Effectively Use Bed and Breakfast Marketing Research
Bed and breakfast marketing research provided by tracking tools will help you develop a plan to most effectively market your B&B Web site. Below are the recommended pieces of information you should track on a Monthly Basis. This information should be recorded and kept separately from your tracker. By doing it this way, you will be able to see trends from month to month and year to year that will help you make good marketing decisions about your business.
VISITOR COUNTS
Visitor Counts, also known as Unique Visitors, tell you how many potential guests visited your Web site for a specified date range. Some Web site trackers included in these counts are the visits occurring from Web crawlers and spiders that read your site and index them in the various search engines, some do not. You need to know if your unique visitors include the spider traffic, so you know if you are looking at combined numbers (spiders and human) or just human. Remember, you can’t sell a product to a spider or crawler.
Included in your Visitor Count (Unique Visitors) you will see all visitors from all different types of referrers. It’s also good idea to know how many came from any PPC (Pay Per Click) Programs. This will help you see how much search engine traffic you are paying for and how much search engine traffic is free.
REFERRALS TRACKING
It is important to track the various companies sending traffic (unique visitors) to your Web site. We recommend you track at least the top 10 referrers each month, but you may track as many referrers as you deem appropriate. This information should be recorded separately from your tracking system.
In most cases, every Paid Listing site will have more traffic to your page on their site than will have “click-throughs” to your site.
It is best to use your Web site Referral tracking as a benchmark and go to the source for their numbers when the Cost Per Click appears too high in comparison to your other Paid Listings.
To be able to track the number of “click-throughs” provided from any Paid Listing site, you first must know who your Paid Listing Companies are so you may track them monthly.
ORGANIC SEARCH ENGINE PLACEMENT TRACKING
Organic Placement is the ranking your Web Site achieves in on the Search Engines at no cost. This is not placement determined by $$$, like PPC (Pay Per Click) but simply where the search engines place you at no cost.
To determine your Organic / Natural placement in search engines such as GOOGLE, YAHOO, and BING you must first determine what Search Terms (Phrases) that are actually being typed by search engine users are most relevant to your business.
If you have made your Web site Search Engine Friendly, once a month review your list of Search Terms on the various search engines and record your placement. This information should be recorded separately from your tracking system. Remember to be logged out of your Google Account and to clear your Cookies before you test your placement. Otherwise Search Engine Personalization will skew your results. Refer to Educational Byte (.009) on how to delete your cookies.
SEARCH TERM TRACKING
Most Web Site Trackers track the Search Terms or Search Phrases that the public is ACTUALLY USING TO FIND YOUR WEB SITE.
In most cases, these phrases will match back to those phrases that were coded in your Titles, Descriptions, and Keywords if you had your site updated to be Search Engine Friendly.
These phrases should tie back to the Entry Pages that contain these phrases. This is used as an indicator to see if organic improvements can be made to your site based on your Titles, Descriptions, and Keywords. In other words, are the phrases you have chosen as part of the Search Engine Friendly process really producing the results anticipated?
LINK POPULARITY TRACKING
Link Counts provide information on the Link Popularity that supports your organic listings.
Once a Web site has been made Search Engine Friendly with the appropriate Titles, Descriptions, and Keywords, it is the link popularity (along with other various factors) as defined by the search engines that determines your placement in the organic listings.
We recommend tracking your link popularity once a month for increase or decrease and the value of any new incoming links. LinkDiagnosis.com is an online tool that you may use to assist in tracking your link popularity.
ENTRANCE PAGE TRACKING
Entrance Pages are simply pages from your Web site. If you have marketed each page of your Web site differently, each page has a chance to stand alone as a listing in the Search Engines.
By examining your Entrance Pages monthly, you can prove that the work done to market all of your pages is effective. Guests don’t always see your home page first – especially if you designed and marketed all of the pages of your site to be different.
In other words, the more pages you have indexed on the Internet with different Search Terms (phrases), the more chance you have to be seen. By watching your entry pages you will know which pages are working the hardest for you.
PAY PER CLICK (PPC) TRACKING
PPC Listings should be tracked and recorded per month. You will need your access information for each PPC program you are participating in so you may log in and gather the information. You should track the number of PPC visitors for the month and the Total cost paid for those visitors. You may also choose to track which phrases you are paying for that bring you the most visitors.
A few examples of PPC Programs are Google Ad Words and Microsoft adCenter.