Making directory renewal decisions

[swirt]

This data really indicates some of the points I've been trying to get across. For instance, if we applied even a 10% conversion rate to these figures (which is probably low since they already take into account an action but is good enough to illustrate), then there would have been roughly 143 reservations from all of these sites combined. At $300 average rez (which is roughly the PAII figure reported across the industry), then all of this in total represents $42,900 in revenue in the innkeepers pocket. Clearly these numbers are not going to be exact, but if applied across all the sites/traffic, they work for comparison sake.
Isolating this for just BedandBreakfast.com and BBonline, then the BedandBreakfast.com reservations were worth $19,500 (650 actions, 10% converting into rez, $300/rez), and BBonline worth $8700 (291 actions, 10% converting to rez, $300/rez). Taking out the costs, BedandBreakfast.com put a net $19.5K - $750, or $18,750, and BBonline put in a total of $8700 - $169, or $8531.
So last year the innkeeper had $42,900 in total revenue from all sites, and now by dropping BedandBreakfast.com because it is "too expensive", assuming nothing else changes, they will only have total revenue of $42,900 - $18,750 (the net revenue generated from bb.com) or $24,150. Had they kept BedandBreakfast.com, and dropped the cheaper per click site BBonline, they would have ended up with $42,900 - $8531 (net rev lost from dropping bbonline), or $34,369.
So their wallet would have been a lot fatter by keeping the "expensive" directory.... (It would have been fattest by keeping them both I might add - which is what we always tell innkeepers. If I had an inn - you can bet I'd be listing it on more sites than just BedandBreakfast.com).
I used to work at an airline back in the early 90's during the last recession. We would cut costs like crazy... and I'll never forget some of the advice I got from a Sr. VP there. There was a lot of it, but two things really stand out. When we were cutting our routes back - he commented "great - our planes are all sitting down now - we are going to save ourselves right into bankruptcy..." because even though we were saving money on a lot of items - we weren't making money on them. And this thought really strikes home when you look at an analysis like this..

Your arguments are logical and make sense to me. The only problem is that the directory that cost $80 per year and resulted in 12 "actions"/goals and if as you approximate, 10% lead to 1 actual conversion could make a similar plea .... "Don't drop us, we brought you $300 for only an $80 investment." At some point you have to draw the line. So the question this innkeeper can now grapple with is do they want to draw the line at $20 per conversion or $3 per conversion or $0.51 per conversion.
It doesn't change anything about your argument but for clarification sake, the average advertised room rate is ~$120 per night for this particular B&B.
.

Your arguments are logical and make sense to me. The only problem is that the directory that cost $80 per year and resulted in 12 "actions"/goals and if as you approximate, 10% lead to 1 actual conversion could make a similar plea .... "Don't drop us, we brought you $300 for only an $80 investment." At some point you have to draw the line. So the question this innkeeper can now grapple with is do they want to draw the line at $20 per conversion or $3 per conversion or $0.51 per conversion.
It doesn't change anything about your argument but for clarification sake, the average advertised room rate is ~$120 per night for this particular B&B.

Good point on the lower numbers - if I understand you correctly, you are saying there is some point low enough where the return may not be material, and there is a cost in time to deal with everyone = may not be worth it. Very important as you can run yourself in circles trying to find good advertising. I also think that conversion does drop off a bit with the quality of sites. Although it wouldn't surprise me if the 10% ratio was low for the main sites. It is pretty easy to wire this up to measure the true actual reservations and revenue from any site if the booking engine supports it (both Webervations has, and so has Rezo, as do sme others).
The $300 I was looking at was from a PAII study - it was something like $150/night, 2 nights per booking. I'm probably not getting it exact, but close. So I believe using your numbers that number would be $240 - as the typical action (email, res request, etc.) would generate an average 2 night stay.
Taking the logic a step further... this is often where the decision comes in whether to go with Silver, Gold, Platinum. No doubt the cost per click for this property would be lower for Gold or Silver - and it is telling that they are getting that much business from the lowest BBonline listing level...
So lets say they dropped to Silver at roughly half the cost of Platinum. There clicks will drop without question, but generally not by the same % of pricing. Which some might think that means silver is a better value. Indeed if you looked at CPC or CPA then a property would claim a victory - they dropped their effective CPC by 20%!!!! But if they looked in their wallet, they would find that they saved $375 or so on membership (approximating due to diff in yearly/monthly)... but LOST roughly $6000 in revenue... (at my $300 average rez cost for consistency). So they just "saved" themselves into losing a net $5600+ in annual revenue.
My point being that evaluating marketing spend needs to be both on the return on investment and on the marginal gain of investing that extra dollar. In the above example, an inn increased their ROI but at the expense of losing revenue and ultimately being much worse off at the end of the year.
This is the type of evaluation that I feel often gets ignored as the focus is on cost-cost-cost....
.

I think it comes down to people having a finite idea in mind about how much they want to spend on advertising.
The question of platinum vs gold vs silver traffic is an interesting one. And again I think it all comes down to homework being done. The averages are too broad to help much. A town with only 4 properties half at platinum and half at silver I bet would see a pretty even distribution of clickthroughs without platinum being favored too heavilly.
Contrast that against a town with 30 properties with 5 at Platinum and I bet you'd find a much bigger difference in traffic between the levels.
The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.
Of course the way other end of the spectrum are inns who are the only property in the town and they go for Gold or Platinum .... I bet they would see no difference. (I just shake my head and wonder what they are thinking.)
(by the way, I'm not thinking the Bookingwiz . com popup is a good idea.)
.

The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.

We currently rotate platinum every hour... so there is no upper or lower. A property goes up and down the list every day. We used to do it on every search up until last summer - but we got consistent consumer complaints that the order would change so often they couldn't remember who they were looking at when they did another search! This happens within every level.

Of course the way other end of the spectrum are inns who are the only property in the town and they go for Gold or Platinum .... I bet they would see no difference. (I just shake my head and wonder what they are thinking.)

In some instances this may be true, however it gets back to the marginal spending argument. For the extra few hundred dollars, if you are really evaluating your total dollar return on investment (not just your ROI %), then there is a strong argument that by presenting your property in the best light will reap benefits. With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.
.

That's right, I forgot about you rotating the inns. Every hour is smart and fair. Good job.

With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.

Hmmm The difference being 10 photos vs 25photos on a town with only 1 B&B... I'd really like to see a split test done with that. I can't see that being worth the expense. Looking at your membership levels chart it seems that is the only difference on the guest side of things. Are their other differences I'm not thinking about?
It would be an informative test ... do you have a 1B&B town with someone at silver that you'd be willing to flip a coin every time the page loads as to whether they get silver or platinum display and then track the data?

 

[swirt]

swirt wrote: The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.
That is why B&B.com sells FEATURED listings. The Upper Upper Platinum. If you have 38 B&B's in one town then you would be forced to do featured listings.
In my town I am it, to be platinum is silly, I am still it, to do featured listings, I am still it..

I've done the featured listing but have no idea if it brought any more or different biz. It would help if the clickthru showed it was from the regular listing or the featured listing.
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).

 

[JunieBJones (JBJ)]

This data really indicates some of the points I've been trying to get across. For instance, if we applied even a 10% conversion rate to these figures (which is probably low since they already take into account an action but is good enough to illustrate), then there would have been roughly 143 reservations from all of these sites combined. At $300 average rez (which is roughly the PAII figure reported across the industry), then all of this in total represents $42,900 in revenue in the innkeepers pocket. Clearly these numbers are not going to be exact, but if applied across all the sites/traffic, they work for comparison sake.
Isolating this for just BedandBreakfast.com and BBonline, then the BedandBreakfast.com reservations were worth $19,500 (650 actions, 10% converting into rez, $300/rez), and BBonline worth $8700 (291 actions, 10% converting to rez, $300/rez). Taking out the costs, BedandBreakfast.com put a net $19.5K - $750, or $18,750, and BBonline put in a total of $8700 - $169, or $8531.
So last year the innkeeper had $42,900 in total revenue from all sites, and now by dropping BedandBreakfast.com because it is "too expensive", assuming nothing else changes, they will only have total revenue of $42,900 - $18,750 (the net revenue generated from bb.com) or $24,150. Had they kept BedandBreakfast.com, and dropped the cheaper per click site BBonline, they would have ended up with $42,900 - $8531 (net rev lost from dropping bbonline), or $34,369.
So their wallet would have been a lot fatter by keeping the "expensive" directory.... (It would have been fattest by keeping them both I might add - which is what we always tell innkeepers. If I had an inn - you can bet I'd be listing it on more sites than just BedandBreakfast.com).
I used to work at an airline back in the early 90's during the last recession. We would cut costs like crazy... and I'll never forget some of the advice I got from a Sr. VP there. There was a lot of it, but two things really stand out. When we were cutting our routes back - he commented "great - our planes are all sitting down now - we are going to save ourselves right into bankruptcy..." because even though we were saving money on a lot of items - we weren't making money on them. And this thought really strikes home when you look at an analysis like this..

Your arguments are logical and make sense to me. The only problem is that the directory that cost $80 per year and resulted in 12 "actions"/goals and if as you approximate, 10% lead to 1 actual conversion could make a similar plea .... "Don't drop us, we brought you $300 for only an $80 investment." At some point you have to draw the line. So the question this innkeeper can now grapple with is do they want to draw the line at $20 per conversion or $3 per conversion or $0.51 per conversion.
It doesn't change anything about your argument but for clarification sake, the average advertised room rate is ~$120 per night for this particular B&B.
.

Your arguments are logical and make sense to me. The only problem is that the directory that cost $80 per year and resulted in 12 "actions"/goals and if as you approximate, 10% lead to 1 actual conversion could make a similar plea .... "Don't drop us, we brought you $300 for only an $80 investment." At some point you have to draw the line. So the question this innkeeper can now grapple with is do they want to draw the line at $20 per conversion or $3 per conversion or $0.51 per conversion.
It doesn't change anything about your argument but for clarification sake, the average advertised room rate is ~$120 per night for this particular B&B.

Good point on the lower numbers - if I understand you correctly, you are saying there is some point low enough where the return may not be material, and there is a cost in time to deal with everyone = may not be worth it. Very important as you can run yourself in circles trying to find good advertising. I also think that conversion does drop off a bit with the quality of sites. Although it wouldn't surprise me if the 10% ratio was low for the main sites. It is pretty easy to wire this up to measure the true actual reservations and revenue from any site if the booking engine supports it (both Webervations has, and so has Rezo, as do sme others).
The $300 I was looking at was from a PAII study - it was something like $150/night, 2 nights per booking. I'm probably not getting it exact, but close. So I believe using your numbers that number would be $240 - as the typical action (email, res request, etc.) would generate an average 2 night stay.
Taking the logic a step further... this is often where the decision comes in whether to go with Silver, Gold, Platinum. No doubt the cost per click for this property would be lower for Gold or Silver - and it is telling that they are getting that much business from the lowest BBonline listing level...
So lets say they dropped to Silver at roughly half the cost of Platinum. There clicks will drop without question, but generally not by the same % of pricing. Which some might think that means silver is a better value. Indeed if you looked at CPC or CPA then a property would claim a victory - they dropped their effective CPC by 20%!!!! But if they looked in their wallet, they would find that they saved $375 or so on membership (approximating due to diff in yearly/monthly)... but LOST roughly $6000 in revenue... (at my $300 average rez cost for consistency). So they just "saved" themselves into losing a net $5600+ in annual revenue.
My point being that evaluating marketing spend needs to be both on the return on investment and on the marginal gain of investing that extra dollar. In the above example, an inn increased their ROI but at the expense of losing revenue and ultimately being much worse off at the end of the year.
This is the type of evaluation that I feel often gets ignored as the focus is on cost-cost-cost....
.

