CloudBurst Consulting

A recent report from eMarketer reveals an interesting trend in the online travel market. While U.S. travel booked online will reach $105 billion this year, fewer travelers are booking their trips online. eMarketer’s take is that customer dissatisfaction with online travel agencies is a result of unfriendly booking engines and navigation tools.

At CloudBurst Consulting we alway recommend that hotel and travel industry clients to look at their web reservations systems from a guest’s point-of-view. They are, after all, the point of conversion. So you would think that reservations systems would be tested during design and implementation phases, but this doesn’t seem to be happening – we know of several widely used “out-of-the-box” solutions that are anything but user-friendly. Customers become frustrated and go elsewhere, or revert to the phone to make their booking (which ultimately costs more to service than an online booking).

The sad truth is that travel and hospitality clients get stuck with systems that quickly become outdated and remain inflexible, presented as mysterious “black boxes” that lock them into vendor relationships that limit their revenue growth. Ultimately, this doesn’t work for the clients, and certainly not for their prospective guests, as the eMarketer report makes clear.

While testing all elements of a travel website from a user’s perspective is a very good idea; selecting a reservations system that provides flexible and customizable interface tools is essential. With today’s more application-oriented web, it’s possible to build systems that are responsive to customer interactions, predicting and supporting them intuitively.

The eMarketer reports the growth of examples like Zicasso.com and Tripology which help travelers interested in exotic locales find travel agents with specialist knowledge that can tailor trips to specific interests and needs.

Google has released a new tool allowing for even more exploration of specific keyword information.  Google Insights for Search allows users to see search volume, seasonality, geographic distribution and much more for specific keyword phrases going back as far as 2004.  For anyone who’s ever needed to know weather it’s better to target one phrase or another with their website, Insights allows for unprecedented analysis of actually data from the search giant’s history. 

As an example, see the charts below that displays the relative search volumes and geographic interests and  for the keyword phrases “buy kites,” “kite stores” and “kites to buy” worldwide since 2004.

Google Insights for Search Volume Graph

Google Insights for Search Geographic Data

The tool is also capable of displaying top related searches and top rising search terms for related phrases and is capable of making comparisons of keywords within specific categories and even drilling down to city level for anywhere in the world.  There is a lot of powerful information here that can help any company determine if they’re chasing the right rankings, so what are you waiting for, get some data!

A recent article on iMediaConnection.com asks the provocative question, “do users really watch TV online?” The majority of reported research studies indicate that most viewing of video content on the computer, rather than the TV, can be considered video “snacking” – the watching of short clips, typified by the 3-5 minute spots found on YouTube.

But a new study from Integrated Media Management, a company that monitors media consumption, indicates that this behavior is changing. In fact, nearly half of the users who watch television shows online are doing so to replace their traditional offline TV consumption. This is a significant finding which has implications for all advertisers and content producers in both the offline and online worlds. (Among our own group, one of the CloudBurst Consulting team has replaced cable TV with a computer hooked up to Netflix and Apple’s iTunes).

Amanda Welsh, co-founder and SVP of research for IMMI, is quoted in the imediaconnection article as saying:

“Everyone’s been talking about the internet becoming a substitute for TV; however, this is the first single-source passive data to show that the migration from one platform to another is actually occurring – and it’s happening fast.”

It is perhaps timely that the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Digital Video Committee published a video format and best practices document earlier this year. The DVC details three main kinds of video ads: in-stream (ad formats related to a video player); in-banner (video ads you access through a banner); and in-text (you scroll over a word, and it plays a video ad that is contextually relevant to the content).

While most advertising agencies have an understanding of traditional TV, few appreciate the technical complexities of the digital video space. While in the online arena, most planners understand banners, short-form rich media and paid search – but not necessarily the emotional connection that longer-form video content can provide, and the opportunities for creative integration.

What’s needed now is a concerted effort by both traditional and digital agencies alike to ensure that the potential of online video is realized, which ultimately will be mutually beneficial for clients and ourselves. The whole industry has a responsibility to get up to speed with the technology as TV dollars continue to migrate to digital video: that means grassroots education with traditional and digital agencies coming together in a spirit of collaboration and cooperation.

Recently, YouTube revealed a feature that allows anyone to view additional information about uploaded videos.  The feature, dubbed “Insight,” allows video owners to view demographic and activity data for any of their uploaded clips including statistics for views, where viewers came from, gender and age.

As an online marketer, this is extremely useful information.  YouTube videos can be a great way to expose your brand or service and knowing how well they’re performing is key.  Before Insight, the only concrete way to measure popularity for a video was to track the amount of comments it received.  This was often misleading.

As an example, a personal video I had uploaded two years ago had received only a couple of comments.  It was a pointless 5-second clip of a stick figure humorously falling that I had created on my PC.  After Insight became available I checked the statistics and what I saw surprised me: views of the video were dormant until May 17th of this year when they shot up, peaking to 30 views per day on June 21st!  The video is still receiving 10-25 views per day.

Here’s what the view tracking and demographics statistics sections of Insight looks like:

Here’s a screenshot of the geographic data Insight provides:

Ex-Googlers have just launched a new search engine called Cuil (“cool”) – and where did they come up with that wordB The name comes from a Gaelic word for “knowledge” which seems very appropriate for a search engine.

Similar to what Google is touting, not surprisingly the founders say that Cuil “indexes the web more comprehensively than anything that came before it.” Interesting to note that on the first day the engine was live, it seems as if it has already indexed 121,617,892,992 web pages. Be sure to check and see if your site is listed!

