Our first post in this series provided an overview of how guests find and book a lodging property, based on research from WIHP, a hotel marketing agency. The four step process assumes the future guest has selected a destination area and then proceeds through the steps of (1) discovery of a particular property, (2) seeking information about the property to see if it is a good prospect (the zero moment of truth), (3) the guest on your website (the first moment of truth), and (4) the guest at your property (the second moment of truth). Our second post discussed the process by which a guest “discovers” (or learns of) your property as a possible place to stay.

Our topic today, then, is the “Zero Moment of Truth,” or the time when the guest has decided on a location to visit, has learned of your property as a possible place to stay, but has not yet seen your website, and wants to find out more about your property.

Another 7.3% seek information from a review site (such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, etc.). After that the numbers fall off radically for travel guides (3%) and social media sites (0.8%). Just a side note – if you’re counting on your social media sites (Facebook, Google Plus, etc.) to provide the information, at the current time you’re reaching less than 1% of those who want to find you.

We would ordinarily expect Google to be the most commonly used search engine, so we won’t be surprised to find that it is. Although many articles remind us not to forget Yahoo, Bing, and others, and other articles talk about Google losing market share at the expense of Bing, in particular, these statistics don’t match up with the results of WIHP’s research. They found that 89.8% of searches leading to a property’s website came from Google, while Yahoo and Bing brought 4% and 3.6%, respectively.

Before booking, the average guest will have viewed 10 different hotel websites over 6 days, and will have visited the one they ultimately choose at least 3-4 times. This is where your competition truly exists. Your goal, at this point, is to be one of the sites (perhaps the top site) the guest will consider, and to get them to visit your website.

We talked about how to help yourself be found on TripAdvisor in our previous post, and much the same advice would apply to other review sites (though no others provide the exposure in the lodging market that TripAdvisor does). Consequently, our focus here should be on search engines – particularly Google – and map sites.

How do guests find information through search engines?

Try it yourself. What search terms would a guest, knowing the location and the name of your inn, use to search? If you’re having trouble, pick a place you’d like to travel, find the name of a property there, and try to find out more about the property using your favorite search engine. Then use those search terms for your own property and location.

What do you see in the results? In the case of our Freeport Maine bed and breakfast (while signed in to Google, which may affect the results), I see our website, then our TripAdvisor reviews, then a couple of B&B directories, a news article we are mentioned in, etc. Verify these results while logged out of Google. They may also differ by your location, so you may want to have someone repeat the search using a different location.

One thing you’ll see in all (or nearly all) the search results is a description of the page the result will link to. Although Google, at least, reserves the right to re-write the description, you can “help” by putting a well-written description META tag in the head section of a page. If your description provides an accurate summary of the content of the page, it may well be the description that is used in the search results.

Bear in mind that just because your own website is the first result in the search results, that does not necessarily mean your guests will click on it first! They may choose one of the B&B directories, TripAdvisor, or something else. Our goal is to provide information for our future guests in all of these sources, so they’ll find it regardless of where they look.

Getting found on search engines (search engine optimization or SEO) is a topic that would make an extensive series in its own right. Fundamentally it breaks down into on-page SEO (signals on the page that help the search engine determine how to index the content), and ongoing SEO efforts (such as building incoming links to your website, dealing with local listings, maps, etc.). We are planning to break out this topic, and part of the next post in this series (on the First Moment of Truth) relating to your website, itself, into a short series of its own. Consequently we’ll just hit some of the high points here. Bear in mind that our brief discussion of SEO is not meant to say it is not important. Just the contrary. It is so important that it deserves a more complete treatment than we can include in this post.

In an excellent series entitled “The Smarter Innkeeper”, Acorn Internet Services has devoted two of the three topics to on-page SEO and ongoing SEO (the third point is on the web design itself, which we cover in our next post). In each post is a checklist of tasks you can perform (or have done for you) to make your website more easily found by the search engines and to make it more likely to be indexed for the relevant search terms. The checklists are written as something you might ask your web designer or SEO firm, to be sure they don’t miss anything, but they will do very nicely as a list of the tasks you should plan to perform, as well.

