IAB Engage for Travel conference

[Read down for updates]

Live blogging some bits and bobs this morning.

Just finished a speech at the Internet Advertising Bureau's Engage for Travel conference, titled "Challenge for Advertisers with Travel 2.0".

Plenty of nods in the audience when talking about ad budgets and engaging so-called Web 2.0 sites such as blogs and social networks. One of the people I spoke to when writing the speech said there is a real sense that experimental advertising is being reigned in, favouring the measurable - i.e. search and affiliate advertising - marketing campaigns.

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Lewis Lenssen of Netizen Digital: measure the effectiveness of offline brand campaigns with a strong pay-per-click advertising push.

Price and product are still king. If the product is poor you'll get found out still.

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Russell Gould, Thomas Cook:

The TCG ecommerce four-point plan - 1) customer acquisition 2) customer retention and growth 3) customer conversion 4) measurement and optimisation. Simple?

Engagement hugely important: maintaining contact constantly (and usefully) with the customer, primarily through email marketing.

Gould is "stunned" by the impact of video on conversion rates on thomascook.com. User who looks at video converts at 30% higher than those who don't.

40% of people that clicked on the recently Thomas Cook interactive magazine then went to the website, via the Book Now buttons.

Gould invites delegates to try the new Beta thomascook.com.

User reviews coming. Not Tripadvisor. Will use negative and positive reviews, will moderate against profanity, etc.

Best bit of the speech: personalised video demonstration.

Videos created live, simply by pulling together clips from the preferences put forward by the user. Very impressive.

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Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Predictive search on Google is here

Not ready for the UK just yet (our Google guy tells us), but the predictive search function which has been knocking about for a few years under the title of Google Suggest is finally up and running on Google.com.

In simple terms, as a user enters a series of keywords into the main search box, suggestions and the number of results are included underneath.

NB: Google toolbar has had the feature for a while, minus the result count.

Analysis and more on SearchEngineLand.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Google without the Google bits

Many searches on Google these days aggregate Google-related results, such as Youtube videos, Knol data and Blogger content - sites, which by amazing coincidence, have a high page rank.

Step forward Google Minus Google, a site which strips out the Google stuff and presents apparently pure internet search results.

But as one commenter on John Battelle's blog (hat-tip, ta), says:

I see that this site still contains ads by google!

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Every face tells a story

Thankfully the headline is not a reference to the, er, classic Cliff Richard single from 1997, but describes quite nicely the results of the Oban Multilingual 'Face of Global Search' survey.

Following the release today of the survey looking at online travel search habits, Greig Holbrook, director of Oban Multilingual, has also penned some analysis of the results:

What the results clearly show is that travel search is a very culturally diverse activity and that search plays a huge part in both the research and purchase of holidays for global travellers.

The growth in Chinese on the web has been phenomenal and reflects the fact that over 900 million people on the web don't speak English (around 70%).

Ninety-nine percent of those people who took part in the research indicated that they have booked travel online at some point. This once again reflects the fact that globally, people are becoming increasingly familiar with booking their travel online.

This means that suppliers not only need to cater from them in their own language but also, as much as possible, allow them to buy successfully from the site. This means the sites need to be very well localised to reflect all search and online purchase behaviours.

Chinese travel searchers don't seem to want to use Google, often preferring their own engines like Baidu much more. With the huge increase in Chinese searchers actually buying online in 2006-2007, it makes more sense than ever to make sure that optimisation for China is focused on local search engines.

It is not surprising that travellers going to different place are looking for different web features. International travel searchers are becoming more specific in their online behaviours so that in addition to multilingual web optimisation, global social media optimisation also needs to take place. In this context, a site properly optimised social media that is visible to a variety of cultures will prosper.

The finding that those who look for multilingual websites tend to avoid Google reflects the fact that international searchers are increasingly demanding good quality multilingual sites which are visible in their own search engines and not simply on Google, as Google is very often not the preferred engine or method for sourcing travel bookings.

