Thursday, June 29, 2006

released in beta today and if you are a seller of goods in the U.S. have fun!
Other parts of the world, we're shut out at least for now. Google Checkout promises to have a signigicant impact in the online retail space, but for non-American retailers like tourism businesses . . . Google Checkout will have to wait - at least as a seller.

Funny enough, checkout permits anyone in the world to be a buyer!
Go figure.

posted by Toddles @   0 comments

Saturday, June 24, 2006

G - Pay News flash

Google's Adwords system is down for four hours today for system maintenance!
If my guess is right, they are integrating a new G-Pay system for online purchasing similar to PayPal. Big announcement likely Monday!

I'm planning on being an early adopter on this one and if you have some time, it might be helpful for your tourism business to look into this week when GPay is officially announced. We're already using PayPal to make it easy for our guests to pay for their experiences with us.

If it GPay is integrated into adwords campaigns, look for Google to be gathering all kinds of user info and granting benefits to advertisers who impliment GPay.

Like PayPal, GPay (cleverly similar to EBay who owns PayPal) will generate revenue for the online advertising giant.

I'm planning on spending some time online this week putting this payment tool to work.

Todd Lucier - TourismClicks.com

posted by Toddles @ 1:25 PM   0 comments

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Email Influences Travel Decisions


The Conference Board in the US, recently reported that e-mail affects online travel
purchases: 10 percent of male and 8.6 percent of female respondents
said that their travel arrangements had been influenced by e-mail in
the last six months.
How are you using e-mail to influence travel decisions of your ideal guests?

posted by Toddles @ 9:32 AM   0 comments

New Pay Per Click tool from Microsoft

http://adlab.microsoft.com/
This is a new site from Microsoft to assist advertisers - those using pay per click.
I'll check it out and add more advice soon.  If you learn anything with it.  Please comment about Adlab on this post.

posted by Toddles @ 8:11 AM   0 comments

Sunday, June 18, 2006

Workshop participants know the value of creating online photo albums for your guests.
is an online storage and sharing tool for image libraries.

Another free tool brought to you by the Tourism Keys Blog.
Users need to be invited to try out the new software - still in beta. If you get an invite, let us know how it works for you.

Todd Lucier - TourismClicks.com

posted by Toddles @   0 comments

Friday, June 16, 2006

Online Payment options for Tourism Businesses


How are your guests paying you? Reply to this blog and share your thoughts.

In our tourism business most people call and pay over the phone and like most tourism businesses we really want to talk to each of our guests. But remember, it's not you that decides how your guests are going to pay you, it's your guests that decide that. By providing as many options as possible, you are opening windows that your new and returning guests can hand you their money through. See how we give payment options.
Few are paying online - but some are. The vast majority of our guests call and register over the phone.

By the way, watch for the launch of Google's own payment scheme to be launched shortly. Dubbed "gpay" the service should be pretty easy for Google to roll out, seeing as they already process payments for thousands of advertisers - all of it online.

Perhaps when Google jumps in the online payment marketplace, online payment won't seem so "off the wall" to those of us in tourism waiting for the masses to adopt online payment.

It's not difficult to set up online payment, most services like Paypal do a really good job making it easy.

Todd Lucier - TourismClicks.com

posted by Toddles @ 1:16 PM   0 comments

Saturday, June 10, 2006

Linking - an excellent article for Search Engine Optimization

This article describes how relevency of links is determined. http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1458/
The article also directs readers to a very cool graphic tool for assessing link quality at Touchgraph.com. Allow 15 minutes for checking out the google tool on the site.

posted by Toddles @ 10:46 AM   0 comments

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Travel buying online growing quickly!

Almost 150 Million visited a travel Web site last year - a 35 percent
surge from 2004, according to a report released Tuesday by comScore.

The research company also found that annual online travel revenues
amounted to $60 billion last year, marking a 20 percent increase from
2004. Those numbers are more conservative than figures released
Tuesday by research firm eMarketer, which estimated that online travel
revenues totaled $64.9 billion last year--which it pegged as a 28
percent increase over 2004.

posted by Toddles @ 10:48 AM   0 comments

Web Stats that Matter

You can't know where you are going, unless you know where you have been.
Regardless of the Web stats that you want to know about for your Web site. (please don't measure hits! - I digress)
Web stats only matter in comparison to what statistics you have seen previously. I was delighted today to see http://www.bayoffundy.com report statistics in a way that matters to their membership and funding partners:
"The first four months of 2006 have shown an increase in web site visitors to the BayofFundy.com web site of 52%, an increase in page views of a 67% and an increase in unique visitors to our website of 46%, resulting in a year-to-date increase in sales of 400%!"

Take a page from the Bay of Fundy Web stats reporting. Compare where you are to where you have been and regardless of the stats you measure, the results will mean something to those who see them.

So, if you have never seen your Web stats, measure them now, so you can use them in the future.

Todd Lucier - TourismClicks.com

posted by Toddles @ 7:21 AM   0 comments