Both of the two SEO checklists make reference to creating and maintaining local listings. In addition to any local listings sites, such as Chambers of Commerce, innkeeping associations, area marketing groups, etc., the search engines have their own local listings pages. Properly setting up and maintaining these pages will help you be found – especially on the mapping websites.

What about maps?

If you have followed the steps on the SEO checklists, and your local setup is correct, you do want to be sure your location is correctly specified on mapping sites. Most will allow you to claim your listing (you did that long ago, didn’t you?), then to edit the location if it is not correct. Again, most will allow you to specify business name, phone, website URL, etc., as well as other details, much as the local sites will. Keep in mind that the search engines have a specific format for business names, addresses and telephone numbers, so you want to follow those formats and keep the information the same from place to place. If the information is not identical (for example, saying “B&B” in one location and “Bed and Breakfast” in another), you run the risk that a search engine (which is only a computer, after all) will think they are two different businesses.

When your guest searches on a map, it is likely that they want to know how close (meaning how convenient) you are to a particular location. To help them out, tell them how close you are to various attractions. There is no substitute for making it easy for the guest to find the information they are seeking!

If we’ve done all these things, we’ve made it easy for the prospective guest to learn more about our property before they come to our website. In fact, if we’ve done our job well, we have whetted their appetite to see our website! We’ll talk about what happens on the website in our next post.

The Maine Innkeepers Association Educational Seminar for April, 2011, was held on April, 28, 2011, and the subject was Social Media – Beyond the Basics. We gave a brief presentation on Facebook: Beyond the Basics, emphasizing engagement and mentioning, to a lesser extent, optimization and measurement. Here is the video (transcript below):

Transcript:

Hello, this is Scott from AboutTheInn.com. This is a short presentation from on using Facebook, that’s beyond the basics from an event on Social Media put on by the Maine Innkeepers Association that was held on April 27, 2011.

So as we move beyond the basics of Facebook, we’ll be focusing on three areas. The areas will be engagement, to some extent optimization and measurement of the progress, but primarily we’ll be focusing on engagement. We’ll do mostly Facebook, a little bit on Twitter, and to some extent these things all apply to LinkedIn. They also apply to other things where you may find your customers, but most of the principles are uniform – there are some differences and we’ll talk about those as we go along.

So first of all we need to consider just what the goal is. Often times we get absorbed in Facebook or Twitter, or whatever your platform of choice may be, and we think about how we’re going to do it, and how we’re going to find time to do it all, and we really don’t think about what we’re really trying to accomplish. So much as I hate the terminology ‘heads in beds’, that is the bottom line, because when we sell rooms, for lodging properties, that’s how we pay the bills, no matter how we want to characterize it. So we need to consider whether or not we have a plan, and the plan should include engaging guests and then some measurable objectives, as well.

So as we consider those things, the first thing to consider is “Where are our guests?” We know that by sheer numbers, they’re on Facebook, they’re on Twitter, they may be following our Blog, they may be on LinkedIn, they may be on a number of others, including FourSquare, Orcut, Gowalla, or any of a number of others. Certainly you need to focus on any networks where the majority of your guests can be found, and if there are other networks where you think there are a significant number of potential guests, then certainly you need to be present there, as well.

So remember that what we’re really trying to do is to create relationships. You’re trying to use social media to make friends for your lodging property. We’re not talking about just selling, or the hard sell, but we’re looking at creating relationships in the places where the guests are.

The first step, from a Facebook point of view, is to create engagement through your custom welcome page. You can create a custom welcome page – one that is very attractive – usually modeled on your web site, and with attractive graphics and text that draws the user in, and also, as in the example here, you can offer specials and extras for those who ‘Like’ you – things that are not available to everyone. This builds a relationship and makes the user feel that they have an opportunity for something special.

Next add photos and videos – things that tell a story. We had an interesting thing happen at a recent innkeeping show, where one of the keynote speakers mentioned that he was going to use one of our posts as an illustration of telling a story. In this case it was in less than 140 characters. We were in the habit of tweeting our breakfast menu. People liked it, and when we stopped doing it, they got in touch and asked, “What’s for breakfast?” One day we had a young couple get engaged at the inn, so at breakfast we tweeted that the “Cute young couple got engaged last night” and what they were having for breakfast. Story told. People were engaged with it, and passed that tweet around more widely than would have otherwise happened.

