How TripAdvisor works

 

How TripAdvisor works

TripAdvisor is the world’s largest travel site, with more than 60 million unique

monthly visitors and over 75 million reviews and opinions.

TripAdvisor’s specialty is ratings and reviews of lodging, attractions, and

destinations, along with travel advice, all from real travelers. The site also

integrates travel planning and booking tools, making it an attractive platform for

hotels, tour companies, and travel and tourism businesses. The TripAdvisor for

Business division provides access to those millions of TripAdvisor visitors.

Airlines, travel agencies, tour operators, credit card companies, and lifestyle

brands will likely find the TripAdvisor audience attractive. Banner advertising

options include traditional “run of site” media buys and home-page takeovers, as

well as more targeted campaigns to reach users researching a specific city, state,

country, or island. You can also target audience types, such as business, family,

or luxury travelers.

Sponsorships are available for two weekly e-mails: TripWatch, a destination-

specific newsletter with deals and information on whatever destination the

TripAdvisor member is “watching”; and “Member Update,” featuring general

travel deals and news.

For hotels, restaurants, and attractions, establishing a business account on

TripAdvisor is free. Doing so enables you to “claim” your location on the site,

update and optimize your business details, and upload photos. Receive e-mail

alerts when your business garners new guest reviews—and you’ll be able to

respond officially to those reviews. You can also get free TripAdvisor widgets

and badges to display on your own website or blog.

The centerpiece ad offering, called Business Listings, is aimed at

accommodations as small as a B&B or as large as a luxury resort hotel. Business

Listings is powered by an appealing, easy-to-use online ad platform, and the flat-

fee pricing is very attractive: just $75 a month or so for a small property, up to

around $1,000 a month for big hotel properties of several hundred rooms.

Business Listings enables hoteliers to increase a property’s exposure by adding

direct contact information—a website link, e-mail address, and phone number—

to their property pages on TripAdvisor.com. The effectiveness and ROI of these

ads can be substantial.

Vancouver’s L’Hermitage Hotel reportedly produced $64 in incremental

bookings for every dollar spent on its TripAdvisor Business Listing. A study

conducted by Forrester Research on behalf of TripAdvisor projects that the 60-

room boutique property will receive over $327,000 in incremental bookings over

a three-year period on a $7,500 investment.

“Our Business Listings subscription costs us approximately $200 per month, and

it more than pays for itself in one day,” says Glenn Eleiter, general manager of

L’Hermitage. “Payback is very quick.”

Other Platforms

Facebook owns a 95% share of the social media market, in terms of time spent

engaging with the platform. It’s no surprise Facebook is taking up most of the

oxygen in the room when it comes to advertising market share. YouTube,

Twitter, LinkedIn, and the other options discussed here are distant followers.

Still, beyond these sites, almost every other social platform would be delighted

to sell you an ad. Group deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial can really

move the needle, although we often hear cautionary tales of unsustainable

discounts and one-night-stand customers.

Zynga will sell you traditional banners and interstitials—or would you prefer to

sponsor a nice “in-game, branded virtual item”?

MySpace and Flickr offer an array of banners. Digg allows users to “digg”

popular ads—or bury unpopular ones. Reddit has a self-serve ad platform. The

opportunities to spend your social advertising dollars are endless.

I talked at length about Foursquare as a means to promote a local

bricks-and-mortar business. Yelp is another great resource for local operations.

Best known for its restaurant reviews, in fact the site boasts more listings for

shopping destinations than for eateries. Some 73 million people visited the site

in the first quarter of 2012 to sift through local business reviews and ratings.

But whereas Foursquare has no paid advertising offerings to speak of, Yelp has a

few worth considering.

Yelp local business advertising packages typically range from $300 to $1,000 per

month. Each package includes a dashboard to track your results in the program.

Yelp Deals are similar to Groupon or LivingSocial promotions—you offer

consumers a substantial discount on your Yelp Business page, and Yelp gets a

30% cut of the revenue.

If you can make some margin on that, more power to you.

Your Deal will be showcased prominently near the top of your Yelp Business

page. In addition to the Deal price, the regular price and discount percentage will

also be displayed, so potential customers know what a great Deal you are

offering.

Here are three other ad units or targeting angles to consider on Yelp:

1. Advertise on Yelp Search. Yelp Ads are placed on search result pages, so

that users searching for your category of business in your area will see your

business above Yelp’s natural search results.

2. Advertise on Related Businesses. Want to cut into your competition’s

market share? You can place ads on the Yelp business pages of your rivals

nearby businesses in your category.

3. Removal of Competitor Ads. By the same token, when you advertise, Yelp

will remove competitor ads from your Yelp business page, allowing you to

keep the purchasing focus on your business.

Yelp’s approach to competitor ads is a bit eyebrow-raising. The newly public

firm is still losing millions of dollars, and it is locked in an ad-revenue fight with

much bigger rivals Google and Facebook. So I expect we will see many more. 

for the visibility of their website within the stream of organic, user-shared

content.

Advertisers can determine who sees their page by specifying the content

category, user interests, and demographic data.

Paid Discovery is available for two budget levels:

Standard, $0.10 per engaged visitor

Premium, $0.25 per engaged visitor

These promoted “Stumbles” receive “priority serving in content streams,” and

they can be targeted by interest, location, and demographics, as well as by device

(web or mobile). StumbleUpon provides detailed analytics about campaign

virality and engagement; the system can also integrate with Google Analytics.

Personal finance site Mint.com used StumbleUpon Paid Discovery ads to reach

new members by targeting the “Financial Planning” category, as well as “Self

Improvement,” “University/College,” and “Internet Tools” interests. Mint.com

split its campaign into male and female demographics. It even promoted its

“Wedding Budget Checklist” page within StumbleUpon’s “Weddings” category.

Stew Langille, vice president of marketing at Mint.com, was pleased with the

results, calling StumbleUpon Paid Discovery “the most cost-effective form of

advertising that we have used, including pay-per-click advertising on a popular

social networking site.”

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The campaign drove 180,000 average monthly visits to Mint.com from

StumbleUpon—only 44% of which were paid clicks.

Paid StumbleUpon campaigns seem to encourage viral transmission, including

unpaid traffic from users sharing Paid Stumbles. For example, a cheese-

marketing campaign from the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board got a boost of

60% more free traffic thanks to organic sharing of its initial Paid Stumbles.

These kinds of results are due, in part, to StumbleUpon’s focus on engagement. 

the top-tier ads are targeted at the most engaged users in the network, based on

factors including time spent, page interaction and activity, share rate, and other

criteria. 

Summary:

While no other social platform offers quite the advertising muscle of Facebook,

it’s important to recognize the unique benefits of the other networks.