This is not really that special but last week I mentioned it and have been too busy this week with so much going on to make the promised post.

Visiting Google is Sydney is something anyone can do and there are great people there like Jasper Vallance who are more than happy to talk to you about the ins and outs of search advertising and some of the Google products that suit NZ and Australian travel companies. But your real reason for visiting should just be to see how cool a place it is - it is kind of what you expect. Reception is pretty much all white with splashes of the Google colours in carpet occasionally around the room in sharp contrast. You sign in as a visitor and it is all done on the computer via a digital pen which you then sign on and its prints out your name tag. It is not really that special either, and there are probably millions of companies that have this - but somehow the Google process just seemed cooler. I noticed they had framed pictures on the walls of all the logo variations they do for special events etc over time - but did not really want to nose around too much - they looked cool though.

And then of course there is the famous Google food. Jasper showed us around the on-site cafeteria which was just cool. Pool table, a massive fridge full of drinks (beer with your meeting anyone) and another fridge full of snacks. He explained that they are all treated with full lunches. No wonder everyone looked so “cool”.

That’s about it really. We talked for a good hour about cost-per-click campaigns and apparently a click through rate of 2% on your keywords in good in the travel industry (I think I floored him when I said we are getting 17% on one ad group and 26% on another for the campaign we are running for The Park Lodge at the moment) and he also told us some really staggering figure about the increased conversion from search engine listings if both and organic and a paid ad appear on the same page - really interesting stuff.

Following on from yesterdays post regarding the very real problem Oz Experience are facing with the third search result being completely negative about Oz Experience we went through many of the social media sites such as Travelblog, Lonely Planet, BUG and so on and reviewed a bit more closely what people were saying about the company.

Generally it is pretty good but there are a number of people in these forums that are hell bent on slagging the company off regardless - in fact, when I looked really closely the same people seemed hell bent on slagging off most independent companies trying to do their own thing. You have to wonder if they are not simply competitors or what their self interested motive is. The frustrating thing we noticed was the number of honest questions being asked that were not being answered - such as someone asking if they could be told about Surf Camp and the answers being such insightful things as “Greyhound goes there - don’t use Oz Experience” - and nothing about the surf camp itself.

We decided that we would try creating a thread in some of these sites in which Oz Experience staff made themselves available to answer any questions and feedback and also to announce the new website if anyone had any wish to stick their sixpence in their as well. I thought this was a brave move as we are basically entering the lions den; and yes, within a few hours the mud-slinging on the Lonely Planet forum started by a couple of users asking about sex and calling the trip “the f… truck” etc. Bruce Thurlow on behalf of Oz Experience continued to humour their banter with honest answers and opinions. He was not hiding anything. The guys making the comments however were just being shear bloody minded - not giving him a chance and most likely intimidating any reasonable users who may have had a serious question. These guys had 3,000 + and 8,000+ posts to their names - clearly people who do a lot of travel from the armchair in front of their computers, and neither of them had travelled on Oz Experience!

Nonetheless, Lonely Planet removed the thread within hours and Boots n All within an hour - not even letting the conversation get going. Quite frankly this is wrong! Their justification is no commercial promotion in the site. Sure, but what about truthfulness. Guys are able to exist in these forums basically bagging tourism operators s without the operators being able to be themselves and fight their own corner. All that leads to is companies hiding behind aliases further bagging their competitors.

Is it legal that these sites can have these discussions about companies without their involvement? Oz Expereince is a trademarked name and going back to yesterdays post these companies are gaining search engine traffic based on these terms which are proprietary - perhaps the only course of action is that these forums either open these doors to the tourism companies to be involved or they remove every post and thread that refers to a company directly or indirectly. After all we all know that the TV show Big Brother blocks out the sound every time the conversation drifts to a person or company that is not on the show in fear of legal reprisals. Most companies trademark their keywords and as such competitors can’t use them in Adwords campaigns etc., what’s the difference here?