I think it comes down to people having a finite idea in mind about how much they want to spend on advertising.
The question of platinum vs gold vs silver traffic is an interesting one. And again I think it all comes down to homework being done. The averages are too broad to help much. A town with only 4 properties half at platinum and half at silver I bet would see a pretty even distribution of clickthroughs without platinum being favored too heavilly.
Contrast that against a town with 30 properties with 5 at Platinum and I bet you'd find a much bigger difference in traffic between the levels.
The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.
Of course the way other end of the spectrum are inns who are the only property in the town and they go for Gold or Platinum .... I bet they would see no difference. (I just shake my head and wonder what they are thinking.)
(by the way, I'm not thinking the Bookingwiz . com popup is a good idea.)
.

The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.

We currently rotate platinum every hour... so there is no upper or lower. A property goes up and down the list every day. We used to do it on every search up until last summer - but we got consistent consumer complaints that the order would change so often they couldn't remember who they were looking at when they did another search! This happens within every level.

Of course the way other end of the spectrum are inns who are the only property in the town and they go for Gold or Platinum .... I bet they would see no difference. (I just shake my head and wonder what they are thinking.)

In some instances this may be true, however it gets back to the marginal spending argument. For the extra few hundred dollars, if you are really evaluating your total dollar return on investment (not just your ROI %), then there is a strong argument that by presenting your property in the best light will reap benefits. With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.
.

That's right, I forgot about you rotating the inns. Every hour is smart and fair. Good job.

With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.

Hmmm The difference being 10 photos vs 25photos on a town with only 1 B&B... I'd really like to see a split test done with that. I can't see that being worth the expense. Looking at your membership levels chart it seems that is the only difference on the guest side of things. Are their other differences I'm not thinking about?
It would be an informative test ... do you have a 1B&B town with someone at silver that you'd be willing to flip a coin every time the page loads as to whether they get silver or platinum display and then track the data?
.

That's right, I forgot about you rotating the inns. Every hour is smart and fair. Good job.

With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.

Hmmm The difference being 10 photos vs 25photos on a town with only 1 B&B... I'd really like to see a split test done with that. I can't see that being worth the expense. Looking at your membership levels chart it seems that is the only difference on the guest side of things. Are their other differences I'm not thinking about?
It would be an informative test ... do you have a 1B&B town with someone at silver that you'd be willing to flip a coin every time the page loads as to whether they get silver or platinum display and then track the data?

here's one in a one horse town.

 

[JunieBJones (JBJ)]

Funny I put in Roanoke Virginia and the only B&B listed there is not even in Roanoke, it is in Fincastle. http://www.bedandbreakfast.com/roanoke-virginia.html

 

[JBanczak]

This data really indicates some of the points I've been trying to get across. For instance, if we applied even a 10% conversion rate to these figures (which is probably low since they already take into account an action but is good enough to illustrate), then there would have been roughly 143 reservations from all of these sites combined. At $300 average rez (which is roughly the PAII figure reported across the industry), then all of this in total represents $42,900 in revenue in the innkeepers pocket. Clearly these numbers are not going to be exact, but if applied across all the sites/traffic, they work for comparison sake.
Isolating this for just BedandBreakfast.com and BBonline, then the BedandBreakfast.com reservations were worth $19,500 (650 actions, 10% converting into rez, $300/rez), and BBonline worth $8700 (291 actions, 10% converting to rez, $300/rez). Taking out the costs, BedandBreakfast.com put a net $19.5K - $750, or $18,750, and BBonline put in a total of $8700 - $169, or $8531.
So last year the innkeeper had $42,900 in total revenue from all sites, and now by dropping BedandBreakfast.com because it is "too expensive", assuming nothing else changes, they will only have total revenue of $42,900 - $18,750 (the net revenue generated from bb.com) or $24,150. Had they kept BedandBreakfast.com, and dropped the cheaper per click site BBonline, they would have ended up with $42,900 - $8531 (net rev lost from dropping bbonline), or $34,369.
So their wallet would have been a lot fatter by keeping the "expensive" directory.... (It would have been fattest by keeping them both I might add - which is what we always tell innkeepers. If I had an inn - you can bet I'd be listing it on more sites than just BedandBreakfast.com).
I used to work at an airline back in the early 90's during the last recession. We would cut costs like crazy... and I'll never forget some of the advice I got from a Sr. VP there. There was a lot of it, but two things really stand out. When we were cutting our routes back - he commented "great - our planes are all sitting down now - we are going to save ourselves right into bankruptcy..." because even though we were saving money on a lot of items - we weren't making money on them. And this thought really strikes home when you look at an analysis like this..

Your arguments are logical and make sense to me. The only problem is that the directory that cost $80 per year and resulted in 12 "actions"/goals and if as you approximate, 10% lead to 1 actual conversion could make a similar plea .... "Don't drop us, we brought you $300 for only an $80 investment." At some point you have to draw the line. So the question this innkeeper can now grapple with is do they want to draw the line at $20 per conversion or $3 per conversion or $0.51 per conversion.
It doesn't change anything about your argument but for clarification sake, the average advertised room rate is ~$120 per night for this particular B&B.
.

Your arguments are logical and make sense to me. The only problem is that the directory that cost $80 per year and resulted in 12 "actions"/goals and if as you approximate, 10% lead to 1 actual conversion could make a similar plea .... "Don't drop us, we brought you $300 for only an $80 investment." At some point you have to draw the line. So the question this innkeeper can now grapple with is do they want to draw the line at $20 per conversion or $3 per conversion or $0.51 per conversion.
It doesn't change anything about your argument but for clarification sake, the average advertised room rate is ~$120 per night for this particular B&B.

Good point on the lower numbers - if I understand you correctly, you are saying there is some point low enough where the return may not be material, and there is a cost in time to deal with everyone = may not be worth it. Very important as you can run yourself in circles trying to find good advertising. I also think that conversion does drop off a bit with the quality of sites. Although it wouldn't surprise me if the 10% ratio was low for the main sites. It is pretty easy to wire this up to measure the true actual reservations and revenue from any site if the booking engine supports it (both Webervations has, and so has Rezo, as do sme others).
The $300 I was looking at was from a PAII study - it was something like $150/night, 2 nights per booking. I'm probably not getting it exact, but close. So I believe using your numbers that number would be $240 - as the typical action (email, res request, etc.) would generate an average 2 night stay.
Taking the logic a step further... this is often where the decision comes in whether to go with Silver, Gold, Platinum. No doubt the cost per click for this property would be lower for Gold or Silver - and it is telling that they are getting that much business from the lowest BBonline listing level...
So lets say they dropped to Silver at roughly half the cost of Platinum. There clicks will drop without question, but generally not by the same % of pricing. Which some might think that means silver is a better value. Indeed if you looked at CPC or CPA then a property would claim a victory - they dropped their effective CPC by 20%!!!! But if they looked in their wallet, they would find that they saved $375 or so on membership (approximating due to diff in yearly/monthly)... but LOST roughly $6000 in revenue... (at my $300 average rez cost for consistency). So they just "saved" themselves into losing a net $5600+ in annual revenue.
My point being that evaluating marketing spend needs to be both on the return on investment and on the marginal gain of investing that extra dollar. In the above example, an inn increased their ROI but at the expense of losing revenue and ultimately being much worse off at the end of the year.
This is the type of evaluation that I feel often gets ignored as the focus is on cost-cost-cost....
.

I think it comes down to people having a finite idea in mind about how much they want to spend on advertising.
The question of platinum vs gold vs silver traffic is an interesting one. And again I think it all comes down to homework being done. The averages are too broad to help much. A town with only 4 properties half at platinum and half at silver I bet would see a pretty even distribution of clickthroughs without platinum being favored too heavilly.
Contrast that against a town with 30 properties with 5 at Platinum and I bet you'd find a much bigger difference in traffic between the levels.
The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.
Of course the way other end of the spectrum are inns who are the only property in the town and they go for Gold or Platinum .... I bet they would see no difference. (I just shake my head and wonder what they are thinking.)
(by the way, I'm not thinking the Bookingwiz . com popup is a good idea.)
.

The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.

We currently rotate platinum every hour... so there is no upper or lower. A property goes up and down the list every day. We used to do it on every search up until last summer - but we got consistent consumer complaints that the order would change so often they couldn't remember who they were looking at when they did another search! This happens within every level.

Of course the way other end of the spectrum are inns who are the only property in the town and they go for Gold or Platinum .... I bet they would see no difference. (I just shake my head and wonder what they are thinking.)

In some instances this may be true, however it gets back to the marginal spending argument. For the extra few hundred dollars, if you are really evaluating your total dollar return on investment (not just your ROI %), then there is a strong argument that by presenting your property in the best light will reap benefits. With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.
.

That's right, I forgot about you rotating the inns. Every hour is smart and fair. Good job.

With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.

Hmmm The difference being 10 photos vs 25photos on a town with only 1 B&B... I'd really like to see a split test done with that. I can't see that being worth the expense. Looking at your membership levels chart it seems that is the only difference on the guest side of things. Are their other differences I'm not thinking about?
It would be an informative test ... do you have a 1B&B town with someone at silver that you'd be willing to flip a coin every time the page loads as to whether they get silver or platinum display and then track the data?
.

That's right, I forgot about you rotating the inns. Every hour is smart and fair. Good job.

With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.

Hmmm The difference being 10 photos vs 25photos on a town with only 1 B&B... I'd really like to see a split test done with that. I can't see that being worth the expense. Looking at your membership levels chart it seems that is the only difference on the guest side of things. Are their other differences I'm not thinking about?
It would be an informative test ... do you have a 1B&B town with someone at silver that you'd be willing to flip a coin every time the page loads as to whether they get silver or platinum display and then track the data?

It would take some work... plus they likely wouldn't have 20 photos in place so it may be difficult. We do however, have a number of cities with 4 or less listings, where there are both platinums and silvers. Meaning everyone is right next to each other in the listings - and this gives a good proxy. Took a look at the city-only traffic for those properties (no 2nd listings, ONLY traffic from that page), and the platinum listings received over 30% more clicks to their detailed listing pages, and over 40% more clicks subsequently to the innkeepers own website.
Now this isn't an exhaustive analysis by any means - I'd have to look at every city, but it confirms what we generally hear. In one city I saw in NH, the Platinum member got 5X the views and click-throughs over the Silver member... In no city did the Silver ever come within 20% of the Platinum.
The other reason people often forget is that if you want a secondary city listing - it gets listed at the same level - so if you are near a competitive larger destination, then Platinum makes even more sense.
Don't get me wrong though - I'm not advocating everyone just go out and buy a Platinum listing (although Eric might give me a vacation if you all do...), but that there is more to it than meets the eye.
BTW - one other thing in your stats. We sent an average of 65 email/rez requests (we let properties post a button if they want on their listings) per year per property. These are behind a captcha wall - so pretty qood quality requests. These would not be counted in your conversion numbers since they don't touch innkeeper website functionality.

 

[JBanczak]

swirt wrote: The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.
That is why B&B.com sells FEATURED listings. The Upper Upper Platinum. If you have 38 B&B's in one town then you would be forced to do featured listings.
In my town I am it, to be platinum is silly, I am still it, to do featured listings, I am still it..

I've done the featured listing but have no idea if it brought any more or different biz. It would help if the clickthru showed it was from the regular listing or the featured listing.
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).

Not sure what you are referring to?