Another way to do it is to ask questions. Now, in Twitter you can ask questions and sometimes you get no response other than the echo of your own voice. In Facebook you can ask questions, in the conventional sense, but you also have the ability to use a Facebook Question, which allows you to create a multiple choice question, and you can limit the responses to those you define, or you can allow others to suggest new answers. We’ve done a number of things with this. Sometimes we’re earnestly trying to get feedback from our guests, which is certainly a good thing. For example, we asked them if they preferred sweet dishes for breakfast or savory dishes, and we got some interesting information from that. We also asked them what kind of sweet dishes they like: pancakes or waffles or more involved things, or just what they like. We allowed them to add their own choices and we saw answers that included things we hadn’t even considered. You learn a lot of interesting things by asking questions.

Another thing you can do to create some interaction is to feed your blog to your page, because a lot of your Facebook followers are not necessarily following your blog – unless you feed it to the Facebook page, and Facebook, as a page, is like a big, hungry animal, just waiting to be served. So post your blog to your Facebook group so they can all keep up with your news. And, to encourage interaction, even in your blog you may choose to ask questions or try to get feedback directly, there.

You can also offer specials just to Facebook followers, as was alluded to when we discussed the custom welcome page. You can also sell gift certificates directly from your Facebook page, there is an application that will allow you to do that, or you can create an application, depending on your booking engine, to allow bookings directly from your Facebook page.

From the point of view of optimization, you definitely want to optimize your Facebook page, both your profile information and the business description information available to you. Facebook is its own search engine, so you want to use terminology that your guest or potential guests will be using as they try to find lodging in your area. So just as you would do this on a web page, you not only want to create your vanity URL, but you also want to think of profile attributes as something people might search on.

You’ll also want to be create when you select the name of your page. Think about branded names, like the name of your property, but also non-branded or descriptive names. For a hardware related page, called “Black & Decker”, and that would be interesting if you’re into tools, but a site called “Women with Tools” might get more attention.

Similarly, Siteman Cancer Center started with only a couple of hundred fans, and is now up to a couple of thousand, but compare that to the page “Cancer Sucks”, with 48,000 fans and lots of engagement. Both are basically information and support pages, but there is a big difference. That isn’t a recommendation that you copy this approach, but that you consider the concept of an edgy name that people can identify with. Something to think about.

Be non-commercial in your commercial approach. What I mean is, don’t just try to sell things. It’s been said many times, and I certainly wholeheartedly agree, that, in many ways, social media is like a cocktail party, or a conversation among friends. You carry on a conversation, you don’t just try to sell stuff. You know perfectly well that if you go to a party and you meet, to pick on an industry, an insurance salesman, and his entire conversation at the party is to try to get you to make an appointment or to buy insurance, you aren’t going to enjoy his company unless you desperately need insurance. But if that same salesman makes witty, interesting conversation, perhaps even giving you some helpful information, you may end up making that appointment. That’s the point of view that most people expect in the social media world, so it becomes an important thing.

So think of things to talk about that appeal to large segments of people. In our industry you might say, I need a vacation – well, who doesn’t? Or maybe it’s coffee… Whatever, but keep it on topic. Remember, our focus is heads in beds, but by building relationships. Now there’s nothing wrong with the occasional personal reflection, story or comment, if you’ve established your credibility by being a helpful, knowledgeable, source. People find that interesting and genuine. The problem comes when you show that you aren’t able to separate your personal “persona” from your business accounts. People don’t want to follow you.

Measure your results. In the Facebook world this isn’t just a “check your Google Analytics” comment. In Facebook there is a thing called Facebook Insights. To get to it, go to “Edit Page” and in the left column, click on Insights. There you’ll see Users and a summary and graph and Interactions and another summary and graph. Both also provide more details, and you can view the latest day, week, month, etc. This gives you a good idea of how much you are engaging people, and which posts were the most effective to encourage interaction.