What are the travel communities scared of by banning tourism companies from getting involved and fighting their corner anyway? Let’s be honest the readers of these sites are not stupid. If Bruce from Oz Experience clearly identified as such starts hammering a bad word about an alternative product they are going to see through it pretty quickly. If he over promotes his products with flowery superlatives again his information will be seen as marketing hyperbole and users will leave the thread discounting his posts. Instead sites such as Lonely Planet and Boots n All are perpetuating a load of slander and one sided rubbish by guys such as larc and ianw who can not surely be reliable sources of travel information while they are able to sit there all day banging out thousands of posts, which would be virtually impossible for a real traveller to do - without doing what they are supposed to do - provide a medium for discussion and information flow.

If you would like to see the forum thread before it was shut down by Lonely Planet you can view it here

I have spoken many times of the risk that bad news can travel so fast in the Web 2.0 world and the importance of keeping on top of it through services such as Google alerts and Xefeed. Here is however a very real example of bad, bad news.

Type ‘Oz Experience’ into Google and third result reads:

Well, if you saw this just below the official site which result would you click? Pretty scary stuff - this is a real serious situation, as there is really nothing that can be done about.

What’s happened is that someone has written a forum post on why not to travel on Oz Experience on a website called Travelblog. The reason it is has risen up the search ranks so quickly, in only 118 days, for what is in effect a rather   competitive term is not initially obvious. Firstly, the page itself only has 115 links (according to Google) and they are all internal. But, Travelblog itself is a very reputable site - it has over 9,00 inbound links so with 115 links in the site to this page this is clearly pushing the importance of the page up. The page is also well structured - the frightful heading above being the h1 tag; then there is the number of times the words ‘Oz Experience’  appears in the content as post after post are added to the discussion. Note, many of them are positive for Oz Experience, but perhaps the damage is already done - there might even be a risk that the reader makes a decision based on this without even visiting the Oz Experience website (I hope not - we are only a matter of weeks away from releasing a new very cool website for them). The continual posts also mean the content is always fresh. A discussion in the office here at Xebidy decided that this situation is illustrative of Google adding more weighting to fresh and new content.

So what can be done? Probably nothing; perhaps as this post starts to fade away and less people add their own comments the content becomes less fresh and the forum topic falls out of favour with Google. Perhaps someone like STA Travel reads this blog - they are only 3 or 4 placings below in the search results.  As they have a massive number of inbound links and thus page rank, they could increase the number of in-site links to their Oz Experience page and hopefully rise up to third place pushing the bad news down the rankings.

The sensible course of action of course is to catch bad news like this very early on and get involved in the discussion, hopefully stemming the flow of comments and links to it and thereby reducing its’ popularity in the search engines. Identifying bad news early and addressing it head on is a web strategy I have talked about in my posts and articles (for example this one on Creating a Relationship with your Customer. Using tools like Google Alerts will go someway to helping you identify this sort of information early on the Internet. Alternatively, Xebidy offers an Interent and Social media monitoring service to our clients on a monthly subscriber basis where using our Xefeed product we can monitor a range of sources for information on your business, feeding bad news to the appropriate channels and even republishing travel stories and reviews etc onto your website. If you want more information feel free to get in touch.

In the New Zealand herald today an article came out (click here for article on Base Backpackers) about Base Backpackers receiving a “rap” over the knuckles for the slogan “New Zealand’s best hostels” in their advertising. According to the article this was in response to a complaint by the Youth Hostels Association (YHA) - a direct competitor of Base. YHA complained that travellers might perceive this to be determinmed by an independent review.

What a load of poppy-cock! I am sure it is marketing 101 that you try and find a statement that proposes you to be the best, the legends, the most famous, the number 1 whatever you are in your market. Does anyone really take any notice of this in advertising? In fact, surely this comes back to the increasing disenchantment of consumers with traditional media and marketing sources and a greater emphasis on peer reviews - hence the growth of review sites and forums etc where travellers seek out fellow travellers opinions on the best places to stay. Are YHA and the Advertising Standards Authority really serious that anyone believes these sort of slogans?