 

[swirt]

This data really indicates some of the points I've been trying to get across. For instance, if we applied even a 10% conversion rate to these figures (which is probably low since they already take into account an action but is good enough to illustrate), then there would have been roughly 143 reservations from all of these sites combined. At $300 average rez (which is roughly the PAII figure reported across the industry), then all of this in total represents $42,900 in revenue in the innkeepers pocket. Clearly these numbers are not going to be exact, but if applied across all the sites/traffic, they work for comparison sake.
Isolating this for just BedandBreakfast.com and BBonline, then the BedandBreakfast.com reservations were worth $19,500 (650 actions, 10% converting into rez, $300/rez), and BBonline worth $8700 (291 actions, 10% converting to rez, $300/rez). Taking out the costs, BedandBreakfast.com put a net $19.5K - $750, or $18,750, and BBonline put in a total of $8700 - $169, or $8531.
So last year the innkeeper had $42,900 in total revenue from all sites, and now by dropping BedandBreakfast.com because it is "too expensive", assuming nothing else changes, they will only have total revenue of $42,900 - $18,750 (the net revenue generated from bb.com) or $24,150. Had they kept BedandBreakfast.com, and dropped the cheaper per click site BBonline, they would have ended up with $42,900 - $8531 (net rev lost from dropping bbonline), or $34,369.
So their wallet would have been a lot fatter by keeping the "expensive" directory.... (It would have been fattest by keeping them both I might add - which is what we always tell innkeepers. If I had an inn - you can bet I'd be listing it on more sites than just BedandBreakfast.com).
I used to work at an airline back in the early 90's during the last recession. We would cut costs like crazy... and I'll never forget some of the advice I got from a Sr. VP there. There was a lot of it, but two things really stand out. When we were cutting our routes back - he commented "great - our planes are all sitting down now - we are going to save ourselves right into bankruptcy..." because even though we were saving money on a lot of items - we weren't making money on them. And this thought really strikes home when you look at an analysis like this..

Your arguments are logical and make sense to me. The only problem is that the directory that cost $80 per year and resulted in 12 "actions"/goals and if as you approximate, 10% lead to 1 actual conversion could make a similar plea .... "Don't drop us, we brought you $300 for only an $80 investment." At some point you have to draw the line. So the question this innkeeper can now grapple with is do they want to draw the line at $20 per conversion or $3 per conversion or $0.51 per conversion.
It doesn't change anything about your argument but for clarification sake, the average advertised room rate is ~$120 per night for this particular B&B.
.

Your arguments are logical and make sense to me. The only problem is that the directory that cost $80 per year and resulted in 12 "actions"/goals and if as you approximate, 10% lead to 1 actual conversion could make a similar plea .... "Don't drop us, we brought you $300 for only an $80 investment." At some point you have to draw the line. So the question this innkeeper can now grapple with is do they want to draw the line at $20 per conversion or $3 per conversion or $0.51 per conversion.
It doesn't change anything about your argument but for clarification sake, the average advertised room rate is ~$120 per night for this particular B&B.

Good point on the lower numbers - if I understand you correctly, you are saying there is some point low enough where the return may not be material, and there is a cost in time to deal with everyone = may not be worth it. Very important as you can run yourself in circles trying to find good advertising. I also think that conversion does drop off a bit with the quality of sites. Although it wouldn't surprise me if the 10% ratio was low for the main sites. It is pretty easy to wire this up to measure the true actual reservations and revenue from any site if the booking engine supports it (both Webervations has, and so has Rezo, as do sme others).
The $300 I was looking at was from a PAII study - it was something like $150/night, 2 nights per booking. I'm probably not getting it exact, but close. So I believe using your numbers that number would be $240 - as the typical action (email, res request, etc.) would generate an average 2 night stay.
Taking the logic a step further... this is often where the decision comes in whether to go with Silver, Gold, Platinum. No doubt the cost per click for this property would be lower for Gold or Silver - and it is telling that they are getting that much business from the lowest BBonline listing level...
So lets say they dropped to Silver at roughly half the cost of Platinum. There clicks will drop without question, but generally not by the same % of pricing. Which some might think that means silver is a better value. Indeed if you looked at CPC or CPA then a property would claim a victory - they dropped their effective CPC by 20%!!!! But if they looked in their wallet, they would find that they saved $375 or so on membership (approximating due to diff in yearly/monthly)... but LOST roughly $6000 in revenue... (at my $300 average rez cost for consistency). So they just "saved" themselves into losing a net $5600+ in annual revenue.
My point being that evaluating marketing spend needs to be both on the return on investment and on the marginal gain of investing that extra dollar. In the above example, an inn increased their ROI but at the expense of losing revenue and ultimately being much worse off at the end of the year.
This is the type of evaluation that I feel often gets ignored as the focus is on cost-cost-cost....
.

I think it comes down to people having a finite idea in mind about how much they want to spend on advertising.
The question of platinum vs gold vs silver traffic is an interesting one. And again I think it all comes down to homework being done. The averages are too broad to help much. A town with only 4 properties half at platinum and half at silver I bet would see a pretty even distribution of clickthroughs without platinum being favored too heavilly.
Contrast that against a town with 30 properties with 5 at Platinum and I bet you'd find a much bigger difference in traffic between the levels.
The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.
Of course the way other end of the spectrum are inns who are the only property in the town and they go for Gold or Platinum .... I bet they would see no difference. (I just shake my head and wonder what they are thinking.)
(by the way, I'm not thinking the Bookingwiz . com popup is a good idea.)
.

The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.

We currently rotate platinum every hour... so there is no upper or lower. A property goes up and down the list every day. We used to do it on every search up until last summer - but we got consistent consumer complaints that the order would change so often they couldn't remember who they were looking at when they did another search! This happens within every level.

Of course the way other end of the spectrum are inns who are the only property in the town and they go for Gold or Platinum .... I bet they would see no difference. (I just shake my head and wonder what they are thinking.)

In some instances this may be true, however it gets back to the marginal spending argument. For the extra few hundred dollars, if you are really evaluating your total dollar return on investment (not just your ROI %), then there is a strong argument that by presenting your property in the best light will reap benefits. With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.
.

That's right, I forgot about you rotating the inns. Every hour is smart and fair. Good job.

With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.

Hmmm The difference being 10 photos vs 25photos on a town with only 1 B&B... I'd really like to see a split test done with that. I can't see that being worth the expense. Looking at your membership levels chart it seems that is the only difference on the guest side of things. Are their other differences I'm not thinking about?
It would be an informative test ... do you have a 1B&B town with someone at silver that you'd be willing to flip a coin every time the page loads as to whether they get silver or platinum display and then track the data?
.

That's right, I forgot about you rotating the inns. Every hour is smart and fair. Good job.

With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.

Hmmm The difference being 10 photos vs 25photos on a town with only 1 B&B... I'd really like to see a split test done with that. I can't see that being worth the expense. Looking at your membership levels chart it seems that is the only difference on the guest side of things. Are their other differences I'm not thinking about?
It would be an informative test ... do you have a 1B&B town with someone at silver that you'd be willing to flip a coin every time the page loads as to whether they get silver or platinum display and then track the data?

It would take some work... plus they likely wouldn't have 20 photos in place so it may be difficult. We do however, have a number of cities with 4 or less listings, where there are both platinums and silvers. Meaning everyone is right next to each other in the listings - and this gives a good proxy. Took a look at the city-only traffic for those properties (no 2nd listings, ONLY traffic from that page), and the platinum listings received over 30% more clicks to their detailed listing pages, and over 40% more clicks subsequently to the innkeepers own website.
Now this isn't an exhaustive analysis by any means - I'd have to look at every city, but it confirms what we generally hear. In one city I saw in NH, the Platinum member got 5X the views and click-throughs over the Silver member... In no city did the Silver ever come within 20% of the Platinum.
The other reason people often forget is that if you want a secondary city listing - it gets listed at the same level - so if you are near a competitive larger destination, then Platinum makes even more sense.
Don't get me wrong though - I'm not advocating everyone just go out and buy a Platinum listing (although Eric might give me a vacation if you all do...), but that there is more to it than meets the eye.
BTW - one other thing in your stats. We sent an average of 65 email/rez requests (we let properties post a button if they want on their listings) per year per property. These are behind a captcha wall - so pretty qood quality requests. These would not be counted in your conversion numbers since they don't touch innkeeper website functionality.
.

We do however, have a number of cities with 4 or less listings, where there are both platinums and silvers. Meaning everyone is right next to each other in the listings - and this gives a good proxy.

Ahhh but that's different than your original premise. I think largely here you are looking at simple eye tracking studies (like the difference between being number 1 and number 3 in google.) Yes they are near each other, but the difference in traffic is huge.
I do wonder if there is a bit of property bias too in such a comparison. I mean what is the likelyhood that if you had 4 properties in town and 2 are platinum..what is the probability that the 2 platinums have their act together more than the other 2. Not so much because potential guests know the difference between a platinum and silver member, and not because the two platinums have more photos, but because an inn willing to spend $800 instead of $400 for advertising is just a little bit more on top of their game. Are they more likely to be the inn that would hire Jumping Rocks to do their photography while the silver is more likely to shoot their own photos and call them good enough.

 

[swirt]

swirt wrote: The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.
That is why B&B.com sells FEATURED listings. The Upper Upper Platinum. If you have 38 B&B's in one town then you would be forced to do featured listings.
In my town I am it, to be platinum is silly, I am still it, to do featured listings, I am still it..

I've done the featured listing but have no idea if it brought any more or different biz. It would help if the clickthru showed it was from the regular listing or the featured listing.
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).

Not sure what you are referring to?
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).

Not sure what you are referring to?

Bree's suggestion that it would be nice (if it isn't already doing it) for a n innkeeper to be able to track on their own tracker whether the click came from their "Inn of the month" listing or their silver listing on the same page.

 

[Morticia]

swirt wrote: The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.
That is why B&B.com sells FEATURED listings. The Upper Upper Platinum. If you have 38 B&B's in one town then you would be forced to do featured listings.
In my town I am it, to be platinum is silly, I am still it, to do featured listings, I am still it..

I've done the featured listing but have no idea if it brought any more or different biz. It would help if the clickthru showed it was from the regular listing or the featured listing.
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).

Not sure what you are referring to?
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).

Not sure what you are referring to?

My post:
I've done the featured listing but have no idea if it brought any more or different biz. It would help if the clickthru showed it was from the regular listing or the featured listing.

 

[JBanczak]

swirt wrote: The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.
That is why B&B.com sells FEATURED listings. The Upper Upper Platinum. If you have 38 B&B's in one town then you would be forced to do featured listings.
In my town I am it, to be platinum is silly, I am still it, to do featured listings, I am still it..

I've done the featured listing but have no idea if it brought any more or different biz. It would help if the clickthru showed it was from the regular listing or the featured listing.
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).

Not sure what you are referring to?
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).

Not sure what you are referring to?

My post:
I've done the featured listing but have no idea if it brought any more or different biz. It would help if the clickthru showed it was from the regular listing or the featured listing.
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).

Not sure what you are referring to?

My post:
I've done the featured listing but have no idea if it brought any more or different biz. It would help if the clickthru showed it was from the regular listing or the featured listing.

Gotcha. Google Analytics would show the actual link that was clicked on - and they are different. We report it in our internal numbers as well on your home base. So you should have two ways of seeing it.

 

[JBanczak]

This data really indicates some of the points I've been trying to get across. For instance, if we applied even a 10% conversion rate to these figures (which is probably low since they already take into account an action but is good enough to illustrate), then there would have been roughly 143 reservations from all of these sites combined. At $300 average rez (which is roughly the PAII figure reported across the industry), then all of this in total represents $42,900 in revenue in the innkeepers pocket. Clearly these numbers are not going to be exact, but if applied across all the sites/traffic, they work for comparison sake.
Isolating this for just BedandBreakfast.com and BBonline, then the BedandBreakfast.com reservations were worth $19,500 (650 actions, 10% converting into rez, $300/rez), and BBonline worth $8700 (291 actions, 10% converting to rez, $300/rez). Taking out the costs, BedandBreakfast.com put a net $19.5K - $750, or $18,750, and BBonline put in a total of $8700 - $169, or $8531.
So last year the innkeeper had $42,900 in total revenue from all sites, and now by dropping BedandBreakfast.com because it is "too expensive", assuming nothing else changes, they will only have total revenue of $42,900 - $18,750 (the net revenue generated from bb.com) or $24,150. Had they kept BedandBreakfast.com, and dropped the cheaper per click site BBonline, they would have ended up with $42,900 - $8531 (net rev lost from dropping bbonline), or $34,369.
So their wallet would have been a lot fatter by keeping the "expensive" directory.... (It would have been fattest by keeping them both I might add - which is what we always tell innkeepers. If I had an inn - you can bet I'd be listing it on more sites than just BedandBreakfast.com).
I used to work at an airline back in the early 90's during the last recession. We would cut costs like crazy... and I'll never forget some of the advice I got from a Sr. VP there. There was a lot of it, but two things really stand out. When we were cutting our routes back - he commented "great - our planes are all sitting down now - we are going to save ourselves right into bankruptcy..." because even though we were saving money on a lot of items - we weren't making money on them. And this thought really strikes home when you look at an analysis like this..

