Hotels Combined Response

I emailed hotels combined and asked them to respond to my experiment. Here it is.

Hello Robert,

Yes, we noticed that you completed your test.

Frankly, I’m a bit disappointed by your efforts.  It doesn’t look like you did anything to optimise your keywords, text ads or bid prices, and you didn’t come back to me for advice once you started losing money.

Overall, your Leads were very good quality, but your Visitors seemed very poorly targetted.  I can tell this because your Visitor-to-Lead conversion rate was only around 7.5% for hotel Leads, and also because around 37% of your Leads were from clicks on Google ads.  Most good Affiliates have an average Visitor-to-Lead conversion rate of 50 – 100%.  Also, most Affiliates only earn less than 5% of their revenue from Google ads, so your high percentage shows that your visitors just aren’t interested in our hotel comparison service.

My suggestion would have been that you used the Label parameter to track the performance of each of your keywords or text ads.  You could even have provided me with your Google Analytics conversion tracking code, so I could’ve placed it on your conversion page.  My experience with AdWords tells me that this would’ve helped you identify poorly converting keywords that you could’ve removed from your adgroups.  For example, the keyword “hotel” appears good at first glance, but if you had it on Broad match, it would attract traffic from searches such as “hotel employment opportunities” or “buy a hotel for investment”.

One of your conclusions was that our Google ads don’t help your profitability.  This is not entirely correct.  Each Visitor can generate multiple Leads, so it adds an extra revenue stream.  Consider an end-user who clicks on a hotel link.  The provider’s website appears in a new window, so when they complete their reservation, our website is still open in front of them.  If they then decide to book a flight or hire a car, they might well reach their next website from one of the Google ads on our page.  In this case, even though you only earned $0.14 from the ad click, you actually earned two commissions from the one Visitor, which should serve to increase your overall Visitor value.

Your comment in week 3 doesn’t give me confidence that you tried very hard at this when you said:

“To be honest I didnt really keep an eye on things this week. Just let it run away.”

If I found that I was losing money each week for the first two weeks of an ad campaign, I would not have simply “let it run away”.  Even if I did, I would not have expected there to be any marked improvement in the situation at the end of that period.

Anyway, I apologise for the negative tone of this email.  You probably tried your best, based on your current experience with paid search and affiliate programs.  I hope that in future you make more effort to reach out to possible sources of assistance.  For example, in this situation I was more than willing to offer my many years of AdWords and affiliate program experience to you in the form of advice and technical support.  If you decide to continue with our Affiliate Program, that offer will still stand.

Regards,

Adam Zebrowski
Business Development