On first glance, there’s almost an overwhelming amount of information in Think Insights. If you love statistics and marketing, you could pretty easily get lost in there. It’s part of the ThinkWithGoogle.com domain and comes from the same group that debuted the Think Quarterly online magazine earlier this year.

Google calls Think Insights a “digital cheat sheet” for marketers.

Here you will find a selection of the research, insights and ideas — from both inside and outside of Google — that informs our strategies, decisions, and products. There are videos, articles, interviews, and studies designed to bring you everything from high-level inspiration to deck-ready data points. Consider this your digital cheat sheet.

There are research reports, infographics, video interviews and statistics (broken down by industry, marketing objective and more), and you get the impression that Think Insights is only going to get bigger — much bigger — over time.

Read More at SearchEngineLand

The research analysed feedback data from nearly 8,000 online travel buyers and found that errors in areas such as pricing, user experience and product were directly contributing to lost travel sales.

The top 10 reasons for lost travel purchases online were:

1. Price – The search for lower prices was a constant theme, underlining the need for the best presentation of all pricing options. Meanwhile, feedback was also focused on disparities between advertised prices and those found on the site themselves.

2. Site functionality – Access to time saving functionality was an important consideration, whether this be features such as records of saved searches or previous bookings.

3. On-site search – Site search for travel companies needs to be able to cope with a broad range of uses, from the first time visitor researching destinations through to a converting buyer looking for specific deals. Search functionality needs to be presented accordingly.

4. Product description – Information about travel products, including text, photos, videos and reviews, is vital in the purchase process and so ensuring it is adequate and well displayed is vital to retail success.

5. Additional charges – Whilst EU law dictates that prices must now be displayed with all additional costs included, the presentation of these costs is still a consideration for many consumers and optional extra charges should be set in line with competitors.

6. Navigation – Complaints around navigation focused on a lack of basic sorting and filtering functionality, enabling consumers to home in on the holiday of their preference quickly and easily.

7. Discounts/sales – In this economic climate consumers are more focused than ever on securing the best price for a holiday. Last minute offers or dedicated bargain sections were sought by buyers, along with loyalty rewards for regular customers.

8. Errors and bugs – Site errors not only cause short term frustration, they can permanently damage a site’s reputation with buyers. Simple issues such as browser compatibility can completely exclude some buyers from a site.

9. Speed – The slow loading of pages, and particularly of search results, was a major irritant for travel buyers. Given that most buyers will be looking at multiple sites, a slow loading page can be a significant disincentive to purchase.

10. Availability – Users become frustrated having invested the time into searching for products only to find that these are not available to purchase. Sites need to ensure that unavailable products are flagged as such at an early stage.

Read More at eyefortravel

Here are some best practice tips:

Run separate campaigns

As above, ads perform differently on mobile devices. To therefore make the most out of mobile, we recommend advertisers run separate mobile campaigns to their traditional desktop paid search ads. The best way to do this is to replicate existing high volume campaigns and target them specifically at mobile devices. Marketers should start pulling together data for mobile campaigns by using their existing brand keyword campaigns.

This will not only offer improved brand protection, but also ensure lower CPCs while getting started (since brand terms typically have higher quality scores than other keywords).  By running separate, mobile specific campaigns, advertisers can experiment with the granular control over bids, creative, and landing pages that mobile targeting provides, before scaling out their efforts.

Think about the user

As most mobile browsing takes place on smartphones, the desktop browsing experience is mimicked, but with two key differences: everything is smaller and there is limited support for Flash. With the proliferation of smart phones, it’s not necessarily important to have a mobile specific (or WAP) website for your brand, but you want to ensure that users get the most from your landing page, especially if they’re going to be making social arrangements on the go.

Read More at Econsultancy

Figure out where to stay: Hotel Finder shines a “tourist spotlight” on the most visited areas of US cities. It’s based on what’s most popular or one can draw a shape around the area where a traveller wants to stay, e.g. on the ocean or along Sunset Boulevard.

Get a good deal: In the “Compared to typical” section, one can see how each hotel’s price compares to its historical average.

Compare fast: One no longer needs to open a new browser tab for each hotel result, and then go hunting around for pictures. When you select a hotel in Hotel Finder, the tool shows a collage of images, Google Places reviews, and key information right within the list. You can even use keyboard shortcuts (“J” and “K”) to flip through the results quickly, just like in Google Reader and News.

Keep a shortlist: As you flip through the results, add the hotels you like to a shortlist to easily keep track of the ones that interest you.

When one is ready to book a hotel, a user finds a selection of booking options from a range of available partners or directly from the hotel.

See More at eyefortravel

The announcement marks Google’s full entrance into the world of behavioral targeting in AdWords.

The system looks at the types of pages that a user visits, considering how recently and frequently the person visits those sites, and associates that browser cookie with the appropriate interest categories. Users can view and edit the categories they’ve been associated at Google’s Ad Preferences page, and opt out entirely, if they so desire.

Read more on Searchengineland

Over the past five years, social media has revolutionized the global economy and become one of the most attractive and cost effective platforms to promote brands and stay competitive in the market. Yet according to a recent poll conducted by TravelClick almost a quarter of hotels are not utilizing social media to increase occupancy and revenue per available room (RevPAR).