Thanks for listening. I hope you find this useful, and that you’ll continue encouraging engagement among your social networks.

From conversations with innkeepers at some recent conferences, we know that innkeepers understand that web analytics are important, and they are searching for ways to use and understand them, but are not finding that to be an easy task.

We were looking at tools that provided some additional capabilities for Google Analytics, and came across GA Evolution, and think it may help some innkeepers get useful results, without overwhelming amounts of raw data. GA Evolution is not intended to provide all the information in Google Analytics. For example, it provides no information on where your visitors came from, time on site, etc. However, it does a really nice job of slicing and dicing the information about visits, page views, bounce rate, etc., while remaining easy to use.

Getting Started

GA Evolution Metrics

In order to get started with Evolution, you’ll need to have a Google Analytics account, and it must already be collecting data on your website (that is, it must have been installed for a month or more, or Evolution won’t have much to do). If you haven’t yet set up Google Analytics, you’ll find an overview of the steps needed to set up Google Analytics in our article providing an overview of analytics. Once it is active, you can set up Evolution, and then all you need is a month or more of statistics-gathering by Google.

If you have a GA account, log in to the account and authorize Evolution to access your GA data. If you have multiple sites and/or profiles in GA, you can select the one to use, then choose the data to graph and away you go with nice, simple graphs of only the information you want to see!

Getting the Data

GA Evolution Data

Once at the GA Evolution site, and logged in, select the domain or domains (your website and your blog, for instance) to view, and check the boxes for the columns to display. Evolution allows the most common data points – Visits, Unique Page Views, and Bounce Rate – and also allows additional columns for Transactions, Quantity, eCommerce Conversions and CI (Confidence Interval or margin of error). You can add columns for your defined Goals, if you like. Select a date range, and if you would rather see data weekly instead of monthly, check that box.

When you’re ready, click the “Get Data” button, and a chart appears below, with columns for each selected item. If you used more than one domain, there will be a separate table of data for each.

Getting a Graph

GA Evolution Graph

To graph a particular column, simply click the column header. If you want to see your Visits over time, click the Visits column and the graph will appear above the data table. If you are using more than one domain, there will be multiple lines on the graph, one for each domain, measuring the same column information. If you click another column it is not added to the graph, but the existing graph is replaced with a new one for the new column. Hovering your mouse over a point on the graph gives information about the value at that point.

Google Analytics is  a free tool, though the author of it has a PayPal button on the site in case you would like to support his work with a donation. Try it, and see if you find it useful.

Let us know how it worked for you!

If you’re like me, you’ve used Google Analytics for quite some time, and find the wealth of information quite useful. One area that has always been a bit frustrating, and not as useful as it seems it should be, is the Site Overlay report. When you would click on this report, a window would open showing the home page of the site, then an overlay would appear (making the site page fade a bit), with some statistics on different links, showing how frequently they were clicked.

Depending on your browser and operating system, sometimes this display would not clear properly, causing problems with browsing later. In any case, the information was tantalizing, but but not always clearly understandable.

Google has now replaced Site Overlay with In-Page Analytics (right). This display is very similar to Site Overlay, but seems, at least at first blush, to work much better, and is in a frame in the page, instead of a new window. Google says the feature is still considered beta, meaning things may change, or may not always work correctly, but so far it seems smooth in our exploration of it.

The little percentage numbers near a link indicate the percentage of clicks for that link. Hovering the cursor over the number drops down a small window with details indicating the number and percentage of clicks, the goals information if they are configured, and, if ecommerce is configured, transaction and revenue information relative to the link.

For most this will be a nice improvement over Site Overlay, and may be very helpful in diagnosing the performance of your web site. What do I mean by that? Suppose you believe that your site visitors will click on certain links on your home page, such as your rooms page or your availability link. In-Page Analytics lets you see what percentage of the clicks actually go through that path, and determine what they are doing from there. You may be in for a surprise.

It is quite possible that the wonderful “call to action” link that you feel is on your page is not getting many clicks. What should you do? One option is to make it more prominent, wait a few weeks, and see if the statistics have changed. Another is to use Google’s Website Optimizer to create multiple versions of the call to action, and see which produces the best results.