In terms of Spanish people travelling to the UK, we have already found that travel sites often fail to provide good optimisation in Spanish for visitors who are seeking to visit the UK.

Spanish people may use some English phrases to search or they may use Spanish, but very few travel sites provide them with the experience they need so they are often forced to use English sites.

There is a great opportunity for travel companies to tap into the demand for travel from Spanish searchers; both for holidays within Spain and for travelling elsewhere like the UK.

Greig Holbrook, director, Oban Multilingual

What happened to the Long Tail of search?

Many of us will remember how, just a few years ago, many search engines and digital marketing agencies espoused the benefits of bidding for long tail search queries.

It was widely believed in some circles – indeed, some evangelised continuously – that users would gradually use a selection of keywords when searching, especially for travel products.

The theory went that search phrases such as “holiday rome”, for example, would be replaced by something along the lines of “city break rome pantheon april gatwick four star”.

There were some who even suggested long tail search queries would transform keyword bidding and SEO practices within two years.

So did it happen?

The MD of a London-based search agency, whom we met with yesterday, suggests it has not at all.

Consumers, our man with the data tells us, are refining their search phrase each time, rather than using long tail search queries to find specific travel product if they do not find appropriate results the first time.

For example: “holiday rome” becomes “city break rome” or “weekend away vatican” or “hotel rome weekend”. The use of lengthy and detailed phrases to hopefully narrow the number of results just hasn’t proven popular as many first believed.

What are the reasons for this?

Consumers may be sceptical that long, meandering search phrases do not return the required and, most importantly, quality information.

Secondly, users have perhaps found that refining the initial search with more detail is a far more successful method.

Or it could be something else entirely.

Indeed, these could be the wildly incorrect thoughts of a crazy digital marketer, so any additional comments readers have would be much appreciated.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Google search trademark - Open Thread

It feels like we've reached a pivotal moment in the long running Google saga.

A new dedicated page - The Google brand name policy switch - on the main Travolution website has all the articles and blog posts over the past six weeks, plus a selection of other articles from around the web and resources for advertisers and agencies.

But now it's time for a discussion. Use the comments section to kickstart the debate.

* What has been the impact on your business so far?
* Do you support Teletext or Directline?
* Are you a 'little guy' enjoying the chance to spread your message into new channels?
* Would you join a cross-industry challenge against Google?

Or

* Why can't we just move on...?

Full coverage here.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Future growth in display, not search

Or so says, Tim Brown, managing director of Blue Lithium EU.

The forecast came during a forum on ad networks at the AOP this week.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: PPC display advertising AOP

First official legal threat in travel over trademark bidding

To end a pretty turbulent week in the world of Google pay-per-click, Teletext issued a statement last night threatening any company with legal action if it bids on the word "teletext".

As far as we are aware this is the first legal challenge made public by any travel company in the UK.

You can see who is still bidding on the word "teletext" by clicking here. At least one major travel company pulled its ad less than an hour after the threat being issued, so it worked.

It brings to a close one of the most bizarre weeks in recent memory for search marketers as companies have been forced to decide whether to bid against rivals and protect their brand name by throwing money into the system to ensure their own ads are not out-bid.

Or sit tight and see how the market reacts...

But throw another spanner in the works in the form of supposed "gentleman's agreements" (we revealed this a few weeks back), which some believe may be contravening competition laws, and the issue starts getting very messy indeed.

An email last night from one chief executive summed up the week and the feeling of many pretty well:

"Lawyers will get rich, Google will get richer - a pain for us all. Big brands will defend, little ones will exploit - a mess."

Our prediction is that the ease with which Google made the switch in the US in 2004 will not be replicated so smoothly here in the UK.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: trademark PPC

Now who works in an office like this?

[Said in a Loyd Grossman drawl]


Well, it could only be those wacky folk at Google.

These are the offices of the search giant's HQ in Zurich. Guided video tour on the BBC.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Search within search - Google's big move on 2008

In typical Google fashion - i.e. no fanfare apart from a blog post - a new piece of functionality is now up and running on the main Google search pages.

Users will now be able to see the search box for a host website included in results for some brand names.