Only 20 percent of the poll’s respondents cited using Twitter, ten percent cited using Groupon or other forms of online couponing, and a miniscule eight percent utilize FourSquare promotions. Facebook was by far the most preferred social media channel for hoteliers, with 65 percent of respondents using it to increase bookings and revenue.

“Instead of running cost-efficient promotions on social media channels like Twitter and Facebook, hotels are electing to increase their advertising spend through online advertisements (57 percent) and paid search advertising (20 percent),” said Jonathan Cherins, chief marketing officer of TravelClick, “It’s important that hotels don’t rely solely on advertising to increase bookings. Hoteliers should be incorporating a mix of online marketing, GDS media as well as social media in order touch their key audiences.”

The poll, which was conducted during the TravelClick webinar titled: “2011 First Quarter Hotel Industry Update: Adapting to the Changing Revenue Management and Marketing Landscape,” also showed that despite the improving economy, hotels are still seeing rate driven guests. Two-thirds (66 percent) of the webinar attendees, which includes hoteliers from around the globe, agreed that although they are seeing less price sensitivity from their guests, rate is still a key factor in bookings. Only four percent believe rate is no longer the driving issue for hotel guests.

Read More of this article at HotelMarketing.com

Google claimed the number-one spot in U.S. display advertising in the first quarter, with 14.7% of the market ($396 million), up from 13.3% in Q4 2010. Yahoo’s hold on the market declined from 13.6% to 12.3%, or $330 million, in that same period.

Facebook, meanwhile, had 8.8% of the display market, or $238 million. Karsten Weide, IDC vice president and the author of the report, says he expects Facebook‘s share to overtake Yahoo’s in the third or fourth quarter.

Weide says the latest numbers reflect Google’s strength rather than Yahoo’s weakness. “They have a huge search network,” Weide says, “And anything you offer based on that is likely to work well.”

Google got into the display ad arena in earnest in September 2009, after its acquisition of DoubleClick. Since then, the business has grown rapidly and is now estimated to be worth $2.5 billion a year, including YouTube

Read More of this story at Mashable

German protel hotelsoftware presented the world’s first property management system for the iPad.

Who needs hotel software on an iPad? Tablet devices offer many advantages to hotels, because many business processes become more and more independent of location. A few examples: Hotels can use iPads as “floating front desks”, offering guests mobile services like check-in or check-out. iPads could even be employed as support work stations to reduce demand peaks.

With protel Air protel expands its SaaS product line. protel Air is a full-service solution and a true “Software-as-a-Service” application, that is hosted in a secure data centre environment. Benefits for the user: Additional hardware and installations in the hotel are unnecessary as the sole requirement is an Internet browser. The software is maintained and updated by protel. Data security is also taken care of by protel. With its extended range of functionalities and based on the latest technology, this easily scalable cloud application is the perfect solution for all hotels who value flexibility, reliability and security.

Article From HotelMarketing.Com (Related Link: Protel)

It may not have received much fanfare, but this is a huge change for post-click marketing.

Until now, PPC marketing and landing page optimization were separated by a gap: the click. The only information a user had to make a decision to click was (1) the text of the ad itself, a mere 135 characters and (2) the position of the ad as a faint signal of quality or value. And, where applicable, any brand equity that the advertiser had previously established. It wasn’t until the user clicked that they could factor in the actual experience that the advertiser would deliver in return.

That structure let a lot of advertisers get away with poor post-click marketing experiences. As long as the ad — just the ad — tempted people enough to click, they generated their traffic, increased their click-through rate (CTR), and had a shot at snaring some fraction of those respondents in a conversion.

But the game has changed. Poor post-click marketing experiences can no longer hide behind the click.

Now, upon entering this “preview mode,” a user can hover over any ad — or organic listing — on the search results page (SERP) to see what its landing page looks like. They can read snippets of text from the actual page to see how closely it relates to the text of the ad. And by effortlessly moving their mouse around the SERP, they can quickly compare all of the different advertisers before they decide to click on any.

Read More of this Article at Search Engine Land

“A social media breakup is when a consumer ends a permission-based communication right with a brand,” explained Jeffrey K. Rohrs, vice president of marketing for ExactTarget, which specializes in interactive marketing.

More than half (55%) of Facebook users have liked a company and later decided they no longer want to see the company’s posts, according to ExactTarget’s research.

Social media breakups can have unexpected – and unwanted – consequences. For companies that don’t have thousands of fans, even a few such breakups can affect how your posts appear – or even whether they appear – on Facebook.

It’s complicated
“A lot of marketers think, ‘If I post something it’s going to get seen by my fans.’ That’s simply not the case,” Rohrs said.

Facebook places posts on users’ walls according to an algorithm. If people are not interacting with your posts, or worse yet hiding them or unliking you, Facebook takes that as a sign that your company isn’t popular, which means fewer of your posts will appear automatically on users’ walls.

(Customers that have liked you and regularly interacted with you will continue to see your posts because Facebook recognizes that they are relevant to that person.)

Ouch, that hurts
Facebook breakups occur three ways. There are de jure breakups – when someone takes the step of unliking a company. And two types of de facto breakups – hiding a brand’s posts on the user’s wall or simply ignoring the posts.

More fans take the proactive step of un-liking a company (43%) than simply hiding a company’s posts from their wall (38%) or just ignoring the posts (19%), according to ExactTarget’s research.

Read more at Travel Market Report