Are TripAdvisor Business Listings Worth $5,000?

Posted on Sep 20, 2011 by Rick to Web Marketing

Hotel clients often ask us whether we think they should upgrade their TripAdvisor business listing. With a hefty price tag of $5,000 per year, it’s a good question. The answer is simple: maybe. Even though we think that TripAdvisor may be evil, let’s looks at this advertising opportunity a little more closely.

About TripAdvisor business listings

While the $5,000 per year price tag of an upgraded TripAdvisor may seem pretty steep, let’s first look at what you get and how they justify it.

1. First, you get a link to your website. This is the real value. At the end of the day, you want to direct prospective guests away from the overly competitive and chaotic TripAdvisor.com website to your website to try to score a direct booking.
2. Second, TA let’s you advertise a special offer. This offer displays in on your TripAdvisor listing page and also in a block called Special Offers which appears in the search results on TA. Basically, it means your TA page will get more exposure, especially if you’re sitting pretty as a top-ranked hotel in your neck of the woods.
3. Third, you can add other direct contact methods to your listing such as phone number, etc.
4. Lastly, your mobile listing is enhanced. This is great, particularly if your website is equipped to easily service mobile users. If not, it can be.

So, are TripAdvisor business listings worth it?

Of course, the answer depends on your business and it’s position and reviews in the TripAdvisor community. To find out without breaking the bank, follow these 2 simple steps. First, shell out $500 to upgrade your listing for one month (you don’t have to commit to a full year). You can do that here: http://www.tripadvisor.com/BusinessListings.Add your website, phone number and a special.

Once your listing has been live for a month, go into your Google Analytics account (if you don’t have one or have no clue how to use it, call 561.832.6262). Then, run a referring website report and switch to the eCommerce tab. Look for the ‘TripAdvisor.com’ line item.The report looks something like this:

If the revenue generated from your listing pays for the listing ($500) plus whatever profit margin you like to see, the ad worked and should consider a longer term investment. If not, don’t continue the ad and get out with minimal loss. While this tracking method isn’t perfect, it’s good enough to make a smart decision in my humble opinion. Arguments can certainly be made to the branding value of doing this but as self-proclaimed responsible marketer, I won’t recommend any media for which i can’t document ROI.

Who does TripAdvisor upgraded listings usually work for?

In general, you’re going to generate the most revenue from direct bookings from TA if your hotel is ranked well in your city. Logic dictates that the more traffic your listing gets, the more traffic your website will and thus, the more bookings. So, if you’re Top 5 in your city, this is definitely worth a try. If not, it still may be worth a try as a good special offer may compensate for your poor ranking within the TA community.

One (probably obvious) afterthought- try this test at a time when your recent TA customer reviews are pretty solid. Bad reviews mean few clicks to your site… Questions? @rickmagoo or comment below.

Tags: hotel marketing, media buying, tripadvisor

Why Hotels Should Stop Using TripAdvisor’s Rating Widget

Posted on Mar 26, 2010 by Rick to SEO

Having done a fair amount of marketing for various hotels, I’ve dealt with TripAdvisor often enough to have a pretty strong opinion about appropriate ways to interact with TripAdvisor. We’ve seen a number of clients take different approaches to implementing their own TripAdvisor stats into hotel websites and we often recommend against the practice. Today, I want to touch on the topic of why utilizing the TripAdvisor widget can possibly hurt your business with regards to both the impact it can have on your traffic and more importantly, your conversion rate. We’ll also briefly cover a few different ways for hotels to promote a good TripAdvisor ranking while minimizing or completely removing the harmful side-effects.

Helping TripAdvisor to ‘Own’ Your Brand Name

Go ahead and search for almost any hotel name on almost any search engine and you’ll probably notice that TripAdvisor.com appears in one of the first three spots. This not-so-gentle giant has done a brilliant job at competing with and sometimes even outranking hotels for searches related to THEIR OWN BRAND NAMES in the SERPs. As a result, it has become almost as important to have a good TripAdvisor rating as it is to rank well for keywords related to their hotel.

As with any search-saavy company, TripAdvisor has embedded somewhat ‘hidden’ SEO strategies in many of their product offerings, the most effective of which seems to be the infamous “free widget.” If you have been to any hotel’s website in the past few years, you’ve probably seen at least one variation of the widget. Most of the “free widgets” offered have a couple SEO friendly (for them!) things in common.

First, most of TripAdvisor’s wonderful widgets include a keyword-rich text link back to the hotel’s main listing on TripAdvisor. How does this help TripAdvisor? It provides a keyword-rich deep link using the hotel’s brand name, further improving the chances that TripAdvisor will rank highly for searches related to that hotel’s name. To be clear: Linking to TripAdvisor from your homepage, site-wide or wherever you choose display that widget helps improve the chances that TripAdvisor will compete with you for searches related to your own brand name. Additionally, the sheer volume of additional links which comes from these widgets continue to support TripAdvisor’s search domination of location specific keyword phrases.

“But I want to promote the fact that my hotel is one of the highest ranked hotels on TripAdvisor!”

Hooray for you! But highest ranked or not, using their standard widget can cause you to lose traffic to TripAdvisor by providing a link to their website. Once visitors click off your site through that link, they will be presented with a number of ads from your competitors and other travel agencies. By providing a link to your TripAdvisor page, you’re basically sending your own hard-earned website traffic to TripAdvisor will little chance of getting them back to book.

What can you do to promote your great TripAdvisor reviews without hurting your business?

• Good solution – Create your own image promotion which promotes your TripAdvisor prowess and make sure that it doesn’t link to TripAdvisor’s website. This solution is recommended for any hotel with a very good TripAdvisor rating.
• Another good solution – Don’t mention TripAdvisor at all. If your TripAdvisor reviews cause you to sit up and cry at night, it should be fairly obvious that the best move is to avoid the subject completely by saying NOTHING about TripAdvisor on your website.
• A mediocre solution  [Updated] – Use an iframe to display your widget and disallow (robots.txt) the widget file for all search engines – If for some reason your hands are bound by corporate nonsense and you can’t talk sense into your superiors, this solution will make them happy and, at the same time, will tell the search engines not to pass link credit on to TripAdvisor. Note: Users will not know the difference and will still be able to leave your website to visit TripAdvisor.

While you alone cannot completely control TripAdvisor’s search impact on your business or even its ranking for your brand name, you can certainly have some impact. Think globally, act locally and help prevent TripAdvisor from controlling your hotel’s future!

Tags: hotel marketing, SEO, tripadvisor