The point isn’t that there is a particular answer that will work for everyone. Instead, the point is that information is valuable, and knowing that something is not performing as expected is the first step to making changes for the better.

Try In-Page Analytics, and see how your links are performing. Then you can determine if you need to make any changes.

What is Google Instant? Search results while you’re typing. Not the little drop-down thingie that anticipates what you’ll type, but actual results (complete with local map, for appropriate searches) that change as you type. See the screen shot below for an example. Notice that while the user has typed in “bed and” Google suggest has added “breakfast” and the search results are for the full term “bed and breakfast”. If you change the third word to bath, the results change.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? The answer to that question depends on a number of factors. Google’s Matt Cutts says you should give it a chance, as it will speed up your research, getting you results really quickly. He also addresses concerns that this will destroy, or at least change Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

No doubt it will change SEO, as search, like the internet itself, is not static. Things change, and businesses adapt. SEO adapts regularly to new algorithms, new players (Bing), etc. This is just another new factor. It will change things. How it will change them remains to be seen.

For a fun example of using Google Instant, and a really effective ad, see Google’s video, below.

Thoughts? Comments?

You’re not alone! Most of us would like to know if some change, or some technique that we’ve heard about will actually make any difference. Recently five Google experts answered questions on the Digital Inspiration blog, covering such topics as page loading speed, duplicate content, sitemaps, and more. John Mueller (Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zurich), Matt Cutts (Webspam Engineer, Google California), Zareen Kazim (Strategist, Google India), Koteswara Ivaturi (Project Manager, Google Hyderabad) and Kaspar Szymanski (Strategist, Google Dublin) provided answers to questions common to most website owners.

If you manage your own web site, or just want to know the details, the 25-question interview is available at the link above, as well as a pdf file of the entire interview.  We’ll summarize some of the interesting answers here (think of it as a short version, or executive summary).

Page loading speed: This is a ranking factor, though not a “high-impact” factor, so faster site loading will not guarantee better search ranking.

Duplicate Content: Duplicate content on your site is generally not a problem. You should consolidate, where possible, to help the search engine (and users) know what is your preferred content. Google discusses different ways to handle duplicate content within a site and across domains. You do not need to worry about sites which scrape your info and republish it as being duplicate content. Google can tell which is the original source and takes care of potential negative effects caused by the scraping site.

Media-rich sites: In addition to using alt tags for images or media, and descriptive file names (these are a must to get a media-rich site indexed), providing textual context for the media can help Google understand the image and its relevance. Google now allows descriptive terms about images in XML sitemaps.

Sitemaps: HTML sitemaps (a page with links to the major sections of the site) are helpful for humans and also help the search engine to confirm they know about all the important pages. Your XML sitemap should include all the pages you want to have indexed by Google. If you don’t want a page indexed, you should include a “noindex” meta tag on the page.

Paid links: Google’s policy is that paid links do not pass page rank. Thus “advertorials” – paid editorial advertisements – do not pass page rank. The link buyer doesn’t benefit and the link seller is considered untrusted by Google. Affiliate links (where a link in the text leads to another site where, if a purchase is made, the linking site receives a commission) are not inappropriate if they are relevant to the content of the site. To guard against possible violation of Google’s policies, these should be made “nofollow” links. Similarly, cross-linking two sites (setting both sites up to link to each other) with unrelated content is not seen as a paid link if you own both sites, but may not have value, unless it is something that is useful for the reader. Cross-linking large numbers of sites is not recommended.

Guest blogging, article submission sites: Links back to your site via guest blogging or by submitting articles to articles submission websites do not violate the paid links policy. However, Google is more impressed a site linking to your great content, than by you linking back to your own site from another article. In other words, high-quality content that others link to is more important that you linking to your own site from another article.

Ranking changes/Penalties: Changes in ranking in SERPs does not always mean your site has been penalized as Google is always making changes to its algorithms. Google will use its Webmaster Tools Message Center to communicate important information about the sites you manage.

Google Ads: Ads are entirely separate from “natural” search, so even if an ad is very popular and frequently clicked, it will not affect the natural search results. Ads on a page do not affect that page’s search ranking.