Your arguments are logical and make sense to me. The only problem is that the directory that cost $80 per year and resulted in 12 "actions"/goals and if as you approximate, 10% lead to 1 actual conversion could make a similar plea .... "Don't drop us, we brought you $300 for only an $80 investment." At some point you have to draw the line. So the question this innkeeper can now grapple with is do they want to draw the line at $20 per conversion or $3 per conversion or $0.51 per conversion.
It doesn't change anything about your argument but for clarification sake, the average advertised room rate is ~$120 per night for this particular B&B.
.

Your arguments are logical and make sense to me. The only problem is that the directory that cost $80 per year and resulted in 12 "actions"/goals and if as you approximate, 10% lead to 1 actual conversion could make a similar plea .... "Don't drop us, we brought you $300 for only an $80 investment." At some point you have to draw the line. So the question this innkeeper can now grapple with is do they want to draw the line at $20 per conversion or $3 per conversion or $0.51 per conversion.
It doesn't change anything about your argument but for clarification sake, the average advertised room rate is ~$120 per night for this particular B&B.

Good point on the lower numbers - if I understand you correctly, you are saying there is some point low enough where the return may not be material, and there is a cost in time to deal with everyone = may not be worth it. Very important as you can run yourself in circles trying to find good advertising. I also think that conversion does drop off a bit with the quality of sites. Although it wouldn't surprise me if the 10% ratio was low for the main sites. It is pretty easy to wire this up to measure the true actual reservations and revenue from any site if the booking engine supports it (both Webervations has, and so has Rezo, as do sme others).
The $300 I was looking at was from a PAII study - it was something like $150/night, 2 nights per booking. I'm probably not getting it exact, but close. So I believe using your numbers that number would be $240 - as the typical action (email, res request, etc.) would generate an average 2 night stay.
Taking the logic a step further... this is often where the decision comes in whether to go with Silver, Gold, Platinum. No doubt the cost per click for this property would be lower for Gold or Silver - and it is telling that they are getting that much business from the lowest BBonline listing level...
So lets say they dropped to Silver at roughly half the cost of Platinum. There clicks will drop without question, but generally not by the same % of pricing. Which some might think that means silver is a better value. Indeed if you looked at CPC or CPA then a property would claim a victory - they dropped their effective CPC by 20%!!!! But if they looked in their wallet, they would find that they saved $375 or so on membership (approximating due to diff in yearly/monthly)... but LOST roughly $6000 in revenue... (at my $300 average rez cost for consistency). So they just "saved" themselves into losing a net $5600+ in annual revenue.
My point being that evaluating marketing spend needs to be both on the return on investment and on the marginal gain of investing that extra dollar. In the above example, an inn increased their ROI but at the expense of losing revenue and ultimately being much worse off at the end of the year.
This is the type of evaluation that I feel often gets ignored as the focus is on cost-cost-cost....
.

I think it comes down to people having a finite idea in mind about how much they want to spend on advertising.
The question of platinum vs gold vs silver traffic is an interesting one. And again I think it all comes down to homework being done. The averages are too broad to help much. A town with only 4 properties half at platinum and half at silver I bet would see a pretty even distribution of clickthroughs without platinum being favored too heavilly.
Contrast that against a town with 30 properties with 5 at Platinum and I bet you'd find a much bigger difference in traffic between the levels.
The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.
Of course the way other end of the spectrum are inns who are the only property in the town and they go for Gold or Platinum .... I bet they would see no difference. (I just shake my head and wonder what they are thinking.)
(by the way, I'm not thinking the Bookingwiz . com popup is a good idea.)
.

The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.

We currently rotate platinum every hour... so there is no upper or lower. A property goes up and down the list every day. We used to do it on every search up until last summer - but we got consistent consumer complaints that the order would change so often they couldn't remember who they were looking at when they did another search! This happens within every level.

Of course the way other end of the spectrum are inns who are the only property in the town and they go for Gold or Platinum .... I bet they would see no difference. (I just shake my head and wonder what they are thinking.)

In some instances this may be true, however it gets back to the marginal spending argument. For the extra few hundred dollars, if you are really evaluating your total dollar return on investment (not just your ROI %), then there is a strong argument that by presenting your property in the best light will reap benefits. With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.
.

That's right, I forgot about you rotating the inns. Every hour is smart and fair. Good job.

With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.

Hmmm The difference being 10 photos vs 25photos on a town with only 1 B&B... I'd really like to see a split test done with that. I can't see that being worth the expense. Looking at your membership levels chart it seems that is the only difference on the guest side of things. Are their other differences I'm not thinking about?
It would be an informative test ... do you have a 1B&B town with someone at silver that you'd be willing to flip a coin every time the page loads as to whether they get silver or platinum display and then track the data?
.

That's right, I forgot about you rotating the inns. Every hour is smart and fair. Good job.

With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.

Hmmm The difference being 10 photos vs 25photos on a town with only 1 B&B... I'd really like to see a split test done with that. I can't see that being worth the expense. Looking at your membership levels chart it seems that is the only difference on the guest side of things. Are their other differences I'm not thinking about?
It would be an informative test ... do you have a 1B&B town with someone at silver that you'd be willing to flip a coin every time the page loads as to whether they get silver or platinum display and then track the data?

It would take some work... plus they likely wouldn't have 20 photos in place so it may be difficult. We do however, have a number of cities with 4 or less listings, where there are both platinums and silvers. Meaning everyone is right next to each other in the listings - and this gives a good proxy. Took a look at the city-only traffic for those properties (no 2nd listings, ONLY traffic from that page), and the platinum listings received over 30% more clicks to their detailed listing pages, and over 40% more clicks subsequently to the innkeepers own website.
Now this isn't an exhaustive analysis by any means - I'd have to look at every city, but it confirms what we generally hear. In one city I saw in NH, the Platinum member got 5X the views and click-throughs over the Silver member... In no city did the Silver ever come within 20% of the Platinum.
The other reason people often forget is that if you want a secondary city listing - it gets listed at the same level - so if you are near a competitive larger destination, then Platinum makes even more sense.
Don't get me wrong though - I'm not advocating everyone just go out and buy a Platinum listing (although Eric might give me a vacation if you all do...), but that there is more to it than meets the eye.
BTW - one other thing in your stats. We sent an average of 65 email/rez requests (we let properties post a button if they want on their listings) per year per property. These are behind a captcha wall - so pretty qood quality requests. These would not be counted in your conversion numbers since they don't touch innkeeper website functionality.
.

We do however, have a number of cities with 4 or less listings, where there are both platinums and silvers. Meaning everyone is right next to each other in the listings - and this gives a good proxy.

Ahhh but that's different than your original premise. I think largely here you are looking at simple eye tracking studies (like the difference between being number 1 and number 3 in google.) Yes they are near each other, but the difference in traffic is huge.
I do wonder if there is a bit of property bias too in such a comparison. I mean what is the likelyhood that if you had 4 properties in town and 2 are platinum..what is the probability that the 2 platinums have their act together more than the other 2. Not so much because potential guests know the difference between a platinum and silver member, and not because the two platinums have more photos, but because an inn willing to spend $800 instead of $400 for advertising is just a little bit more on top of their game. Are they more likely to be the inn that would hire Jumping Rocks to do their photography while the silver is more likely to shoot their own photos and call them good enough.
.

We do however, have a number of cities with 4 or less listings, where there are both platinums and silvers. Meaning everyone is right next to each other in the listings - and this gives a good proxy.

Ahhh but that's different than your original premise. I think largely here you are looking at simple eye tracking studies (like the difference between being number 1 and number 3 in google.) Yes they are near each other, but the difference in traffic is huge.
I do wonder if there is a bit of property bias too in such a comparison. I mean what is the likelyhood that if you had 4 properties in town and 2 are platinum..what is the probability that the 2 platinums have their act together more than the other 2. Not so much because potential guests know the difference between a platinum and silver member, and not because the two platinums have more photos, but because an inn willing to spend $800 instead of $400 for advertising is just a little bit more on top of their game. Are they more likely to be the inn that would hire Jumping Rocks to do their photography while the silver is more likely to shoot their own photos and call them good enough.

No doubt. There is a lot that goes into this for sure - not sure we'd ever get to the bottom of it. I can say at BB.com for our own advertising and branding - we almost always pay extra for more photos/links/etc. to make us look more professional whenever possible. But I certainly can understand that this may not make sense all the time.

 

[Morticia]

This data really indicates some of the points I've been trying to get across. For instance, if we applied even a 10% conversion rate to these figures (which is probably low since they already take into account an action but is good enough to illustrate), then there would have been roughly 143 reservations from all of these sites combined. At $300 average rez (which is roughly the PAII figure reported across the industry), then all of this in total represents $42,900 in revenue in the innkeepers pocket. Clearly these numbers are not going to be exact, but if applied across all the sites/traffic, they work for comparison sake.
Isolating this for just BedandBreakfast.com and BBonline, then the BedandBreakfast.com reservations were worth $19,500 (650 actions, 10% converting into rez, $300/rez), and BBonline worth $8700 (291 actions, 10% converting to rez, $300/rez). Taking out the costs, BedandBreakfast.com put a net $19.5K - $750, or $18,750, and BBonline put in a total of $8700 - $169, or $8531.
So last year the innkeeper had $42,900 in total revenue from all sites, and now by dropping BedandBreakfast.com because it is "too expensive", assuming nothing else changes, they will only have total revenue of $42,900 - $18,750 (the net revenue generated from bb.com) or $24,150. Had they kept BedandBreakfast.com, and dropped the cheaper per click site BBonline, they would have ended up with $42,900 - $8531 (net rev lost from dropping bbonline), or $34,369.
So their wallet would have been a lot fatter by keeping the "expensive" directory.... (It would have been fattest by keeping them both I might add - which is what we always tell innkeepers. If I had an inn - you can bet I'd be listing it on more sites than just BedandBreakfast.com).
I used to work at an airline back in the early 90's during the last recession. We would cut costs like crazy... and I'll never forget some of the advice I got from a Sr. VP there. There was a lot of it, but two things really stand out. When we were cutting our routes back - he commented "great - our planes are all sitting down now - we are going to save ourselves right into bankruptcy..." because even though we were saving money on a lot of items - we weren't making money on them. And this thought really strikes home when you look at an analysis like this..

Your arguments are logical and make sense to me. The only problem is that the directory that cost $80 per year and resulted in 12 "actions"/goals and if as you approximate, 10% lead to 1 actual conversion could make a similar plea .... "Don't drop us, we brought you $300 for only an $80 investment." At some point you have to draw the line. So the question this innkeeper can now grapple with is do they want to draw the line at $20 per conversion or $3 per conversion or $0.51 per conversion.
It doesn't change anything about your argument but for clarification sake, the average advertised room rate is ~$120 per night for this particular B&B.
.

Your arguments are logical and make sense to me. The only problem is that the directory that cost $80 per year and resulted in 12 "actions"/goals and if as you approximate, 10% lead to 1 actual conversion could make a similar plea .... "Don't drop us, we brought you $300 for only an $80 investment." At some point you have to draw the line. So the question this innkeeper can now grapple with is do they want to draw the line at $20 per conversion or $3 per conversion or $0.51 per conversion.
It doesn't change anything about your argument but for clarification sake, the average advertised room rate is ~$120 per night for this particular B&B.