Here's an example:


A user can then type in "Paris" into the second search box and obtain results only from Hilton.co.uk, as seen below:


E-Consultancy points out an interesting issue to all this. Some sites might not be too happy about this as they rely on people using their sites for search as a source of customer behaviour data.

Anyway, we have been trying a few things out and so far have discovered that none of the main UK meta search engines/price comparison sites have the sub-box so far.

In hotels, Hilton, Marriott and Premier Inn do. Sheraton and Travelodge do not.

Airlines: thumbs-up for Ryanair. Not so for EasyJet, BA and Virgin Atlantic.

Big operators/verticals sees Thomas Cook get a box, but not Thomson, Kuoni or Cosmos.

OTAs: Expedia, Opodo, TravelRepublic, Ebookers and STA Travel do not, but Lastminute.com does.

So what's the criteria for whether a box appears or not?

Google says:

Through experimentation, we found that presenting users with a search box as part of the result increases their likelihood of finding the exact page they are looking for.

So over the past few days we have been testing, and today we have fully rolled out, a search box that appears within some of the search results themselves.

This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site. Like the rest of our snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users.

One of the interesting things about this is that brand name searches are, by all accounts, still extremely popular despite a supposed surge in online activity by supplier and intermediaries.

Another is will sites be disadvantaged if they CANNOT have their search box included? Not sure...

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: google
search

SES London - Keep an eye on the brand

If you have ever seen a presentation on SEM you will almost certainly have seen the heat map showing where users' eyes go.

The classic screen shows quite clearly a red cloud in the top left indicating that the top three organic (or paid if up there) listings get the eyeballs.

Well that's all changed. Now with blended search, often referred to as Universal search as in Google Universal, where images, vidoes, news, blogs, maps etc appear in the listings the eyeballs are attracted to other areas of the screen.

See Enquiro Research.

Simply put, an image on position #4, for example, grabs attention above (or should that be below) and beyond the top three listings.

This is a great opportunity to get exposure through social media optimisation.

Travel operators can as such grab the eyeballs then the clicks through placement of GOOD and tagged pictures/videos of resorts on Flickr, YouTube.

But there's a “but”. It also means that Reputation Management is more important now then ever.

Bad reports whether in blogs, on YouTube or in mainstream media will shoot into the SERPs on your brand name complete with imagery. And don't think it can't happen to you.

In the next five years 83% of companies will face a crisis that will negatively affect their share price by 20-30%, according to Oxford Metrica.

Datamonitor report that 33% of people who lose trust in a brand will actively campaign on the internet against that company - and that figure is on the rise.

The lesson is simple you need to be ready to deal with a crisis far more rapidly then before - quite how you do that get's a little more complex...

That's my last blog from SES so sorry to finish on an alarmist note but if there's one lesson from these three days it's that, now more then ever and for good and for bad, you can't take your (tracked) eye off your brand on the internet.

Matt Brocklehurst, marketing director, Latitude Group

SES London - SEM Cool tools & tricks

I've been told that if you're over 30 you should stop using the word cool and this probably counts double if you're talking about search engine marketing.

Anyway, leading on from the top travel marketing tips I presented at a recent Travolution seminar, here are some cool tools & tricks I picked up at SES on Wednesday that may help you get some quick and often cheap wins.

1. If you write a blog make sure you register it at Google, Google blog search, Yahoo, DMOZ and others as well as syndicate - check out Syndic8.com.

2. So you know that if you have GOOD video content you share it on YouTube and tag it and you probably know that you should use other video sites but don't have the time. Go to Tubemogul.com where one upload is sent out to 12+ video sites - and it's tagged.

3. Find out who the most popular/influential blogger in your travel sector and charm him/her to be a guest blogger for your site.

4. Need inspiration for a blog - how about interviewing someone, writing a book review, a "how-to" or a survey.

5. Want a free/cheap tool to see where on the page people are clicking on your site? Try Bunnyfoot and Crazyegg.

Also Google web site analyser will help you optimise conversions.