Last year I wrote a post on the Art of Writing Web Content which stated that web content should start with a big fat claim to draw people’s attention in. Examples were “lost weight in 21 days guaranteed” and “Pick of the backpacker hostels - Lonely Planet”. I did fortunately qualify this to say make sure it is believable and provable. Perhaps YHA is recognising that at least Base’s claim is believe - perhaps they are the best hostels in NZ, after all the above Lonely Planet claim relates to Base Hot Rocks Rotorua and the y have certainly received their fair share of awards from independent hostel booking website Hostelworld.

Interestingly enough the findings of the Advertising Authorities Standards panel (that the word was hyperbole and comparative) was similar to a complaint upheld against Kiwi Experience last year. I can’t help thinking that surely this is simple evidence of competitors misusing this medium to try and gain competitive advantage. If the businesses complaining spent more time focusing on their own products and less time staring at their competitors they might all raise the standard of tourism offerings in this country to the benefit of the tourists - you remember those people, the ones with the brains who can see through the superficial slogans that the marketing departments continually pump out and make informed purchase decisions based on what they think will be the best product for themselves and then very quickly report back via word of mouth and other peer to peer forums (such as the web) how good or bad the service really is.

Incidentally, I notice on the YHA site that they claim to have hostels in “57 of the country’s best locations” - but they don’t have a hostel in Quail Rise, or Arrowtown, or Cardrona, or … I think these are “bester” (hic) than some of their best locations - are they misleading travellers?

Unfortunately this is not a unique post, in fact it is something I have harped on about a lot before - but it seems extremely relevant to me at the moment as I have had two incidents recently where I have seen that people don’t understand the concept of keywords with regard to visitor numbers to a website and more importantly the business purpose of the website.

Let me explain; your website exists for a specific purpose, whether it is to sell bed nights for your hotel, or tours, or houses on a real estate site, or rental properties as in the case of the property development guys I had lunch with yesterday, or in the case of many sites, just as source of information. The biggest mistake is to get trapped in the game of focussing purely on visitor numbers, that is, all search engine and marketing effort you put in focusses just on increasing visitor numbers, without a commensurate focus on real website purpose - say for example selling bed nights. Let me put it another way, if Xebidy reduced the overall number of visitors to your site but doubled the number of people booking a nights stay in your hotel would you say that the search engine and Internet Marketing strategy was a success or a failure?

Hopefully, a success - the return on investment is better. So, one of the most important steps in this regard is the selection of keywords that you will focus on in your marketing efforts to attract customers to your site. This is not rocket science, identify your target market, if you sell tours in Northern Territory to 35+ age group then targeting keywords such as “backpacker bus” and “backpacker tours” is a waste of time and effort, the result is that you will have a high bounce rate on your website. That means, visitors are coming to your site from search results expecting to see some information based on their search query and instead seeing something different so therefore immediately leaving your site. Step 2, identify the search queries that your target market is using, assuming then that you appear high up in the search results page for your selected terms, the higher the search volume the better. If you can find that getting high rank results in search engines for a particularly competitive terms (say Sydney hostel) is difficult, then target more specific terms that might be easier to rank with but nonetheless are more likely to lead to conversion (purchase etc) of visitors on your site. Studies have shown that the more words a user puts into their search query the more likely they are to be a purchaser.

Finally, the keywords you select should be proprietary information, they should be your competitive advantage. If you approach your keyword phrases with a great deal research and then refining them ongoing based on your analytics, which terms lead to more sales, which terms don’t - this is not something you should be telling everyone. We can use lots of tools such as Spyfu to try and work out what competitor keyword terms are, but at the end of the day only you know your sales figures. More importantly, you should be setting up goal conversions and funnels in your analytics packages so that you can see what customers are doing on your site when they come to your site from particular search terms and identifying which ones make you money.