Good point on the lower numbers - if I understand you correctly, you are saying there is some point low enough where the return may not be material, and there is a cost in time to deal with everyone = may not be worth it. Very important as you can run yourself in circles trying to find good advertising. I also think that conversion does drop off a bit with the quality of sites. Although it wouldn't surprise me if the 10% ratio was low for the main sites. It is pretty easy to wire this up to measure the true actual reservations and revenue from any site if the booking engine supports it (both Webervations has, and so has Rezo, as do sme others).
The $300 I was looking at was from a PAII study - it was something like $150/night, 2 nights per booking. I'm probably not getting it exact, but close. So I believe using your numbers that number would be $240 - as the typical action (email, res request, etc.) would generate an average 2 night stay.
Taking the logic a step further... this is often where the decision comes in whether to go with Silver, Gold, Platinum. No doubt the cost per click for this property would be lower for Gold or Silver - and it is telling that they are getting that much business from the lowest BBonline listing level...
So lets say they dropped to Silver at roughly half the cost of Platinum. There clicks will drop without question, but generally not by the same % of pricing. Which some might think that means silver is a better value. Indeed if you looked at CPC or CPA then a property would claim a victory - they dropped their effective CPC by 20%!!!! But if they looked in their wallet, they would find that they saved $375 or so on membership (approximating due to diff in yearly/monthly)... but LOST roughly $6000 in revenue... (at my $300 average rez cost for consistency). So they just "saved" themselves into losing a net $5600+ in annual revenue.
My point being that evaluating marketing spend needs to be both on the return on investment and on the marginal gain of investing that extra dollar. In the above example, an inn increased their ROI but at the expense of losing revenue and ultimately being much worse off at the end of the year.
This is the type of evaluation that I feel often gets ignored as the focus is on cost-cost-cost....
.

I think it comes down to people having a finite idea in mind about how much they want to spend on advertising.
The question of platinum vs gold vs silver traffic is an interesting one. And again I think it all comes down to homework being done. The averages are too broad to help much. A town with only 4 properties half at platinum and half at silver I bet would see a pretty even distribution of clickthroughs without platinum being favored too heavilly.
Contrast that against a town with 30 properties with 5 at Platinum and I bet you'd find a much bigger difference in traffic between the levels.
The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.
Of course the way other end of the spectrum are inns who are the only property in the town and they go for Gold or Platinum .... I bet they would see no difference. (I just shake my head and wonder what they are thinking.)
(by the way, I'm not thinking the Bookingwiz . com popup is a good idea.)
.

The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.

We currently rotate platinum every hour... so there is no upper or lower. A property goes up and down the list every day. We used to do it on every search up until last summer - but we got consistent consumer complaints that the order would change so often they couldn't remember who they were looking at when they did another search! This happens within every level.

Of course the way other end of the spectrum are inns who are the only property in the town and they go for Gold or Platinum .... I bet they would see no difference. (I just shake my head and wonder what they are thinking.)

In some instances this may be true, however it gets back to the marginal spending argument. For the extra few hundred dollars, if you are really evaluating your total dollar return on investment (not just your ROI %), then there is a strong argument that by presenting your property in the best light will reap benefits. With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.
.

That's right, I forgot about you rotating the inns. Every hour is smart and fair. Good job.

With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.

Hmmm The difference being 10 photos vs 25photos on a town with only 1 B&B... I'd really like to see a split test done with that. I can't see that being worth the expense. Looking at your membership levels chart it seems that is the only difference on the guest side of things. Are their other differences I'm not thinking about?
It would be an informative test ... do you have a 1B&B town with someone at silver that you'd be willing to flip a coin every time the page loads as to whether they get silver or platinum display and then track the data?
.

That's right, I forgot about you rotating the inns. Every hour is smart and fair. Good job.

With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.

Hmmm The difference being 10 photos vs 25photos on a town with only 1 B&B... I'd really like to see a split test done with that. I can't see that being worth the expense. Looking at your membership levels chart it seems that is the only difference on the guest side of things. Are their other differences I'm not thinking about?
It would be an informative test ... do you have a 1B&B town with someone at silver that you'd be willing to flip a coin every time the page loads as to whether they get silver or platinum display and then track the data?

It would take some work... plus they likely wouldn't have 20 photos in place so it may be difficult. We do however, have a number of cities with 4 or less listings, where there are both platinums and silvers. Meaning everyone is right next to each other in the listings - and this gives a good proxy. Took a look at the city-only traffic for those properties (no 2nd listings, ONLY traffic from that page), and the platinum listings received over 30% more clicks to their detailed listing pages, and over 40% more clicks subsequently to the innkeepers own website.
Now this isn't an exhaustive analysis by any means - I'd have to look at every city, but it confirms what we generally hear. In one city I saw in NH, the Platinum member got 5X the views and click-throughs over the Silver member... In no city did the Silver ever come within 20% of the Platinum.
The other reason people often forget is that if you want a secondary city listing - it gets listed at the same level - so if you are near a competitive larger destination, then Platinum makes even more sense.
Don't get me wrong though - I'm not advocating everyone just go out and buy a Platinum listing (although Eric might give me a vacation if you all do...), but that there is more to it than meets the eye.
BTW - one other thing in your stats. We sent an average of 65 email/rez requests (we let properties post a button if they want on their listings) per year per property. These are behind a captcha wall - so pretty qood quality requests. These would not be counted in your conversion numbers since they don't touch innkeeper website functionality.
.

John said: BTW - one other thing in your stats. We sent an average of 65 email/rez requests (we let properties post a button if they want on their listings) per year per property. These are behind a captcha wall - so pretty qood quality requests. These would not be counted in your conversion numbers since they don't touch innkeeper website functionality.
Now here is a spot where statistics can be overwhelming skewed. I save all of the request emails I get to see if they convert. The last one I got from your site was in January '08 which means some other inn got my other 64 email requests.

Actually, what it means to me is that essentially no one is emailing me from your site for whatever reason and that to get that average, SOME inns are receiving well over 200 requests.

 

[Morticia]

swirt wrote: The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.
That is why B&B.com sells FEATURED listings. The Upper Upper Platinum. If you have 38 B&B's in one town then you would be forced to do featured listings.
In my town I am it, to be platinum is silly, I am still it, to do featured listings, I am still it..

I've done the featured listing but have no idea if it brought any more or different biz. It would help if the clickthru showed it was from the regular listing or the featured listing.
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).

Not sure what you are referring to?
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).

Not sure what you are referring to?

My post:
I've done the featured listing but have no idea if it brought any more or different biz. It would help if the clickthru showed it was from the regular listing or the featured listing.
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).

Not sure what you are referring to?

My post:
I've done the featured listing but have no idea if it brought any more or different biz. It would help if the clickthru showed it was from the regular listing or the featured listing.

Gotcha. Google Analytics would show the actual link that was clicked on - and they are different. We report it in our internal numbers as well on your home base. So you should have two ways of seeing it.
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).

Not sure what you are referring to?

My post:
I've done the featured listing but have no idea if it brought any more or different biz. It would help if the clickthru showed it was from the regular listing or the featured listing.

Gotcha. Google Analytics would show the actual link that was clicked on - and they are different. We report it in our internal numbers as well on your home base. So you should have two ways of seeing it.

OK, I found where my home base shows the click-thru numbers. But for the same date range, Goggle Analytics does not show any referrals from another source other than the usual bandb listing. Do you know what Google might call the featured property listing when showing the referrals?

 

[JBanczak]

swirt wrote: The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.
That is why B&B.com sells FEATURED listings. The Upper Upper Platinum. If you have 38 B&B's in one town then you would be forced to do featured listings.
In my town I am it, to be platinum is silly, I am still it, to do featured listings, I am still it..

I've done the featured listing but have no idea if it brought any more or different biz. It would help if the clickthru showed it was from the regular listing or the featured listing.
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).

Not sure what you are referring to?
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).

Not sure what you are referring to?

My post:
I've done the featured listing but have no idea if it brought any more or different biz. It would help if the clickthru showed it was from the regular listing or the featured listing.
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).

Not sure what you are referring to?

My post:
I've done the featured listing but have no idea if it brought any more or different biz. It would help if the clickthru showed it was from the regular listing or the featured listing.

Gotcha. Google Analytics would show the actual link that was clicked on - and they are different. We report it in our internal numbers as well on your home base. So you should have two ways of seeing it.
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).

Not sure what you are referring to?

My post:
I've done the featured listing but have no idea if it brought any more or different biz. It would help if the clickthru showed it was from the regular listing or the featured listing.

Gotcha. Google Analytics would show the actual link that was clicked on - and they are different. We report it in our internal numbers as well on your home base. So you should have two ways of seeing it.

OK, I found where my home base shows the click-thru numbers. But for the same date range, Goggle Analytics does not show any referrals from another source other than the usual bandb listing. Do you know what Google might call the featured property listing when showing the referrals?
.

That's a good idea...if John doesn't already have it set up that way, he could do it pretty easilly (I think).

Not sure what you are referring to?

My post:
I've done the featured listing but have no idea if it brought any more or different biz. It would help if the clickthru showed it was from the regular listing or the featured listing.

Gotcha. Google Analytics would show the actual link that was clicked on - and they are different. We report it in our internal numbers as well on your home base. So you should have two ways of seeing it.

OK, I found where my home base shows the click-thru numbers. But for the same date range, Goggle Analytics does not show any referrals from another source other than the usual bandb listing. Do you know what Google might call the featured property listing when showing the referrals?

If you look at your referrers, then click on bedandbreakfast.com - it should expand and show you all the various links that sent traffic.

 

[springlady]

This data really indicates some of the points I've been trying to get across. For instance, if we applied even a 10% conversion rate to these figures (which is probably low since they already take into account an action but is good enough to illustrate), then there would have been roughly 143 reservations from all of these sites combined. At $300 average rez (which is roughly the PAII figure reported across the industry), then all of this in total represents $42,900 in revenue in the innkeepers pocket. Clearly these numbers are not going to be exact, but if applied across all the sites/traffic, they work for comparison sake.
Isolating this for just BedandBreakfast.com and BBonline, then the BedandBreakfast.com reservations were worth $19,500 (650 actions, 10% converting into rez, $300/rez), and BBonline worth $8700 (291 actions, 10% converting to rez, $300/rez). Taking out the costs, BedandBreakfast.com put a net $19.5K - $750, or $18,750, and BBonline put in a total of $8700 - $169, or $8531.
So last year the innkeeper had $42,900 in total revenue from all sites, and now by dropping BedandBreakfast.com because it is "too expensive", assuming nothing else changes, they will only have total revenue of $42,900 - $18,750 (the net revenue generated from bb.com) or $24,150. Had they kept BedandBreakfast.com, and dropped the cheaper per click site BBonline, they would have ended up with $42,900 - $8531 (net rev lost from dropping bbonline), or $34,369.
So their wallet would have been a lot fatter by keeping the "expensive" directory.... (It would have been fattest by keeping them both I might add - which is what we always tell innkeepers. If I had an inn - you can bet I'd be listing it on more sites than just BedandBreakfast.com).
I used to work at an airline back in the early 90's during the last recession. We would cut costs like crazy... and I'll never forget some of the advice I got from a Sr. VP there. There was a lot of it, but two things really stand out. When we were cutting our routes back - he commented "great - our planes are all sitting down now - we are going to save ourselves right into bankruptcy..." because even though we were saving money on a lot of items - we weren't making money on them. And this thought really strikes home when you look at an analysis like this..

Your arguments are logical and make sense to me. The only problem is that the directory that cost $80 per year and resulted in 12 "actions"/goals and if as you approximate, 10% lead to 1 actual conversion could make a similar plea .... "Don't drop us, we brought you $300 for only an $80 investment." At some point you have to draw the line. So the question this innkeeper can now grapple with is do they want to draw the line at $20 per conversion or $3 per conversion or $0.51 per conversion.
It doesn't change anything about your argument but for clarification sake, the average advertised room rate is ~$120 per night for this particular B&B.
.

