To use the Analytics Tool, log on to the Supplier Administration area of GetYourGuide and then select “Analytics” from the menu on the left.

You can see how well individual products are performing by selecting a product name from the drop-down list. To filter by date, choose a start date and an end date.

You can also switch between different report types by clicking on the tabs below the graph:

Products Found displays how often a product has been viewed on a search results page. E.g. if your product appears on page 2 of a user‘s search results, your product will only count as “found” if the user then clicks through to the second page of his search results.

Products Viewed shows you how often an individual product page has been viewed.

Products Booked tells you how often a product has been booked.

You can also see how many views or bookings were made on a single day by hovering your cursor over the dots that represent the dates in the range displayed at the top of the graph.

What is conversion rate?

The conversion rate represents the number of sales of a product as a percentage of total product views. The calculation asks: of all the people who viewed my product, how many actually made a booking?

This is calculated as: total sales divided by total views multiplied by 100.

E.g. A tour with 456 views and 16 sales has a conversion rate of: 16 / 456 x 100 = 1.79 %

Conversion rates between 1.6  % and 2.2 % are considered to be very good.

Why does my product convert poorly?

There may be several reasons why a product converts poorly. You can use this helpful checklist to see if there are ways you could improve your conversion rates:

• Is your tour description easy to understand? Your description should use clear, readable language and also not be too long. Remember that many of our customers are browsing the website in their second language.
• Have you mentioned all of the reasons to book (RTBs)?  Make sure you highlight the key itinerary items or points of interest, as well as any other details which make your tour uniquely attractive.
• Have you answered all of the questions a potential customer may have? