Making PPC marketing more effective with diligent planning and effective tracking

Exclusive: Swissotel Hotels and Resorts shares PPC marketing best practice.

There’s no shortage of advice, be it for sticking to basics or implementing the best practices, when it comes to devising and executing plans for sustaining a connection with consumers in such a challenging economic environment. 

As with any other marketing discipline, the practitioners of search engine marketing continue to look-out for ways which results in the judicious use of marketing budgets.  

In order to assess the viewpoint of a travel marketer on issues such as pay per click, data analytics and conversion tracking, EyeforTravel.com recently spoke  to Barbara Pezzi, Director - Web Marketing and e-Commerce, Swissotel Hotels and Resorts. 

Pezzi, who is scheduled to speak at EyeforTravel’s Travel Distribution Summit in London on 20th May, shared the following with us: 

EyeforTravel.com: Recently, an expert advised Internet marketing teams to include no more than 20 keywords per ad group while assigning search terms. In addition, application of geographic and demographic targeting to ad groups too was recommended to increase click through rates and minimise costs, while building a strong quality score. How do you assess such approach?  

Barbara Pezzi: I would not go as far as defining the actual number of keywords per adgroup but completely agree that tight adgroups are essential for a successful campaign.

Small tight ad groups, with keywords strongly related to each other and the ad text, not only result in higher click through rates and subsequently higher quality score and lower CPC (cost per click), but also make it easier to manage the campaign. 

Bid levels can be set at ad group rather than individual keyword, and there will not be a need to consistently sift through a long list to identify poor performing keywords. We do set geographic targets and also apply day-parting, i.e apply different settings depending on the time and the day the ad will be shown, based on the data sourced by our web analytics system. This will ensure that the ads are shown at the most optimal time and are relevant to the searcher, resulting in a higher ROI.

EyeforTravel.com: It is said that companies using pay per click services can turn click throughs into conversions by making use of deep linking. Deep linking leads users directly to the source of the content they are looking for, based on the search term entered, rather than taking them to the home page or some other part of the site. How does this boost conversion rates?

Barbara Pezzi: Landing pages are essential for a successful campaign. The most important element of a PPC landing page is to convince the visitor that they have landed on the right page and this page has the information they were looking for. 

Furthermore, you only have a few seconds to convince the visitor. If we were, for example, bidding on “five star hotel Singapore” and the visitor landed on our main home page, they might not stay and navigate through the site until they find our Singapore hotel pages, which would simply result in a “bounce” and wasted money.  

I strongly believe that it is not only essential to ensure the visitors land on the most relevant page for their searches, but also to keep on monitoring such pages and optimise and update them on a regular basis. A good landing page will also contribute to a higher quality campaign quality score and therefore lower CPC.

EyeforTravel.com: As far as new tracking options are concerned, how do you assess the launch of services where marketers will now be able to specify how their conversions are counted? Marketers can choose to count one conversion per click, which will see subsequent conversions discounted unless they originate from a new click, preventing multiple counts from the same user coming back to the page. 

Barbara Pezzi: I don’t think there is a “right or wrong” in terms of conversion tracking. It very much depends on what your goals are and what you are trying to achieve. Even our site, which is essentially an e-commerce site with the purpose of selling hotel rooms, has various goals. Successful bookings on our hotel pages, menu downloads on our restaurant pages, sign ups for offers, visits to our press pages, and so on... each section will have its own set of goals, being a visit, a download or a booking. Each company can then decide how to measure a successful event. 

The main issue is that many companies do not set goals and without it, no tracking or web analytics tool will actually make sense or bring value. 

EyeforTravel.com: It is said that website owners must keep track of the number of people visiting their site and the number of transactions. Adding or modifying web pages, launching pay per click campaigns and executing search optimisation can all have an impact on conversion rates, so numbers should be tracked to see which approaches are working best. What do you think is key to analysing data? 

Barbara Pezzi: It all depends on the purpose of the campaign and again on the goals set prior to the start of the campaign. 

For example, it might be a lead generation campaign, to promote a new package for small meetings or weddings. In this case, one would place a link to a request form and/or use a specific telephone number for enquiries, assign a value to each enquiry received and calculate the return of investment based on the amount of enquiries received vs money spent for the campaign. 

Or it could be a straightforward pay per click campaign to generate bookings. In this case, it might be sufficient to measure conversion and revenue generated by the campaign vs investment. 

Depending on the web analytics tool used, it is also possible to set cookie expiration to over 30 days and measure repeat business generated by the campaign over a three months period, for example. Different goals could be set for keyword groups, i.e. branded vs non-branded, or geographic targets, i.e. new markets vs established markets. What really surprises me is that there are still companies using the number of impressions or “clicks” as a success measurement. At the end of the day, a page view is just a page view. What happened after the visitor viewed the page and how the visitor interacted with the page really matters. 

Barbara Pezzi will be joining the 80 other industry speakers scheduled to speak at EyeforTravel’s 2009 Travel Distribution Summit, taking place on 19-20 May in London. For full event details, click here: http://events.eyefortravel.com/tds/online-travel-strategies/agenda.asp 

Related links: PPC, SEM, Web analytics, Landing pages

Travel Distribution Summit Europe 2009

Barbara Pezzi, Director - Web Marketing and e-Commerce, Swissotel Hotels and Resorts is scheduled to speak during the Online Travel Strategies Conference, to be held as a part of TDS Europe 2009 Summit in London (May 19-20). 

For more information, 

Or Contact:

Simon Carkeek
Executive Director
EyeforTravel
+44 (0) 207 375 7181
simon@eyefortravel.com