I am a big fan of the Marketing Experiments team over in Florida. Not only because they like to go surfing right out of their office, but because they are very scientific about their work in online selling. Even though they do not focus on online vacation rental and online travel bookings, their materials are very applicable to vacation home rental managers.
Their latest publication: Search Marketing 2008 Benchmark covers all the latest trends in Search Marketing. See an excerpt: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/exs/Search08Excerpt.pdf
Couple of immediate take-aways:
- About half of online seller will increase their PPC and SEO budget by over 10%.
- Only House Email Marketing has a higher ROI than SEO & PPC
- SEO and SEM positions are very hard to fill
- Long URLs are not good. Short ones are.
If this is an area you plan to invest a lot of time and energy, the ME Benchmark could prove to be a very valuable resource for you.
Ralf
www.liverez.com
Tags: Online Booking, online travel, property management, travel, vacation, vacation home rental, vacation property management