I've not had a chance to try all these myself yet but they're certainly worth investigating.

Matt Brocklehurst, marketing director, Latitude Group

SES London - MicroHoo: The Big Switch view

Now this is what I call a great way to start the day.

Nick Carr, author of the Big Switch, gave the keynote address here this morning at SES. OK, it was a video recording from the US but it was that good it got a round of applause (including me) which felt a little strange!

I've never clapped a video before.

Still it was filmed specially for SES and it offered a perspective on the Microsoft Yahoo deal which makes sense.

His view is that computing and software is increasingly being used on the web with documents saved there as opposed to downloading the software to your PC.

Related to this is the trend for software providers becoming more and more like media companies offering their software (content) for free or cheap to consumers, relying on ad revenue for their profits.

So here's the rub - if this continues where does this leave Microsoft?

Could the giant have its carpet pulled from it?

They can't take that risk obviously. They need web properties, distribution networks and social sites. Hello Yahoo!.

The other gem from Nick was that this trend could produce a digital elite. Take Craigs List which sells more ads then many traditional, massive media concerns.

Employees? 20. Skype which now serves more customers then BT has only 200 employees compared to BT's and other telco's thousands.

And YouTube only had 60 employees when bought by Google for 1.6 billion.

The recent lay-offs from Yahoo! take on a slightly different light now.

Matt Brocklehurst, marketing director, Latitude Group

Technorati tags: microsoft yahoo google skype youtube

SES London - Cash in China; Mobile in Japan

Boy, search is complex in Asia.

In Japan keyword choice is made that bit more difficult in that the same word will have multiple spellings.

Venice, for example, has six well used versions so you need to make some informed decisions on which version(s) you use on your site.

Japan has a different no 1 SE - Yahoo with 47 million users per month to Google’s 27 and Rakuten's 27.

The number 1 social network is not MySpace or Facebook but Mixi with 17 million users.

But probably the most intriguing fact is that more people in Japan now access the
internet via mobile then PC.

But China, forecast to overtake the US in internet users this year, really takes the biscuit (I would say Fortune Cookie but apparently these don't exist in China and are actually made in Mexico).

China search is dominated by Baidu.

This is very different from Google, not least in that paid inclusions sit at the top of the 'natural results' yet 90% of users don't realise they're paid for.

On the subject of paying most Chinese still prefer to pay in cash.

Particularly in travel with 60% of online transactions on C-Trip (the Chinese 'equiv' of Expedia) involving cash on demand that involves a man on a moped arriving at the online buyers doorstep, getting the cash then handing over the tickets.

This will change as credit cards are growing but, in the meantime, this is a stark example of just how different internet business really is in China.

Matt Brocklehurst, marketing director, Latitude Group

SES London - Google is really big!

The annual Search Engines Strategies gig in London this week is considered to be one of the biggest events in the calendar for digital marketers.

Our man with the laptop and a keen eye for new business new thinking on SEO is Matt Brocklehurst from Latitude Group.

He'll be sending a number of despatches throughout the three-day event.

Number 1:

It's been global - content-wise but also every speaker seems to be from the US. Isn't that what SES New York is for?

Anyway, I've found out that, guess what, Google is big, I mean really big internationally.

Presentations looking at the global search market confirmed that in Europe Google is the no 1 Search Engine in every country save Russia with Yandex and Czech Republic with Seznam.

But no matter whether you’re in Belgium or Bosnia, one of the keys to doing well in the natural rankings is the more local your site appears the better Google likes it.

So look at getting national extensions, .fr, .de etc, links from other local sites and, of course, use the native language. You also need to be careful with your keywords.

The Google algorithm for English speaking websites is more advanced and will group together and recognise similar words such as tour, touring or tours.

Not so in other languages. Google maybe everywhere but to succeed internationally you need to treat it different in each market.

Matt Brocklehurst, marketing director, Latitude

Good to see someone has a sense of humour

Alex Bainbridge, clearly filled with enthusiasm after his appearance for Travolution at the Travel Technology Show last week, has written this cheeky post.