I don't want to take this discussion in a different direction but there is another element to conversion that I feel is missing here. Do we think that most people find a b&b by typing in mytown, mystate b&b or do we feel that they are found by going to a directory and then browsing the directory for possible towns? If it's the first, then dropping one specific directory may not result in the loss of all of those conversions.
The results for mytown, mystate b&b - once you get past the local results where I am listed first - are bbonline, my own website, bnbfinder, lanier, tripadvisor, bandb.com. I don't plan to renew my lanier listing which is due now - not enough clickthrus to make it worthwhile. I suspect that as long as you show up in some directories which come to the top of the organic search list, someone who looks at directories will still find you - just not through the one you dropped. It would be interesting to know if the conversions through bbonline went up after bandb.com was dropped for your client.
You will, of course, lose the conversions of people who start at the directories - like people looking to use bandb.com gift cards or a bnbfinder gift cert or the ILoveInns gift cert.
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I always used to use bbonline because that's what my daughter used. Now I do a search on 'city, state, B&B' because I know not everyone pays to be in a directory. I get more traffic from keywords on Google than I get from directories. If that makes sense. An example of that would be 380 referrals from a Google search using 'my town, state, B&B' and only 42 referrals from any of the top 3 directory listings I have for the last month.
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I always used to use bbonline because that's what my daughter used. Now I do a search on 'city, state, B&B' because I know not everyone pays to be in a directory. I get more traffic from keywords on Google than I get from directories. If that makes sense. An example of that would be 380 referrals from a Google search using 'my town, state, B&B' and only 42 referrals from any of the top 3 directory listings I have for the last month.

Definately, people search and IF you have your SEO in place then they click on your website - which is what we want! But planning a whole trip can be laborious.
Guests who just left planned their entire USA visit this way - they got on google maps - clicked a route. Then they put in a stop here off the beaten track - googled to find lodging nearby, then a clicked the route over there at the next stop - clicked to find lodging nearby so on and so on.
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That's exactly how I planned my trip to Oregon last year except I used Mapquest because it would give me approx. drive times. Then I'd search towns in my target area (again, pet friendly lodging).

 

[Copperhead]

John wrote: Just to add some real numbers here, less than half of our traffic comes from Google results (according to Google Analytics). Out of that Google traffic, just looking at the top 50 keywords only, a full 25% of our total Google traffic either types our name into the google search box, or searches on a generic term (meaning they enter no geographic data). I'm sure if I looked farther down the keyword list there would be a lot more lesser-typed in generic words (other than bed and breakfast) fo instance. Google search traffic that enters in a destination of some kind amounts to only about 1/3 of our traffic.
This IS very interesting and something that you should boast boldly about on your Why should I join page. (I have not reviewed your listing page since I joined last fall, but if it is there, I do not recall.) This is a most important tidbit of info. I do know that bandb.com has a good following, but this info - stating your source - does help keep eyes open on this.
Muiford: .... You might look at a directory instead of a specific B&B website if you want to get an idea of how many choices you have. ....
In my own specific case, having someone look at bandb.com gives me a distinct disadvantage. A platinum listing for a B&B in a town ten miles away is the first listing in mytown, mystate. That's not great. I still haven't made up my mind about renewing bandb.com
My 'home' town is very small, and most people do not even know our town exists, yet we are within 5 miles of a known town, which has no B&B's. We have a silver listing and appear under that town as 'near town, state', and another silver listing b&b does as well- they are listed first but they are 20 miles away from the same town. If our listing rotates, I have not seen it. The map that is used for this town has both of our inns marked but ours is so close to the side in a very conjested looking area so it is hard to spot, while the other is very obvious. This is disappointing.

 

[swirt]

This data really indicates some of the points I've been trying to get across. For instance, if we applied even a 10% conversion rate to these figures (which is probably low since they already take into account an action but is good enough to illustrate), then there would have been roughly 143 reservations from all of these sites combined. At $300 average rez (which is roughly the PAII figure reported across the industry), then all of this in total represents $42,900 in revenue in the innkeepers pocket. Clearly these numbers are not going to be exact, but if applied across all the sites/traffic, they work for comparison sake.
Isolating this for just BedandBreakfast.com and BBonline, then the BedandBreakfast.com reservations were worth $19,500 (650 actions, 10% converting into rez, $300/rez), and BBonline worth $8700 (291 actions, 10% converting to rez, $300/rez). Taking out the costs, BedandBreakfast.com put a net $19.5K - $750, or $18,750, and BBonline put in a total of $8700 - $169, or $8531.
So last year the innkeeper had $42,900 in total revenue from all sites, and now by dropping BedandBreakfast.com because it is "too expensive", assuming nothing else changes, they will only have total revenue of $42,900 - $18,750 (the net revenue generated from bb.com) or $24,150. Had they kept BedandBreakfast.com, and dropped the cheaper per click site BBonline, they would have ended up with $42,900 - $8531 (net rev lost from dropping bbonline), or $34,369.
So their wallet would have been a lot fatter by keeping the "expensive" directory.... (It would have been fattest by keeping them both I might add - which is what we always tell innkeepers. If I had an inn - you can bet I'd be listing it on more sites than just BedandBreakfast.com).
I used to work at an airline back in the early 90's during the last recession. We would cut costs like crazy... and I'll never forget some of the advice I got from a Sr. VP there. There was a lot of it, but two things really stand out. When we were cutting our routes back - he commented "great - our planes are all sitting down now - we are going to save ourselves right into bankruptcy..." because even though we were saving money on a lot of items - we weren't making money on them. And this thought really strikes home when you look at an analysis like this..

Your arguments are logical and make sense to me. The only problem is that the directory that cost $80 per year and resulted in 12 "actions"/goals and if as you approximate, 10% lead to 1 actual conversion could make a similar plea .... "Don't drop us, we brought you $300 for only an $80 investment." At some point you have to draw the line. So the question this innkeeper can now grapple with is do they want to draw the line at $20 per conversion or $3 per conversion or $0.51 per conversion.
It doesn't change anything about your argument but for clarification sake, the average advertised room rate is ~$120 per night for this particular B&B.
.

Your arguments are logical and make sense to me. The only problem is that the directory that cost $80 per year and resulted in 12 "actions"/goals and if as you approximate, 10% lead to 1 actual conversion could make a similar plea .... "Don't drop us, we brought you $300 for only an $80 investment." At some point you have to draw the line. So the question this innkeeper can now grapple with is do they want to draw the line at $20 per conversion or $3 per conversion or $0.51 per conversion.
It doesn't change anything about your argument but for clarification sake, the average advertised room rate is ~$120 per night for this particular B&B.

Good point on the lower numbers - if I understand you correctly, you are saying there is some point low enough where the return may not be material, and there is a cost in time to deal with everyone = may not be worth it. Very important as you can run yourself in circles trying to find good advertising. I also think that conversion does drop off a bit with the quality of sites. Although it wouldn't surprise me if the 10% ratio was low for the main sites. It is pretty easy to wire this up to measure the true actual reservations and revenue from any site if the booking engine supports it (both Webervations has, and so has Rezo, as do sme others).
The $300 I was looking at was from a PAII study - it was something like $150/night, 2 nights per booking. I'm probably not getting it exact, but close. So I believe using your numbers that number would be $240 - as the typical action (email, res request, etc.) would generate an average 2 night stay.
Taking the logic a step further... this is often where the decision comes in whether to go with Silver, Gold, Platinum. No doubt the cost per click for this property would be lower for Gold or Silver - and it is telling that they are getting that much business from the lowest BBonline listing level...
So lets say they dropped to Silver at roughly half the cost of Platinum. There clicks will drop without question, but generally not by the same % of pricing. Which some might think that means silver is a better value. Indeed if you looked at CPC or CPA then a property would claim a victory - they dropped their effective CPC by 20%!!!! But if they looked in their wallet, they would find that they saved $375 or so on membership (approximating due to diff in yearly/monthly)... but LOST roughly $6000 in revenue... (at my $300 average rez cost for consistency). So they just "saved" themselves into losing a net $5600+ in annual revenue.
My point being that evaluating marketing spend needs to be both on the return on investment and on the marginal gain of investing that extra dollar. In the above example, an inn increased their ROI but at the expense of losing revenue and ultimately being much worse off at the end of the year.
This is the type of evaluation that I feel often gets ignored as the focus is on cost-cost-cost....
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I think it comes down to people having a finite idea in mind about how much they want to spend on advertising.
The question of platinum vs gold vs silver traffic is an interesting one. And again I think it all comes down to homework being done. The averages are too broad to help much. A town with only 4 properties half at platinum and half at silver I bet would see a pretty even distribution of clickthroughs without platinum being favored too heavilly.
Contrast that against a town with 30 properties with 5 at Platinum and I bet you'd find a much bigger difference in traffic between the levels.
The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.
Of course the way other end of the spectrum are inns who are the only property in the town and they go for Gold or Platinum .... I bet they would see no difference. (I just shake my head and wonder what they are thinking.)
(by the way, I'm not thinking the Bookingwiz . com popup is a good idea.)
.

The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.

We currently rotate platinum every hour... so there is no upper or lower. A property goes up and down the list every day. We used to do it on every search up until last summer - but we got consistent consumer complaints that the order would change so often they couldn't remember who they were looking at when they did another search! This happens within every level.

Of course the way other end of the spectrum are inns who are the only property in the town and they go for Gold or Platinum .... I bet they would see no difference. (I just shake my head and wonder what they are thinking.)

In some instances this may be true, however it gets back to the marginal spending argument. For the extra few hundred dollars, if you are really evaluating your total dollar return on investment (not just your ROI %), then there is a strong argument that by presenting your property in the best light will reap benefits. With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.
.

That's right, I forgot about you rotating the inns. Every hour is smart and fair. Good job.

With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.

Hmmm The difference being 10 photos vs 25photos on a town with only 1 B&B... I'd really like to see a split test done with that. I can't see that being worth the expense. Looking at your membership levels chart it seems that is the only difference on the guest side of things. Are their other differences I'm not thinking about?
It would be an informative test ... do you have a 1B&B town with someone at silver that you'd be willing to flip a coin every time the page loads as to whether they get silver or platinum display and then track the data?
.

That's right, I forgot about you rotating the inns. Every hour is smart and fair. Good job.

With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.

Hmmm The difference being 10 photos vs 25photos on a town with only 1 B&B... I'd really like to see a split test done with that. I can't see that being worth the expense. Looking at your membership levels chart it seems that is the only difference on the guest side of things. Are their other differences I'm not thinking about?
It would be an informative test ... do you have a 1B&B town with someone at silver that you'd be willing to flip a coin every time the page loads as to whether they get silver or platinum display and then track the data?

It would take some work... plus they likely wouldn't have 20 photos in place so it may be difficult. We do however, have a number of cities with 4 or less listings, where there are both platinums and silvers. Meaning everyone is right next to each other in the listings - and this gives a good proxy. Took a look at the city-only traffic for those properties (no 2nd listings, ONLY traffic from that page), and the platinum listings received over 30% more clicks to their detailed listing pages, and over 40% more clicks subsequently to the innkeepers own website.
Now this isn't an exhaustive analysis by any means - I'd have to look at every city, but it confirms what we generally hear. In one city I saw in NH, the Platinum member got 5X the views and click-throughs over the Silver member... In no city did the Silver ever come within 20% of the Platinum.
The other reason people often forget is that if you want a secondary city listing - it gets listed at the same level - so if you are near a competitive larger destination, then Platinum makes even more sense.
Don't get me wrong though - I'm not advocating everyone just go out and buy a Platinum listing (although Eric might give me a vacation if you all do...), but that there is more to it than meets the eye.
BTW - one other thing in your stats. We sent an average of 65 email/rez requests (we let properties post a button if they want on their listings) per year per property. These are behind a captcha wall - so pretty qood quality requests. These would not be counted in your conversion numbers since they don't touch innkeeper website functionality.
.