Publishing frequency: If you publish frequently, and Google updates results quickly, then you take a break, Google may not update your site while you are not publishing, but it will return when your publication frequency resumes.

Keywords on a page: As long as you can do it in a natural way, using different synonyms for important terms is appropriate and will be helpful to both the reader and the search engine. Keyword stuffing should be avoided.

Outbound links: Links out from your site do not directly affect your search rankings. However, linking to quality sites may help in how Google perceives your site.

Recommended reading: Due to the changing nature of the internet, the Google experts did not recommend any particular book on web search and SEO, but suggested their SEO page in the Webmaster Help Center, and the pdf file called the SEO Starter Guide.

Most Bed and Breakfast owners realize they need to list their property on more than one directory, so this series (Part One can be found here) does not intend to present a magic formula for finding the one listing that will solve all problems. The objective is to present some guidelines to help evaluate any directory in determining whether to begin listing with them, or to continue listing with them.

Some things to consider will apply whether you are deciding to try a new directory or keep a current listing. Others will apply only once the listing is in place.

Some basics to consider

The first thing most of us would consider is the cost of the directory, and that would not be a bad idea. However, it is important to make sure that if we compare the cost of Directory A with Directory B, that both are giving us the same features and value, or that we can see the reason for higher or lower rates.

Consequently, when comparing rates (and most directories have different membership levels, with different features offered at each level), it is important to compare features, exposure via search engines, etc. Here are some of the things to consider:

1. Base cost for the listing
2. Cost of any additional items (such as a link to your availability calendar, extra photos, videos, etc.)
3. Whether the directory provides links to your web site and availability listings
4. Whether there are opportunities to post photos, videos, and other media
5. How many photos and/or videos you may post

Another consideration is how visible the directory is for the searches your guests will use. Imagine yourself in the position of a guest searching for lodging in your area. Search just as the guests would. How well does the directory show up in the search results? Check at least the three major search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo!). If you have access to AOL, you could also check there. Directories that do not show up well in the search results for your area are not likely to send a significant amount of visitors to you. This is true for national and international directories as well as regional, state or provincial directories, or local directories.

Beyond the basics: Visibility

Visibility can be evaluated by performing a series of searches on at least Google, Bing and Yahoo! to see where the directory appears. Here are some suggested searches to try (substitute province or other regional description for city, state, etc., as appropriate):

• city, state, “bed and breakfast”
• city, state, bed breakfast
• city, state b&b
• “bed and breakfast”, city, state

Search Engine Usage

Try all variations of the above, plus adding “inn” as well as any regional terms (mid-coast, southern california, etc.). Bear in mind when using search engines, that while Bing usage has been increasing, both Bing and Yahoo! are far less widely used than Google. The current (as of this writing) market utilization is shown in the StatCounter image at right (click the image to visit the web site and see a larger version), where the red line is Google, Yahoo! is yellow, and Bing is the lighter blue.

For your search engine optimization (SEO) or search engine marketing (SEM) tasks, you may already know other terms to use. To find relevant search terms use one of the keyword research tools (many are free), such those from Google’s AdWords, Yahoo!’s Advertising, or one of many other tools (hint: try searching for “keyword research tools“).

If a directory is not showing up well, they may not be a good investment, unless they provide value in some other way.

Beyond the basics: Reputation

A directory has a reputation, just like any other business. Part of that reputation is the cost vs. benefit other innkeepers have experienced with it. Consult other innkeepers in your area, as well as those on various innkeeping forums, such as the PAII forum, so see if there have been prior discussions of the value of a particular directory.

Another part of the reputation is to see whether or not other properties in your area use the directory. We are aware that some guests have expressed concerns when several properties appear on a directory and one does not, that the missing property may be out of business. Visit the directory (or several directories) and see which properties (and what proportion of the total properties in your area) are listed on that directory. That may help you decide how important it is to be listed on that directory.

