One of the most successful and challenging things about marketing on the internet is that the impact of your marketing efforts is measurable. While critical to your initiative, the measurement of true return on investment (ROI) for the lodging industry is a complex exercise since the results manifest themselves across multiple channels. What further compounds the complexity of measuring these results is that often a website that is being marketed and the actual booking engine where the transaction is closed may be on different servers. In this article, we explain the challenges of measuring search engine marketing results and some solutions for accurately tracking your investment returns.

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Frequently, hoteliers measure the size and importance of the internet as a booking channel by the number of reservations flowing through their online booking engines. An alternate way to measure the importance of their internet presence is to determine how many people were influenced by the hotel’s website, online ads, customer reviews, etc. While the hotel industry has seen a significant increase in online reservations, the true testament of growth is how many people use the internet as a research tool and take action based on your online presence.

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It is evident that Web 2.0 initiatives are changing the way all industries operate today. The chart below shows the overall spending by US marketing executives on the next generation of internet marketing technologies. As far as early adoption goes, the travel industry is lagging other major industries in investing in and taking advantage of these Web 2.0 tools. Eventually, most of these technologies will find their way into the travel industry, given that travel is in the top 3 market segments on the internet.

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Weekly

1. Online Inventory
Make sure you have sufficient inventory allocated for all sales channels, especially on your site. Your independent and brand.com website is the most cost efficient tool for a hotel to receive reservations, as the hotel does not pay any fees when a customer books through these websites.

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When choosing an online strategy for your business, the first step is selecting a domain name.

Choose only one domain name for one business! Theoretically business owners want more than one domain name to cover issues such as misspellings, having separate domain names for products, or simply having more than one name pointing to there website. This might seem logical because having various domains names all coming up on your website is a sure way everyone will find you easily. Wrong; this is one of the most common mistakes among all industries on the internet. The best approach is to have one domain name and one version of your website. The key here is to get properly indexed, get properly ranked, and not damage one’s image in the eyes of search engines. When having numerous domain names all pointing to various versions of your website, or having numerous domain names all pointing to the same website, search engines see this as spam and, in turn, can have you banned or blacklisted. Therefore, having one domain name and one version of your website is the key stepping stone in building a strong web presence.

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The common question which reoccurs time after time is maximizing keyword usage. Meaning if keyword phrases and H1 tags are important for organic optimization, let’s stuff the entire page full of relevant keywords and create as many H1 and H2 tags as possible. This is a common misconception. People and search engines alike do not like over-stuffed keywords. Instead of helping your site rank better this can actually damage your site’s ranking and appeal. The most obvious sign of keyword stuffing is when you notice a decrease in your site’s performance, and at this point it is time to review your SEO strategy.

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