EXCLUSIVE: Google finally announces travel industry strategy - disintermediation.

Funny lad.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: google troogle

Kartoo - the most bizarre search engine ever

For sheer quirkiness, Kartoo.com would score ten out of ten.

On first look it looks and feels like many search engines. But once the keywords are entered all hell breaks loose.

This the result for "london berlin flight":


Kartoo describes itself as a visual meta search engine - which is correct, in some respects.

The user interface displays results in a kind of tag cloud/map environment, where users can select a result and then be deep-linked into the source site.

Hover over a link and additional information appears on the left hand site with links elsewhere into the site.

The site looks and feels, in some respects, like the product of a mad brainstorming session over a few bottles of wine - but is actually quite addictive. Which is obviously the point...

But we probably haven't done it justice in our description, so the best thing to do is go and play with it and report back here in the comments section.

NB: some further detail on the chaps behind Kartoo is availabile on Wikipedia.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: kartoo meta search travel search

Google says Microsoft-Yahoo deal would be trouble for the web

Google's only response to Microsoft's hostile approach for rival portal/search engine Yahoo! comes via a official blog post from David Drummond, senior vice president for corporate development and chief legal officer.

If anyone thought a deal between Microsoft and Yahoo! would be plain sailing... think again.

In fact, Google's comments are nothing short of hostile.

Drummond says:

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies - and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft - despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses - to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet? In addition, Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web email accounts.

The gloves are off.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Yahoo+Microsoft - travel sites in the UK probably won't care too much

Clearly the biggest story kicking about today concerns Microsoft's "audacious" (or so says the MediaGuardian, which loves the hyperbole of it all) bid for Yahoo!.

Microhoo or YaSoft? Both sound rubbish.

A letter to the Yahoo! board last night proposed a £22.4 billion takeover of the company.

The Silicon Valley blogs are going crazy with excitement. [Excellent coverage of a Microsoft conference call]

From a search point of view you can see why the Americans can hardly contain themselves.

Yahoo share coupled with Microsoft's is around 33% of the market (Comscore), against Google's 58%, meaning it would certainly have a decent challenger in the US if the two combined.

In the UK, however, it would be a different story. Google currently commands between a 75% and 80% share of the market, depending on which measurement you use.

Nevertheless it completely dominates the search market here.

From a travel perspective I would hazard a guess that a takeover would hardly send digital marketers skipping happily into balmy sunset.

Almost everyone we have talked to in the past year or so has spoken admirably of Panama (YSM's search platform) and Microsoft's AdCenter - "but without the volumes there is not much point".

Where this proposed takeover might make a difference is in the area of portals.

Yahoo has a sizeable travel portal (and there's always Kelkoo!). Microsoft has the Live network.

Search plays a part in the all this, but I wonder if the takeover is more of a way of reaching consumers with other services.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: yahoo microsoft google

What is the problem with Yahoo?

Some people would answer that question with these five words: 'it', 'will', 'never', 'be' and 'Google'.

One of the first sentences of an excellent article on ZDNet, written by Stefanie Olsen, goes like this:

If Yahoo could be placed on a psychiatrist's couch, the internet giant would be told it was suffering from an identity crisis.

Here in Europe the problem is even worse, with the site languishing even further behind the dreaded Google in terms of search traffic.

As the ZDNet article explains, Yahoo and its reasonably new CEO Jerry Yang - one of its co-founders - have a tough job on their hands.

In the meantime, employees are waiting anxiously to see if the widely rumoured job cuts are coming their way.

All is quiet in the UK. Tim Frankcom, who used to run travel for Yahoo and Kelkoo across Europe, has moved upwards in the Yahoo foodchain and has not been replaced.

Any questions about Yahoo and the fate of Kelkoo - a hot topic considering that Yahoo in the US has recently intergrated its highly rated Farechase into its travel channel - are met with a line about no comments ahead of financials.

Fair enough. The problem with not saying anything is that speculation mounts. And the market is talking a plenty...

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: yahoo google zdnet