Best place to advertise

[nimportequoi]

I ask guests to fill in a booking form and state which words they used to search on and which site they found us on (all my advertising is on the internet). However, I find a lot just don't remember - or forget the name of the listing site they were on, many just put my own website, but I'm sure many a lot of these must be referrals from listing sites who have no means by which the customer can enquire. The only accurate stats I have of listing site performance are when the enquiry comes directly from the listing site, often where there is no link to my website, such as in the case of holiday-rentals.com.

[mascamps.com]

We ask too Chris but we find that, as with Susan, most people who we need to ask (ie those who've not arrived directly from a reservation system or listing) just quote our own website. Now, that's "sort-of" true in that it's the last place that they arrived at before they booked us but it's the first place that they arrived at which is more important.

For instance, we quite commonly get people who I know for a fact are getting here from visitfrance quoting mascamps.com as where they found us. We even had someone phone up this morning saying that he was looking at "our website" whilst he was on the phone and confirmed the booking about 30 mins later through "our website" which turned out to be activehotels! Identifying the original source is particularly important for paid-for sites, of course, but really only possible in a definitive way when the listings site doesn't have a link to your own site and passes on e-mail enquiries or actual bookings.

So, I agree with the principle of asking people how they found us but I think that the answers aren't really to be relied upon. I do like the idea of asking what keywords people used too but have found that it's quite rare for them to remember them.

Yeah, you're right about me changing the text Chris. The snag is that we changed several things at the same time on the site and still haven't identified which of the amendments made the difference (a 10 fold jump in hits within a week of making them). Some experimenting during the year has identified some of them but we continue to come across other aspects of our September update which were important now and again as we've made further amendments since then.

[Ex Forum Admin]

There was some extra code not allowing other users to reply to Mascamps post. I have now removed this code.

 

[Quillan]

I understand you can't ask people for the search string when they arrive because they won't remember but if they copy and past the URL in to a for or something on your website it will contain the search string. I have already added this to mine today as well as a drop down menu for compains I advertise with and a text box for those that are not catered for in the other bit's. I will see what happens.

[nimportequoi]

[quote user="Quillan"]

I understand you can't ask people for the search string when they arrive because they won't remember but if they copy and past the URL in to a for or something on your website it will contain the search string. I have already added this to mine today as well as a drop down menu for compains I advertise with and a text box for those that are not catered for in the other bit's. I will see what happens.

[/quote]

Do people book directly on your website then? If they've got to your website, would they still have the url of the referrer? Could you let us know if it works? 

I get most of my visit france bookings via the enquiry form on their website, the only ones I 'appear' to get no bookings from and gites-brittany.com and pour-les-vacances, but I'm sure by the huge number of visits I get from these sites they must generate some bookings, but because they are small, unknown and have no enquiry form facility themselves, people forget them.

[Quillan]

Yes, we have an Equiry/Reservation form that they complete, you can have a look at the Englsih version by following.:

http://www.chambresdhote.com/Enquiry%20Form.htm

The data is then sent to us by email.

Using the URL to find out what they typed in to google to find you does work because I have tried it already.

[mascamps.com]

Certainly if you don't ask for the query string or the keywords, you won't get them. I do like the idea of asking for them explicitly on enquiry forms; hope you don't mind me pinching that for the inns/gites sites.

I suspect the reliability of the information will depend on the guests themselves and how they've actually gone about booking - if they've done loads of searches to find you they may not know or may just make up an answer for you. For that matter, the time of year is probably a factor too - if they're booking in July it's unlikely that they'll succeed in booking their first preference and therefore unlikely that they'll remember what they originally searched for to reach you (on 'tother hand, is it more relevant in those circumstances to know what they started looking for or what path they followed to reach you in the end?).

Having said all that, once when we did enquire much further following a large booking we were surprised to find that they'd looked for "pyrenees gite" to find us. "Gite" wasn't even on the shortlist of our keywords at that time yet remains our single most profitable keyword to this day even though we rarely rent our little gite as self-catering (we're mainly B&B).

 

Arnold

 

[CatherineS2]

Over the past couple of months I've been bookmarking properties in Florida as we are thinking of taking the children to Disneyland next Easter. By the time I actually get my act together to try to book somewhere, I won't have a clue which search string or rental portal I used!

I am sure that there must be many people in the same boat... 

[nimportequoi]

Do people really pay attention to where they found somewhere if they are just enquiring? I hope it works and people don't just select the referrer at the top of the list for ease. I like having the minimum information possible on the enquiry form for guests to fill in. I bother them about how they found us when they make the booking, which is probably far too late!

Arnold, it is interesting how several rental owners in France seem to avoid the term 'gite' as they think it is downmarket - whereas in reality I think there are still a lot of people searching for French holiday homes use it in searches, so it is best not to dismiss it too quickly. As Chris said, it is the website text which seems to matter now, and if people are looking for gites, you need to get it on your website to appear in the search engines.

[mascamps.com]

I suspect that in a lot of cases, what Catherine says it what actually happens. That's why I'm keen on being able to do the tracking automatically as far as possible. I've about 10 lines of code which I've started adding to my pages with a view to picking up the "referrer" string right from the start. Add that to an enquiry form such as Chris has and you then don't need to ask people how they got to you because you'll know. Still doesn't allow for people collecting sites in their favourites months ahead of time of course but at least it goes part of the way there.

Well, "know" in the sense that you'll know the place they arrived to your site from. You won't know how they got to that particular site though, which I think would be quite useful too (visitfrance provide this in a limited sense).

The term "gite" is interesting. If the French themselves are looking for somewhere with a lot of rooms they will search for a gite rather than a B&B even if they actually want catering. The family that found us under "pyrenees gite" wanted all meals from the evening of December 31st through to lunch on the 2nd for 28 people.

Use something other than "gite" and you run into bother I think. Does a villa site list apartments for instance (ourvillas.com is registered but no longer used so perhaps "villa" isn't a great name)? Is a cottage a villa or vice versa? Then you've the Brits looking for "self-catering" and the Yanks looking for "vacation rental homes". Not to mention other languages!

B&B is an even worse term though. For a start the "&" just doesn't work well in searches so people will search for untold numbers of combinations of "B&B", "bed&breakfast", "bed and breakfast", "guest house",.....

 

Arnold