One difference that supposedly separates Cuil from Google is that the engine “can purportedly understand the context of a page and the intentions behind search requests.” Additionally, the search engine does not retain data on users a slight difference from Google maintaining a database of user information for as long as 18 months.

So you might want to check it out and see if you think it has a chance to challenge the mighty Google.

A couple of days ago Adobe officially announced that they had created a way for Google and Yahoo (sorry, Microsoft) to read all of the content inside Flash animations on the Web.  Is this really the end of SEO people nagging everyone to avoid Flash or at the least relegate it to only graphics?

Unfortunately it’s not the “hole-in-one” solution Adobe is promoting it as.  The long-time problem with Adobe’s Flash technology is that content within it (like text and individual images) has been very difficult for the search engines to extract.  Google was able to pull in some of the words in Flash files previously but for the most part 90% of any Flash file was unreadable to a search engine spider/robot.

At least now all of the content contained in a Flash file can at least be extracted.  One big problem still remains, the content isn’t assigned to any particular web pages.  For instance, if you own www.catpaintings.com but your entire website is contained in a Flash file, there are no unique page names or URLs associated with each section.  So the page containing content about oil paintings of cats would get lumped together with every other section of the website.  Google still sees a Flash website as one big singular page.  So optimizing the content can still on result in one or two listings for any search term.

This also creates a usability problem.  If a user finds content listed on Google that’s contained in a Flash website and they click on it, they’re not brought to that specific section but rather have to start at the beginning of the website and find their way to the right area.

So while this a good step in the right direction, it is still very advisable to use Flash sparingly, never for content and only within existing HTML pages.  The good news is that if you already have a Flash website, you may see a jump in your Google rankings (and eventually Yahoo, whenever they get around to implementing Adobe’s new technology), although don’t expect your website visitors to easily find what they’re looking for once they get to your site.

[More Details Here]

If you know the demographics of your target audience and want to place your ad in front of them when they are surfing around the Internet, you might be interested in a new, FREE, media-planning tool that Google is poised to launch.  Why would we be surprised that Google is getting in to this – after all, they do own DoubleClick – which makes for a perfect setting for this new tool.  “Simply enter demographics and sites associates with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit,” wrote the Google AdWords blog.

It will also be possible to get more detailed information about a particular site (demographics and related searches) or even get aggregate statistics for the sites you are considering for your media plan.  You can narrow down the country, language, gender, age, education and household income.  Unfortunately, there is one drawback, the ad placement cannot be purchased but (of course) they make it very convenient to export the data to platforms like Google’s DoubleClick.

As of today, there is no indication as to when this tool will be launching, but I’m going to be in line to give it a test drive –

So many details provided in this image…look at all that gear! Pictured is one of the cars Google outfits for its Street View feature on Maps, where you can get a ground-level view of certain areas of the U.S. It appears that Google uses Toyota Prius Hybrids in this effort, which is better for everyone…except maybe unaware members of law enforcement.

[Credit to The San Francisco Citizen for pointing this out]

A bit ahead of its originally-stated launch date of June 15th, Google has begun taking how fast or slow your website or landing page loads as a significant factor in determining ranking for pay-per-click campaigns on AdWords. You can see your ad or ad groups’ load time grades form within AdWords. Tons of more info is available on the official Help page from Google.

I think some interesting things to note are that:

        · An entire ad group’s load time grade is based on the *slowest* destination URL in that ad group.

        · Google rates your load time by comparing it to the the average load time of other pages in the geographic region where you’re website’s server is located – regardless of it’s domain or target (i.e. if you have a website all about American travel but it’s hosted in the Philippines, it’ll be graded against other websites in the Philippines).

Overall the goal is to obviously improve things for Google’s users but in my experience so far with Google’s load time analysis I’ve discovered that they can be very demanding. We have some AdWords campaigns for websites that are on par with many other e-commerce websites’ load times. Google still flagged some of the ads and we must have been within seconds of their required maximum but our adds were turned off until we demonstrated that there really wasn’t a reasonable amount of delay in load time. If you’ve ever dealt with Google’s support via email you know that this can be a slow process.

Improving things for users is always good but unfortunately Google offers little in the way of advice on how to improve a web page’s load time. The solutions they list in the help document amount to ‘ask your web designer or hosting provider.’

As the use of the r word becomes increasingly prevalent in media reports about the domestic economy, the recently released state of the market survey report from SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, reveals that search engine advertisers value increasingly sophisticated targeting tactics.

The report reveals that four out of every five respondents are willing to increase their online advertising budget in order to add behavioral targeting to their pay-per-click campaigns.

Behavioral targeting delivers ads based on online users’ past search behavior and can help organizations reach users as they approach a buying decision, potentially leading to more conversions. For example, if you’ve recently been reviewing Orlando hotel websites as part of your vacation planning, but then go to a news website for local weather information, it’s possible to deliver an ad for an Orlando hotel to that news site based upon your earlier search criteria. Behavioral advertising targets ads based on your visits to topic-specific websites and subscriptions to these sites; your registration and user-generated profiles for chosen subjects, content and shopping categories also provide opportunities for advertisers to deliver behavioral ads.

As the domestic economic downturn focuses the minds of marketers everywhere, we’re going to be seeing more importance placed on maximizing return on advertising spend. The SEMPO report also reflects what we’ve been seeing for some time – traditional advertising budgets migrating online, with print dollars being diverted in order for organizations to engage in effective and measurable search strategies.