Beyond the basics: Performance

Tracking performance of directories is one of the most difficult things to do well. The simplest, but probably the least accurate, way is to simply ask guests where they found you. We are aware of instances where online analytics software proves a guest found a property via one directory, but the guest claimed to have found them via another. Add to that the truism that guests generally make several searches, often visiting multiple directories, before making a booking (whether they book online or by phone), and you have a recipe for inaccurate reporting.

The internet provides great opportunities for tracking, but with that comes another word of caution. There is a great inclination to accept computer generated data as accurate, but it isn’t aways the case. Like any data, computer generated data is only as good as the system that generates it.

Most systems use a cookie on your computer, created when you visit a web page, to determine where you have been. Most analytics software used to track bookings (as well as visits to your web site, etc.) stores only the most recent site visited which referred the guest to your site. In other words, only the last directory visited, or the last site visited with a link to your site, gets credit for “sending” you the guest.

Some would say that this is appropriate tracking, as the last directory visited is the one that “closed the deal.” However, when there is an opportunity to see better data, as some systems can provide, it becomes clear that the last directory does not necessarily deserve the credit, or at least all the credit, for the booking.

Tracking tools include:

• Google Analytics
• Intell-A-Keeper
• Super Statz
• Urchin
• Others

Google Analytics is the only system mentioned that is free, and it is very powerful.  Intell-A-Keeper uses a proprietary system to track historical referrals, so that more than just the last directory gets credit for a booking.

Make certain your analytics software properly tracks the source of bookings (in Google Analytics, for example, this would mean properly setting up a Goal for the creation of a booking, and tracking the referral sources of the bookings). Once you have that information, you’re ready to track the performance of the directories you subscribe to.

Part of the measure of performance is the number of visits a directory sends to your web site. Most analytics software will allow you to simple create a filter of the referral sources, showing only your directories. That gives you some idea of the value of spending money on the directory.

A more important measure for your bottom line is the return on that investment (ROI). For our purposes we’ll define the ROI as the cost of the directory subtracted from the money earned from that directory, divided by the cost of the directory. Or, in arithmetic terms (revenue – cost)/cost.

At left is a sample spreadsheet with several directories, the number of room nights booked and attributable to the directory, the total revenue represented by those bookings, the annual cost of the directory, the cost per dollar earned, and the ROI.

Looking at the last two rows, there is quite a cost difference between two national directories. Yet, the amount of revenue they produce is not that different. The ROI tells the tale, as the less expensive directory has an ROI of 27, while the more expensive directory ROI is a far smaller 5.9.

The two regional directories have similar ROI’s, even though they are very different in cost. As we can see – each produces an appropriate amount of revenue for the cost.

The local directory seems out of line with the others, with its ROI of only 4.

Making decisions

Now that we have some real data, it is tempting to consider dropping both the Local directory and National Directory 1, as both have relatively high costs and low ROI. We would do well, however, to remember that there can be more to the story than these statistics reveal.

The first thing to consider is whether or not you are utilizing all the features of the directory to maximize its ROI. It would hardly make sense to drop a directory for not performing well, if you have not availed yourself of all the ways you can make the listing work for you. Do you have lots of high-quality photos? Videos? Do you have a well-written description of your property? Are your rooms, rates, availability and specials prominently mentioned? Should you try a higher (or lower) listing level? If you lower your listing level to a less expensive level and your revenue does not change, your ROI will be higher.

The other significant consideration in evaluating a directory with a relatively low ROI is whether they provide value not reflected directly in bookings (revenue). This is especially true with local, state, or regional directories, but can also be the case with national or international directories. For example, a local or state directory may also do marketing for the state or city, bringing awareness to the potential guest, long before they begin to search for lodging. Or perhaps they publish print materials bringing people to the area. They may also provide information and/or political clout to help the industry, as well. National or international directories may provide you with publicity opportunities that go far beyond the revenue reflected in the ROI.

If it is possible to deduct the amount of the directory fees that is attributable to the non-revenue-producing areas, you should recalculate the ROI with those figures deducted. If not, still keep in mind that it may be worthwhile to tolerate a lower ROI in exchange for the added value these other services bring.

Once you have considered all the added value items, you can then add that to the mix in determining the true value of the directory to your business.

Do you have any experiences to share about evaluating B&B directories? Please post them in the comments.