How much is a travel click worth?

[SlyOldDog]

We are in the accommodation industry. Sometimes we reserve accommodation at other people's hotels and sometimes we fill the booking in our own accommodation.

The price per click varies a lot with location. From 20 cents for a backwater up to $8 a click for places like London. In our target areas the price between $0.80 and $2 a click.

We haven't implemented tracking software but I am confident we still make a big profit from ppc despite what seems to me to be a high price.

Any other experiences?

[jeremy goodrich]

High CPC cost = generally a good potential to make a nice margin on the media buy.

Keep in mind negative word(s), building out content that matches the query as close as possible, and benchmark your creative click thru rates versus conversion rates on the back end.

Ideally, you want a creative that has a higher CTR & a higher conversion rate.

So as long as you keep the right focus on the page, the creative, and mine appropriately the data that comes in from the media buy, you can tighten down your costs & bring up the ROI significantly over time.

[webdiversity]

8 bucks a pop and no tracking? Yikes.

[whats up skip]

I have been trying to do some work on this, but I have not yet worked it out. The answer is not simple and would normally take time (months) to work it out.

You first have to consider what your base line traffic is. This is the traffic you receive to your site from exisiting listings in search engines. This will have a conversion rate to bookings that could be very different to the highly targeted PPC advertising you may run.

Then you have to determine how much traffic you are generating from PPC, its cost and conversion rate. Unless you know the base line traffic and conversion rate, it is difficult to determine the PPC conversion rate to bookings.

Another factor is the increase in brand/site value obtained from PPC traffic. This can be in several forms:
A person visiting your site as a result of PPC advertising may not make a booking immediately, but may bookmark, tell a friend or subscribe to a newsletter. They may also remember the site name from the ad or return later.

Depending on the market, many customers may not book accommodation the first time they visit a site. Thus the full value of a PPC campaign may not show for weeks or months (read not normally more than 3 months).

As I said, the answer is not straight forward. Determining the result is made more difficult because of the different seasons and external factors (SARS, wars, 911...) all creating noise in the data.

[Tropical Island]

We fully agree with "whats up skip". We have small specialty accommodations and need many refferals to make one booking. Many will look in April for a winter vacation however may not contact us until September. We also get a lot of last minute business because of our AdWords.

Do AdWords work? Definately! Use those negative keywords to sort of the chaff.

[edit_g]

Remember misspellings - travel is a real playground when it comes to misspellings - you'd be surprised at how many people can't spell things like mauritious, er... mauritius. ;)

If you're the first adword on one of these then the user can often just click on your adword rather than running the search again - and they're usually dirt cheap.