John said: BTW - one other thing in your stats. We sent an average of 65 email/rez requests (we let properties post a button if they want on their listings) per year per property. These are behind a captcha wall - so pretty qood quality requests. These would not be counted in your conversion numbers since they don't touch innkeeper website functionality.
Now here is a spot where statistics can be overwhelming skewed. I save all of the request emails I get to see if they convert. The last one I got from your site was in January '08 which means some other inn got my other 64 email requests.

Actually, what it means to me is that essentially no one is emailing me from your site for whatever reason and that to get that average, SOME inns are receiving well over 200 requests.
.

Actually, what it means to me is that essentially no one is emailing me from your site for whatever reason and that to get that average, SOME inns are receiving well over 200 requests.

Or the email is broken or getting nabbed as spam. I just sent you a reservation request email to test. You'll be able to spot it 1 adult and 20 children for 200 nights

 

[Morticia]

This data really indicates some of the points I've been trying to get across. For instance, if we applied even a 10% conversion rate to these figures (which is probably low since they already take into account an action but is good enough to illustrate), then there would have been roughly 143 reservations from all of these sites combined. At $300 average rez (which is roughly the PAII figure reported across the industry), then all of this in total represents $42,900 in revenue in the innkeepers pocket. Clearly these numbers are not going to be exact, but if applied across all the sites/traffic, they work for comparison sake.
Isolating this for just BedandBreakfast.com and BBonline, then the BedandBreakfast.com reservations were worth $19,500 (650 actions, 10% converting into rez, $300/rez), and BBonline worth $8700 (291 actions, 10% converting to rez, $300/rez). Taking out the costs, BedandBreakfast.com put a net $19.5K - $750, or $18,750, and BBonline put in a total of $8700 - $169, or $8531.
So last year the innkeeper had $42,900 in total revenue from all sites, and now by dropping BedandBreakfast.com because it is "too expensive", assuming nothing else changes, they will only have total revenue of $42,900 - $18,750 (the net revenue generated from bb.com) or $24,150. Had they kept BedandBreakfast.com, and dropped the cheaper per click site BBonline, they would have ended up with $42,900 - $8531 (net rev lost from dropping bbonline), or $34,369.
So their wallet would have been a lot fatter by keeping the "expensive" directory.... (It would have been fattest by keeping them both I might add - which is what we always tell innkeepers. If I had an inn - you can bet I'd be listing it on more sites than just BedandBreakfast.com).
I used to work at an airline back in the early 90's during the last recession. We would cut costs like crazy... and I'll never forget some of the advice I got from a Sr. VP there. There was a lot of it, but two things really stand out. When we were cutting our routes back - he commented "great - our planes are all sitting down now - we are going to save ourselves right into bankruptcy..." because even though we were saving money on a lot of items - we weren't making money on them. And this thought really strikes home when you look at an analysis like this..

Your arguments are logical and make sense to me. The only problem is that the directory that cost $80 per year and resulted in 12 "actions"/goals and if as you approximate, 10% lead to 1 actual conversion could make a similar plea .... "Don't drop us, we brought you $300 for only an $80 investment." At some point you have to draw the line. So the question this innkeeper can now grapple with is do they want to draw the line at $20 per conversion or $3 per conversion or $0.51 per conversion.
It doesn't change anything about your argument but for clarification sake, the average advertised room rate is ~$120 per night for this particular B&B.
.

Your arguments are logical and make sense to me. The only problem is that the directory that cost $80 per year and resulted in 12 "actions"/goals and if as you approximate, 10% lead to 1 actual conversion could make a similar plea .... "Don't drop us, we brought you $300 for only an $80 investment." At some point you have to draw the line. So the question this innkeeper can now grapple with is do they want to draw the line at $20 per conversion or $3 per conversion or $0.51 per conversion.
It doesn't change anything about your argument but for clarification sake, the average advertised room rate is ~$120 per night for this particular B&B.

Good point on the lower numbers - if I understand you correctly, you are saying there is some point low enough where the return may not be material, and there is a cost in time to deal with everyone = may not be worth it. Very important as you can run yourself in circles trying to find good advertising. I also think that conversion does drop off a bit with the quality of sites. Although it wouldn't surprise me if the 10% ratio was low for the main sites. It is pretty easy to wire this up to measure the true actual reservations and revenue from any site if the booking engine supports it (both Webervations has, and so has Rezo, as do sme others).
The $300 I was looking at was from a PAII study - it was something like $150/night, 2 nights per booking. I'm probably not getting it exact, but close. So I believe using your numbers that number would be $240 - as the typical action (email, res request, etc.) would generate an average 2 night stay.
Taking the logic a step further... this is often where the decision comes in whether to go with Silver, Gold, Platinum. No doubt the cost per click for this property would be lower for Gold or Silver - and it is telling that they are getting that much business from the lowest BBonline listing level...
So lets say they dropped to Silver at roughly half the cost of Platinum. There clicks will drop without question, but generally not by the same % of pricing. Which some might think that means silver is a better value. Indeed if you looked at CPC or CPA then a property would claim a victory - they dropped their effective CPC by 20%!!!! But if they looked in their wallet, they would find that they saved $375 or so on membership (approximating due to diff in yearly/monthly)... but LOST roughly $6000 in revenue... (at my $300 average rez cost for consistency). So they just "saved" themselves into losing a net $5600+ in annual revenue.
My point being that evaluating marketing spend needs to be both on the return on investment and on the marginal gain of investing that extra dollar. In the above example, an inn increased their ROI but at the expense of losing revenue and ultimately being much worse off at the end of the year.
This is the type of evaluation that I feel often gets ignored as the focus is on cost-cost-cost....
.

I think it comes down to people having a finite idea in mind about how much they want to spend on advertising.
The question of platinum vs gold vs silver traffic is an interesting one. And again I think it all comes down to homework being done. The averages are too broad to help much. A town with only 4 properties half at platinum and half at silver I bet would see a pretty even distribution of clickthroughs without platinum being favored too heavilly.
Contrast that against a town with 30 properties with 5 at Platinum and I bet you'd find a much bigger difference in traffic between the levels.
The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.
Of course the way other end of the spectrum are inns who are the only property in the town and they go for Gold or Platinum .... I bet they would see no difference. (I just shake my head and wonder what they are thinking.)
(by the way, I'm not thinking the Bookingwiz . com popup is a good idea.)
.

The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.

We currently rotate platinum every hour... so there is no upper or lower. A property goes up and down the list every day. We used to do it on every search up until last summer - but we got consistent consumer complaints that the order would change so often they couldn't remember who they were looking at when they did another search! This happens within every level.

Of course the way other end of the spectrum are inns who are the only property in the town and they go for Gold or Platinum .... I bet they would see no difference. (I just shake my head and wonder what they are thinking.)

In some instances this may be true, however it gets back to the marginal spending argument. For the extra few hundred dollars, if you are really evaluating your total dollar return on investment (not just your ROI %), then there is a strong argument that by presenting your property in the best light will reap benefits. With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.
.

That's right, I forgot about you rotating the inns. Every hour is smart and fair. Good job.

With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.

Hmmm The difference being 10 photos vs 25photos on a town with only 1 B&B... I'd really like to see a split test done with that. I can't see that being worth the expense. Looking at your membership levels chart it seems that is the only difference on the guest side of things. Are their other differences I'm not thinking about?
It would be an informative test ... do you have a 1B&B town with someone at silver that you'd be willing to flip a coin every time the page loads as to whether they get silver or platinum display and then track the data?
.

That's right, I forgot about you rotating the inns. Every hour is smart and fair. Good job.

With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.

Hmmm The difference being 10 photos vs 25photos on a town with only 1 B&B... I'd really like to see a split test done with that. I can't see that being worth the expense. Looking at your membership levels chart it seems that is the only difference on the guest side of things. Are their other differences I'm not thinking about?
It would be an informative test ... do you have a 1B&B town with someone at silver that you'd be willing to flip a coin every time the page loads as to whether they get silver or platinum display and then track the data?

It would take some work... plus they likely wouldn't have 20 photos in place so it may be difficult. We do however, have a number of cities with 4 or less listings, where there are both platinums and silvers. Meaning everyone is right next to each other in the listings - and this gives a good proxy. Took a look at the city-only traffic for those properties (no 2nd listings, ONLY traffic from that page), and the platinum listings received over 30% more clicks to their detailed listing pages, and over 40% more clicks subsequently to the innkeepers own website.
Now this isn't an exhaustive analysis by any means - I'd have to look at every city, but it confirms what we generally hear. In one city I saw in NH, the Platinum member got 5X the views and click-throughs over the Silver member... In no city did the Silver ever come within 20% of the Platinum.
The other reason people often forget is that if you want a secondary city listing - it gets listed at the same level - so if you are near a competitive larger destination, then Platinum makes even more sense.
Don't get me wrong though - I'm not advocating everyone just go out and buy a Platinum listing (although Eric might give me a vacation if you all do...), but that there is more to it than meets the eye.
BTW - one other thing in your stats. We sent an average of 65 email/rez requests (we let properties post a button if they want on their listings) per year per property. These are behind a captcha wall - so pretty qood quality requests. These would not be counted in your conversion numbers since they don't touch innkeeper website functionality.
.

John said: BTW - one other thing in your stats. We sent an average of 65 email/rez requests (we let properties post a button if they want on their listings) per year per property. These are behind a captcha wall - so pretty qood quality requests. These would not be counted in your conversion numbers since they don't touch innkeeper website functionality.
Now here is a spot where statistics can be overwhelming skewed. I save all of the request emails I get to see if they convert. The last one I got from your site was in January '08 which means some other inn got my other 64 email requests.

Actually, what it means to me is that essentially no one is emailing me from your site for whatever reason and that to get that average, SOME inns are receiving well over 200 requests.
.

Actually, what it means to me is that essentially no one is emailing me from your site for whatever reason and that to get that average, SOME inns are receiving well over 200 requests.

Or the email is broken or getting nabbed as spam. I just sent you a reservation request email to test. You'll be able to spot it 1 adult and 20 children for 200 nights
.

Actually, what it means to me is that essentially no one is emailing me from your site for whatever reason and that to get that average, SOME inns are receiving well over 200 requests.

Or the email is broken or getting nabbed as spam. I just sent you a reservation request email to test. You'll be able to spot it 1 adult and 20 children for 200 nights

Only 50 nights...thanks, you've shown the link works.

 

[Morticia]

John wrote: Just to add some real numbers here, less than half of our traffic comes from Google results (according to Google Analytics). Out of that Google traffic, just looking at the top 50 keywords only, a full 25% of our total Google traffic either types our name into the google search box, or searches on a generic term (meaning they enter no geographic data). I'm sure if I looked farther down the keyword list there would be a lot more lesser-typed in generic words (other than bed and breakfast) fo instance. Google search traffic that enters in a destination of some kind amounts to only about 1/3 of our traffic.
This IS very interesting and something that you should boast boldly about on your Why should I join page. (I have not reviewed your listing page since I joined last fall, but if it is there, I do not recall.) This is a most important tidbit of info. I do know that bandb.com has a good following, but this info - stating your source - does help keep eyes open on this.
Muiford: .... You might look at a directory instead of a specific B&B website if you want to get an idea of how many choices you have. ....
In my own specific case, having someone look at bandb.com gives me a distinct disadvantage. A platinum listing for a B&B in a town ten miles away is the first listing in mytown, mystate. That's not great. I still haven't made up my mind about renewing bandb.com
My 'home' town is very small, and most people do not even know our town exists, yet we are within 5 miles of a known town, which has no B&B's. We have a silver listing and appear under that town as 'near town, state', and another silver listing b&b does as well- they are listed first but they are 20 miles away from the same town. If our listing rotates, I have not seen it. The map that is used for this town has both of our inns marked but ours is so close to the side in a very conjested looking area so it is hard to spot, while the other is very obvious. This is disappointing..

