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The Four T’S
14 October 2005

As reported in last week’s TTG, at the PhoCusWright Executive Conference Europe in Paris, technology leaders such as Brent Hoberman of lastminute and David Soskin, Chief Executive of Cheapflights urged the industry to innovate with technology. Soskin also advised companies against becoming too dependent on Google, even though he admitted that Cheapflights does well on the search engines.

Yet there are so many travel companies that have not yet grasped the basics of search engine marketing that, for them, it is more important to get this right before taking the next, innovative leap.

The key point to remember is that conversion is king. Your adverts are displayed against certain keywords that you choose. You are then paying the search engines for every visitor that clicks through to your Web site from your advert; but if those visitors are not persuaded to actually convert from lookers to bookers then you are throwing your online advertising budget down the drain.

At another conference, Soskin’s Head of International, Hugo Burge, came up with a useful mnemonic. Instead of the 4 P’s of marketing (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), he coined the 4 T’s of pay per click: Track, Test, Tweak, Time. This neatly sums up the effort you need to put into your online advertising campaigns to help them be successful. What are the 4 T’s?

Track - If you do not know the source of your bookings how can you know whether your advertising is successful? A vital ingredient of pay per click campaigns is to track the visitor from first click, through to final booking, even if they re-visit your site to book later. You can then measure that all important conversion rate and how much revenue is being generated from each keyword. Only then can you calculate how much return you are earning from your campaigns.

Test and Tweak - This is a never ending process. Never be satisfied. Experiment with new keyword combinations. Try out new advert wording against the existing. Test changes to the layout of landing pages, the pages where visitors arrive when clicking on your adverts. A/B testing is ideal, where you test existing keywords, pages, etc. against new. If the new version does better than the old, switch over. Constant tweaking will raise that conversion rate.

Time - So many businesses still view the Web as a spare-time activity, but successful advertisers such as Cheapflights and lastminute.com who see the bookings rolling-in have not achieved this by chance. They have worked hard and put in a great deal of effort to reach the stage where their advertising is really paying off.

If your online efforts are on the back burner, why not resolve to put in the time and energy and follow the 4 T’s? You too may be rewarded with ever-increasing Web sales.

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