• Travel deals – list of deals travelers may find useful while in your town, such as coupon to the nearest museum, state fare, etc.
• Traveler’s guide to your city – several things to do, places to eat, and top local picks to check out are just several things that a traveler may look for when visiting your area for the first time. Hint: some travelers are budget conscious, and providing free or low-cost things to do in your area can be very attractive.

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Contributed by Teresa Villaruz, Sr. Marketing Specialist, Milestone Internet Marketing

1. Improve conversion with enhanced analytics: Monitor on-page analytics to analyze detailed information about visitor behavior and interaction.
2. Personalization, localization, and socialization: Information and search results are becoming more and more personalized, localized, and socialized. Businesses should create robust and optimized Bing Local, Google Places, and Hyperlocal profiles.
3. Multi channel marketing & consistency in cross implementation: Multi-Channel Marketing will increase in 2012 with diversification in channels such as local, social, images, blogs, videos etc. It will be very crucial to cross implement what’s working and to have a consistent strategy.
4. Universal search saturation: A user’s ability to search for information through multiple channels and devices (mobile, blog, image, and social search) makes it that much more important for a business to be present in these avenues. Making integration of social sharing elements like Facebook Like and Google Plus buttons on your site critical.
5. Create a platform for content freshness: New, fresh and relevant content will be a major focus in 2012. Check your content strategy to ensure that new and fresh content is added on a regular basis.
6. Site quality, usability, & performance: Website and page quality have become very critical post-Google Panda updates. Important visibility factors will include site structure, download speed, readability, usability, and usefulness to searchers. Ensure your website is compatible with the latest technology and platforms.
7. Farewell to rankings: Page rank will become less and less important due to ranking becoming more personalized and not static. SERPs now vary depending on the user’s location, intent, search history, and social circles.
8. Organic growth in qualitative links: The importance of organic high quality links from authoritative sources such as .edu and .gov will continue to increase.
9. Search results saturation and management: Google and other search engines are providing ‘preview’ features in their search results such as rich snippets, user reviews, and Google Places page preview. Make sure your site looks good from these search result pages.
10. Online brand management: Consistent brand information such as URL, Name, Address, Phone Number (UNAP) — as well as online reviews management via review sites, directory listings, and social channels — will be an important factors for search impacting user behavior and decision making.

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Tweets to share this Post:

- “The top 10 Organic Search Trends in 2012. Grow Your Internet Presence! bit.ly/zPRj4I (via@milestonemktg)” [tweet this]

- “Great blog post on how to get your website discovered in 2012! bit.ly/zPRj4I (via@milestonemktg)” [tweet this]

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Contributed by Bhawna Sharma, Sr. eStrategist, Milestone Internet Marketing

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The idea was to build custom Facebook tabs around a “Hotel 1000 Scavenger Hunt”contest. Visitors to Hotel 1000′s Facebook page would land on a default tab explaining the contest and encouraging them to become fans to participate. Once a fan of Hotel 1000, they would see the scavenger hunt questions that all had to do with sections of the new website. For example, one question asked what time a guest wakes up in the promotion video hosted on their homepage. Other questions asked about different sections of the new website. If the “test taker” needed a hint, they could click on a link for each question that took them to the appropriate webpage where they could find the answer. Each click out of Facebook contained tracking metrics.

The Facebook Scavenger Hunt was well received by the Hotel 1000 Facebook fans and was a fun way for fans to learn about the new site. After the eight-week promotion ended, we analyzed the data. Results are shown below.

• 16% increase in Facebook fans (3x the average daily fan growth vs the previous eight weeks)
• 30% increase in traffic to the website from Facebook (vs the previous eight weeks)
• 31% increase in daily page engagement in the month after the contest was completed (compared to the month prior to the contest)
• 30% increase in daily total reach in the month after the contest was completed (compared to the month prior to the contest)
• The amount of daily views to the promotional video hosted on the Hotel 1000 homepage saw a 9x spike during the launch of the Facebook contest.
  

In addition, every entrant provided an email address for use in future direct marketing campaigns. The results of this Hotel 1000 test case show that there are effective, creative, and engaging ways to announce significant brand changes and updates through social media strategies.

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Contributed by Keith DeVey, Social Media Manager, Milestone Internet Marketing

1. Connect with your audience: Get closer to your customers and make your hotel more personal using circles to target specific groups for announcements and offers
   1. Ability to separate weekday versus weekend guests, business versus leisure guests, family versus couples, and so on.
   2. Hangout with your guests real time through video conference in Google+ Hangout.
   3. Connect to more guests by adding the Google+ badge to your website
      
   4. Signing your posts allow guests to meet the people behind the hotel
      
2. Videos: Access videos to hang out with guests real time, create webinar, and those offered by companies you follow.

Need video ideas? Recipes from the Chef and concierge tips about local attractions to see in the city are just a couple great examples


3. Visibility: Gain more relevancy for your page through cross-channel integration by creating videos, content, web pages, and images for guests and sharing on your Google+
4. Data: Google+ gives you invaluable information about your audience. Connect your webmaster and adwords accounts to your profile to gain valuable information showing the age, gender, and geo-location of those in your circles. You can also see content that guests have shared, reposted, and +’d most often through Google Ripple. Using information provided through your Google+ account can:
   1. Allows you to target marketing campaigns to specific guests in your circles
   2. Provide knowledge on what guests want to use for specials, packages and valuable information
5. Check-Ins: Stronger integration between Google+ and Google Places thanks to check-in offers now available through Google Places
   1. Hoteliers can offer specials for those who check in through Google Places.
   2. Guest’s circles will see the check in via Google+

For additional tips and examples be sure to check out Milestone’s Google+ business page here: https://plus.google.com/114497953800601905093

To start creating your hotel’s Google + business profile, login to your personal Google+ account and click “Create a Google+ page”.