John wrote: Just to add some real numbers here, less than half of our traffic comes from Google results (according to Google Analytics). Out of that Google traffic, just looking at the top 50 keywords only, a full 25% of our total Google traffic either types our name into the google search box, or searches on a generic term (meaning they enter no geographic data). I'm sure if I looked farther down the keyword list there would be a lot more lesser-typed in generic words (other than bed and breakfast) fo instance. Google search traffic that enters in a destination of some kind amounts to only about 1/3 of our traffic.
This IS very interesting and something that you should boast boldly about on your Why should I join page. (I have not reviewed your listing page since I joined last fall, but if it is there, I do not recall.) This is a most important tidbit of info. I do know that bandb.com has a good following, but this info - stating your source - does help keep eyes open on this.
Muiford: .... You might look at a directory instead of a specific B&B website if you want to get an idea of how many choices you have. ....
In my own specific case, having someone look at bandb.com gives me a distinct disadvantage. A platinum listing for a B&B in a town ten miles away is the first listing in mytown, mystate. That's not great. I still haven't made up my mind about renewing bandb.com
My 'home' town is very small, and most people do not even know our town exists, yet we are within 5 miles of a known town, which has no B&B's. We have a silver listing and appear under that town as 'near town, state', and another silver listing b&b does as well- they are listed first but they are 20 miles away from the same town. If our listing rotates, I have not seen it. The map that is used for this town has both of our inns marked but ours is so close to the side in a very conjested looking area so it is hard to spot, while the other is very obvious. This is disappointing.

Email bandb and complain about the map. I had problems with the map way back when and they fixed it as best they could. If it is strictly pulled from Google or other mapping service, tho, they may not be able to help.

 

[Copperhead]

This data really indicates some of the points I've been trying to get across. For instance, if we applied even a 10% conversion rate to these figures (which is probably low since they already take into account an action but is good enough to illustrate), then there would have been roughly 143 reservations from all of these sites combined. At $300 average rez (which is roughly the PAII figure reported across the industry), then all of this in total represents $42,900 in revenue in the innkeepers pocket. Clearly these numbers are not going to be exact, but if applied across all the sites/traffic, they work for comparison sake.
Isolating this for just BedandBreakfast.com and BBonline, then the BedandBreakfast.com reservations were worth $19,500 (650 actions, 10% converting into rez, $300/rez), and BBonline worth $8700 (291 actions, 10% converting to rez, $300/rez). Taking out the costs, BedandBreakfast.com put a net $19.5K - $750, or $18,750, and BBonline put in a total of $8700 - $169, or $8531.
So last year the innkeeper had $42,900 in total revenue from all sites, and now by dropping BedandBreakfast.com because it is "too expensive", assuming nothing else changes, they will only have total revenue of $42,900 - $18,750 (the net revenue generated from bb.com) or $24,150. Had they kept BedandBreakfast.com, and dropped the cheaper per click site BBonline, they would have ended up with $42,900 - $8531 (net rev lost from dropping bbonline), or $34,369.
So their wallet would have been a lot fatter by keeping the "expensive" directory.... (It would have been fattest by keeping them both I might add - which is what we always tell innkeepers. If I had an inn - you can bet I'd be listing it on more sites than just BedandBreakfast.com).
I used to work at an airline back in the early 90's during the last recession. We would cut costs like crazy... and I'll never forget some of the advice I got from a Sr. VP there. There was a lot of it, but two things really stand out. When we were cutting our routes back - he commented "great - our planes are all sitting down now - we are going to save ourselves right into bankruptcy..." because even though we were saving money on a lot of items - we weren't making money on them. And this thought really strikes home when you look at an analysis like this..

Your arguments are logical and make sense to me. The only problem is that the directory that cost $80 per year and resulted in 12 "actions"/goals and if as you approximate, 10% lead to 1 actual conversion could make a similar plea .... "Don't drop us, we brought you $300 for only an $80 investment." At some point you have to draw the line. So the question this innkeeper can now grapple with is do they want to draw the line at $20 per conversion or $3 per conversion or $0.51 per conversion.
It doesn't change anything about your argument but for clarification sake, the average advertised room rate is ~$120 per night for this particular B&B.
.

Your arguments are logical and make sense to me. The only problem is that the directory that cost $80 per year and resulted in 12 "actions"/goals and if as you approximate, 10% lead to 1 actual conversion could make a similar plea .... "Don't drop us, we brought you $300 for only an $80 investment." At some point you have to draw the line. So the question this innkeeper can now grapple with is do they want to draw the line at $20 per conversion or $3 per conversion or $0.51 per conversion.
It doesn't change anything about your argument but for clarification sake, the average advertised room rate is ~$120 per night for this particular B&B.

Good point on the lower numbers - if I understand you correctly, you are saying there is some point low enough where the return may not be material, and there is a cost in time to deal with everyone = may not be worth it. Very important as you can run yourself in circles trying to find good advertising. I also think that conversion does drop off a bit with the quality of sites. Although it wouldn't surprise me if the 10% ratio was low for the main sites. It is pretty easy to wire this up to measure the true actual reservations and revenue from any site if the booking engine supports it (both Webervations has, and so has Rezo, as do sme others).
The $300 I was looking at was from a PAII study - it was something like $150/night, 2 nights per booking. I'm probably not getting it exact, but close. So I believe using your numbers that number would be $240 - as the typical action (email, res request, etc.) would generate an average 2 night stay.
Taking the logic a step further... this is often where the decision comes in whether to go with Silver, Gold, Platinum. No doubt the cost per click for this property would be lower for Gold or Silver - and it is telling that they are getting that much business from the lowest BBonline listing level...
So lets say they dropped to Silver at roughly half the cost of Platinum. There clicks will drop without question, but generally not by the same % of pricing. Which some might think that means silver is a better value. Indeed if you looked at CPC or CPA then a property would claim a victory - they dropped their effective CPC by 20%!!!! But if they looked in their wallet, they would find that they saved $375 or so on membership (approximating due to diff in yearly/monthly)... but LOST roughly $6000 in revenue... (at my $300 average rez cost for consistency). So they just "saved" themselves into losing a net $5600+ in annual revenue.
My point being that evaluating marketing spend needs to be both on the return on investment and on the marginal gain of investing that extra dollar. In the above example, an inn increased their ROI but at the expense of losing revenue and ultimately being much worse off at the end of the year.
This is the type of evaluation that I feel often gets ignored as the focus is on cost-cost-cost....
.

I think it comes down to people having a finite idea in mind about how much they want to spend on advertising.
The question of platinum vs gold vs silver traffic is an interesting one. And again I think it all comes down to homework being done. The averages are too broad to help much. A town with only 4 properties half at platinum and half at silver I bet would see a pretty even distribution of clickthroughs without platinum being favored too heavilly.
Contrast that against a town with 30 properties with 5 at Platinum and I bet you'd find a much bigger difference in traffic between the levels.
The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.
Of course the way other end of the spectrum are inns who are the only property in the town and they go for Gold or Platinum .... I bet they would see no difference. (I just shake my head and wonder what they are thinking.)
(by the way, I'm not thinking the Bookingwiz . com popup is a good idea.)
.

The city from my sample has 38 properties on your site, 14 of them are Platinum (that's two and a half screens of Platinum). I bet there is a large disparity just between upper Platinum and lower Platinum.

We currently rotate platinum every hour... so there is no upper or lower. A property goes up and down the list every day. We used to do it on every search up until last summer - but we got consistent consumer complaints that the order would change so often they couldn't remember who they were looking at when they did another search! This happens within every level.

Of course the way other end of the spectrum are inns who are the only property in the town and they go for Gold or Platinum .... I bet they would see no difference. (I just shake my head and wonder what they are thinking.)

In some instances this may be true, however it gets back to the marginal spending argument. For the extra few hundred dollars, if you are really evaluating your total dollar return on investment (not just your ROI %), then there is a strong argument that by presenting your property in the best light will reap benefits. With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.
.

That's right, I forgot about you rotating the inns. Every hour is smart and fair. Good job.

With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.

Hmmm The difference being 10 photos vs 25photos on a town with only 1 B&B... I'd really like to see a split test done with that. I can't see that being worth the expense. Looking at your membership levels chart it seems that is the only difference on the guest side of things. Are their other differences I'm not thinking about?
It would be an informative test ... do you have a 1B&B town with someone at silver that you'd be willing to flip a coin every time the page loads as to whether they get silver or platinum display and then track the data?
.

That's right, I forgot about you rotating the inns. Every hour is smart and fair. Good job.

With 20 photos, and all the bells and whistles of a Platinum membership, for only another $350-400 over a Silver - question is will you get at least 1-2 more bookings year? Presenting your property in the best light whenever possible may help you do that - and that is a profit maximizing decision.

Hmmm The difference being 10 photos vs 25photos on a town with only 1 B&B... I'd really like to see a split test done with that. I can't see that being worth the expense. Looking at your membership levels chart it seems that is the only difference on the guest side of things. Are their other differences I'm not thinking about?
It would be an informative test ... do you have a 1B&B town with someone at silver that you'd be willing to flip a coin every time the page loads as to whether they get silver or platinum display and then track the data?

It would take some work... plus they likely wouldn't have 20 photos in place so it may be difficult. We do however, have a number of cities with 4 or less listings, where there are both platinums and silvers. Meaning everyone is right next to each other in the listings - and this gives a good proxy. Took a look at the city-only traffic for those properties (no 2nd listings, ONLY traffic from that page), and the platinum listings received over 30% more clicks to their detailed listing pages, and over 40% more clicks subsequently to the innkeepers own website.
Now this isn't an exhaustive analysis by any means - I'd have to look at every city, but it confirms what we generally hear. In one city I saw in NH, the Platinum member got 5X the views and click-throughs over the Silver member... In no city did the Silver ever come within 20% of the Platinum.
The other reason people often forget is that if you want a secondary city listing - it gets listed at the same level - so if you are near a competitive larger destination, then Platinum makes even more sense.
Don't get me wrong though - I'm not advocating everyone just go out and buy a Platinum listing (although Eric might give me a vacation if you all do...), but that there is more to it than meets the eye.
BTW - one other thing in your stats. We sent an average of 65 email/rez requests (we let properties post a button if they want on their listings) per year per property. These are behind a captcha wall - so pretty qood quality requests. These would not be counted in your conversion numbers since they don't touch innkeeper website functionality.
.

John said: BTW - one other thing in your stats. We sent an average of 65 email/rez requests (we let properties post a button if they want on their listings) per year per property. These are behind a captcha wall - so pretty qood quality requests. These would not be counted in your conversion numbers since they don't touch innkeeper website functionality.
Now here is a spot where statistics can be overwhelming skewed. I save all of the request emails I get to see if they convert. The last one I got from your site was in January '08 which means some other inn got my other 64 email requests.

Actually, what it means to me is that essentially no one is emailing me from your site for whatever reason and that to get that average, SOME inns are receiving well over 200 requests.
.

Actually, what it means to me is that essentially no one is emailing me from your site for whatever reason and that to get that average, SOME inns are receiving well over 200 requests.

Or the email is broken or getting nabbed as spam. I just sent you a reservation request email to test. You'll be able to spot it 1 adult and 20 children for 200 nights
.

Actually, what it means to me is that essentially no one is emailing me from your site for whatever reason and that to get that average, SOME inns are receiving well over 200 requests.

Or the email is broken or getting nabbed as spam. I just sent you a reservation request email to test. You'll be able to spot it 1 adult and 20 children for 200 nights

Only 50 nights...thanks, you've shown the link works.
.

Actually, what it means to me is that essentially no one is emailing me from your site for whatever reason and that to get that average, SOME inns are receiving well over 200 requests.

Or the email is broken or getting nabbed as spam. I just sent you a reservation request email to test. You'll be able to spot it 1 adult and 20 children for 200 nights

Only 50 nights...thanks, you've shown the link works.

So now back to the original question, why aren't you getting the AVERAGE? (I am not either - I am batting a ZERO in the 4 months on bandb.com, so unless they come pouring in, I will not get even near the average John mentioned either.)