Let’s sum up with a hypothetical example, Bob has a tour company running backpackers around New Zealand. 40% of Bob’s market is Americans, 40% English, 10% Canadian and a smattering of other nationalities thereafter. Bob’s competitors all rate very highly for the terms Backpacker Bus and Backpacker tours - Bob doesn’t. But Bob does do well for some nice generic terms such as New Zealand and Queenstown, and even adventure travel, he has spent a great deal of money targeting these terms. But, he hardly makes any sales online - why not? Because, when someone comes to his site from the search term New Zealand they leave it again. They were not looking for a backpacker tour they were looking for information on New Zealand. Xebidy do the analyse of the search terms with Bob and discover that before his market travel to New Zealand 90% of them do not use the term Backpackers. In the US Backpackers are people that go hiking in the bush and camping. In fact, Bob discovers through his analyse of his market that most of his American market are students and that the main search terms they use are in fact budget travel, student travel and student vacation. Wow and behold, this is a long way off from “backpacker”. Bob reworks his strategy, suddenly his web sales to his America market sky rockets. He does the same for his UK and Canadian market, identifying the keywords that they use in search engines and targeting his site to match. An interesting thing occurs, Bob receives the same amount of traffic as before but from different sources. He receives less customers reaching his site for non-specific terms like Queenstown and more traffic for specific terms like “cheap bus travel New Zealand” and his sales go through the roof. The last thing he is going to do is announce to his competitors, hey I found where all the business is!

Sounds too simple? It is! But it is staggering the number of people I talk to who don’t get it. They want to target broad keywords terms that don’t generate sales, that try to be everything to everyone, and interestingly enough they don’t identify their market. The use of “bus” for companies selling tours, “hotel” for companies selling hostels and Queenstown Restaurants for a company that leases commercial space properties in Queenstown. Go figure!

We recently upgraded the look and feel of the Base Backpackers hostel pages and introduced a feature we had been developing for awhile (those who have seem the Adventure Tours Australia website would have seen it before) - that is, the displaying of images onto the website that sit on Flickr.

The idea here is that we take an RSS feed directly from our these pages and then display the most recent 20 or so images. This works fantastic for a company such as Base which has 14 hostels across Australia and New Zealand and a continually growing mountain of images that are taken almost daily by staff, customers and friends.

A lot can change in a week in a hostel and there is just so much going on from regular parties in the hostel bar to activities and local events. By using a Flickr account we can give access to all the hostel and bar managers who can easily update their photos in real time without the need to continually go back to the website content manager to get new photos. It keeps the images fresh and gets everyone from the crew to the customer buy in - hey that’s me in the bar the other night!

I have said this before in my articles etc, but Flickr also provides a parallel marketing medium. For example someone looking for images on Magnetic Island on Flickr might come across Base or the Full Moon Party and subsequently be enticed to investigate Base Magnetic Island hostel as the place to stay.

We are currently in the process of extending the functionality such that we also pull in the description and tags of the images as they appear on the Flickr site and are displayed on Base, Adventure Tours etc websites.

This problem is not new to us at Xebidy, but a recent article in the Great New Zealand Travel Directory newsletter highlighted it, so I thought it high time we comment. The newsletter was commenting on the recent upgrade by many hosting companies from analytics package Urchin 4 to Urchin 5 - which apparently due to a change in measurement methods is now displaying less site traffic then before for the same sites.

This particular article recommends Google analytics and we could not agree more. In fact, I would go as far to say that the free server packages that most hosting companies provide are bad news for the unweary. I have a prime case in point. One of our clients was using a package called Deep Matrix and was of the understanding they were enjoying visitor numbers of 25 - 30,000 per month. In fact, they went as far as to commit a large investment in redesigning their site based on their belief.

The new site was launched and everyone was happy. That is, until the first months stats were reviewed by the marketing department. Low and behold, visitor numbers in the newly installed Google Analytics packages were 50% of what they previously were on the Deep matrix server log analysis. A quick review of Deep Matrix revealed the route of the problem - “This report includes visits from automated users such as search engine robots”; and Google analytics don’t. There is no easy way to explain that to the board!

The newsletter in fact says:

“if you load Google analytics to your site you will certainly see a drop in traffic compared to your other stats packages. However, it is, widely assumed (but probably not proven) that Google analytics is not subject to the same stats server issues that hosting companies seem to have. It may therefore be a more reliable and independent method of measuring monthly trends”.