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Contributed by
Manisha Kumar, Director of Client Services
Meagan Hasennoehrl, Sr. eStrategist

Google has always placed importance in the freshness of websites and its content, but the recent Google caffeine update has propelled this freshness factor into the spotlight. Affecting about 35% of all searches, Google Caffeine update and Google Panda updates are definitely two biggest changes that happened in 2011. (If you have not had a chance to learn about the Google Panda update, you can read all about it here http://blog.milestoneinternet.com/industry-news/google-panda-update/ )

We know it is important, but what exactly is “Freshness Factor”? There are many components to a website’s Freshness Factor, but it all boils down to these top factors: date of the last update, frequency of updates, quality and quantity of updates, and what was updated. Below are some hotel-relevant ideas that can help improve your site’s Freshness Factor.

Last Minute Deals Offers

The booking window has become shorter and shorter with the proliferation of technology and gadgets. Some industry studies showed same day and last minute booking surged up 28% in 2011; this growth is looking to continue in 2012 and onward (Dhiren Fonseca, co-president of Expedia’s Partner Services Group, Dec 2011). If we learned anything from the traveler’s booking behavior in 2011, it would be that people love getting great last-minute deals. Due to this fact, searching for last minute deals and offers is considered a “hot topic” and may be leveraged with frequent updates. Incorporating last minute deals into the website allows you to make frequent and relevant updates as well as satisfying traveler’s booking behavior.

Social Channel Integration

The proliferation of smart phones and mobile devices also increased the amount of time people spend connecting on social media channels and using hyperlocal applications. This technology is how most people choose to receive news updates, share interests, as well as connect with their network. By integrating fresh content into social channels you will be leveraging not only the content’s ‘freshness factor’ but also its ‘social engagement’ factor.

Fresh content on social channels increases the visibility of your content as well as the possibility to make your posts go viral. Content shared on social channels creates the ability for users to share content with family, friends, and social networks in several forms in a very short period of time.

Event Calendar

An event calendar is another great way to increase freshness on your website. Event calendars are especially effective for hoteliers because guests are always looking for things to do in your hotel’s local area, including local attractions and events: romantic getaways, family vacations, reunions, weddings, conventions, work, and etc. Because events and places often times change and are time sensitive, the best way to capture and leverage these for fresh content is adding an event calendar blog. Things like concerts, conventions, local holiday events, etc. are examples of great event calendar blog entries.

Blog and Timely News-

Local news and current events are often times very relevant pieces of information travelers search for when visiting a particular destination. Updating your site with current local news is also a great way to add fresh content. For example, instead of blogging about a new hotel promotion once a week, the blogger can really get creative and blog about topics that matter in their own neighborhood. For example, “XYZ” restaurant celebrating 30 years in business, “Highway 1 is closed due to extreme bad weather, travelers driving beware”, etc. These topics are great for link baiting as well as encouraging website visitors to share your content and URL!

Content freshness will continue to be an important factor in SEO, but it is important to remember that adding content to the site just for the sake of adding freshness is not a good strategy as quality and relevancy of the content are still important factors. In short, focus on creative ways to add relevant, quality, fresh content without congesting your website.

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Contributed by:
Chad Tsang, Sr. eStrategist
John Pol, Sr. eStrategist

Our clients simply had awesome PPC results in 2011; higher click volumes and click-through-rates (CTR), lower costs, and better positioning on the search engine pages. However, it was the clients who tested some of our more advanced strategies and embraced new opportunities that truly experienced phenomenal results:

Two Methods to Approach Increasing ROI

Oftentimes, advertisers neglect the impact of rising costs on the bottom line. To achieve phenomenal results – creative marketers should be able to both increase revenue while decreasing cost. So how did we find those low-cost, high-value opportunities?

Look Beyond Paid Search Channels

• Search engines do their best to reward a website that provides users with their ideal experience. If a keyword is successfully driving traffic to your organic website, chances are it would also be relevant for your PPC campaign.
• Client A found more of their website traffic coming from keywords containing “downtown” and has had great success with a “downtown” ad group.

Improve Your Targeting

• Don’t create a one-size-fits-all campaign – the more specific you can become in your targeting (i.e. geography, device, language, etc.) the better.
• Client B runs separate campaigns for English, Spanish, and Portuguese speakers as well as different campaigns for computers, tablets devices, and mobile devices.

Focus on Your MVPs

Keywords, ad groups, and campaign aren’t created equal, so don’t treat them as such.

• Identify the most profitable keywords/ad groups/campaign (not just the highest clicks, CTR, etc.) and redirect funds to ensure your top performers are getting the best exposure possible.
• If you examine your campaigns, you’ll probably find that 80% of your revenue is coming from 20% of the keywords. If keywords haven’t performed well historically, chances are they never will. Consider a major “detox” of your PPC campaigns to start 2012.

By looking beyond paid search, refining current campaign targeting, and focusing on the “star” keywords as opposed to trying to improve the 80% of poor performers, any PPC campaign can have a successful 2012. For some additional reading and PPC strategy resources, please also visit: the Top 5 Successful 2011 PPC Strategies and Top 10 Best Practices for Optimizing PPC Campaigns

The views and opinions presented are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the company. Any changes to a pay-per-click campaign should be done only after careful research and analysis – any changes made to an account are at the discretion of the advertiser and the authors cannot be held liable for the results of any modification.

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Contributed by
Jonas Pauliukonis, Sr. eStrategist and
David Addison, eStrategist