I think what is being referred to here is server uptime, and most importantly the way Google analytics picks up the incoming traffic and recognises is an either search engine or some other automated bots (such as email harvesters etc). Google analytics sit on the website or user side and register traffic as it hits your site via some code inserted by your developer into your site. Server stats packages on the other hand take the raw data from your server logo and interpret this data into something meaningful. The difference is in how these packages recognise this traffic and categorise it, or not as may be the case (Deep Matrix simply treating the traffic the same whether it be for a visitor, a search engine bot or some other automated service).

So how much of this non-qualified traffic is there? Lots! When we looked closely at the client I referred to before they experienced over 20,000 visits in one month from search engines and the like. Add this to the Google reported visitors of nearly 10,000 and they were back on track (albeit very disappointedly) with their stats.

Is there a lesson here, are stats packages useful at all then, especially if they are not accurate? Absolutely! Analytics packages are essential for trend analysis. You should be continually analysing your site, what happens if I change this content or this heading, what happens after this course of optimistation. Google moreover allows you to set goals and track your users from source to your desired outcome - such as making a purchase. But, be aware of the limitations of your stats pack, get professional advice and setup a programme of monitoring and reporting that is meaningful to your business. And finally, be aware that poorly analysed stats could lead to some very bad news in the future!

We gave our unsolicited opinion on a website and potential strategy the other day and it really got me thinking about the importance of establishing some social currency in today’s Web 2.0 sites. The site was effectively a reviews and ratings site that was struggling to generate the traffic and comments that were wanted.

I believe the reason that people are not using the site is because it does not answer the basic marketing axiom of “what’s in it for me”. There is no social currency to be earned from leaving a review or a rating for the user. It has already been shown that cash or prize incentives don’t work for this sort of thing (ala all the video publishers that pay for content versus You Tube and still You Tube wins). You need to create a method of people earning social currency, whether that be through a rate the rater system of some other method.. Thereby there is something in it for those doing the reviews - to get a better rating.

I also think that in the plethora of review sites, even bookmarking sites there needs to be a second layer of demographics added to the process. In my opinion reviews these days are only useful if those reading them can identify with them. An example is on the Base Backpackers site where we take comments directly from HostelWorld. These comments include the reviewers age range and their nationality and sex. That way if you are an English lager lout looking for a party hostel and read a review saying that it is too noisy from an older American lady you can take the review at face value - or vice versa. We know that users are quite open with their personal information if they believe it is going to be of benefit to them.

I am reading Wikinomics by Don Trapscott and Anthony Willliams (thanks Nigel at AJ Hackett for the recommendation) at present and it was interesting to come across a similar argument put forward by blogger and media consultant Jeff Jarvis. Although talking about “ownership” of all the user generated content his sentiments echo the argument that for a site looking to gather user generated content the site needs to recognise the ownership of the content - reward the contributors with social currency, in my words.

“These collective benefits yield a richer web experience and enhance the wisdom of crowds (see my article on What is Web 2.0 for information on this). This new wisdom can be useful in helping people discover content, or in organizing the web around topics, or improving search results, and even in improving ad performance.”

“So who owns that collected wisdom of the crowd? Obviously the crowd does. Platforms like Google, Technorati and Yahoo (…) merely borrow it. And they can only borrow it if they continue to have the trust of the crowd and if the pay dividends back to the crowd. And those that try to hard to control that wisdom, to limit its use and the sharing of it … risk turning away the crowd that creates this value”.

According to Netcraft, the Internet now accounts for some 155,583,825 websites. But interestingly enough the number of sites only grew by approximately 345,000 in January as opposed to 5.4million in December. I have argued before that the Internet will in fact shrink in coming years as search engine rankings get monopolised by larger sites and sites will have a bigger Internet footprint through links etc, that simply launching another new site will simply become uneconomical (if it is not largely already for many). Could this be the start of less sites being launched - I doubt it, more likely just a Christmas New Years hang over.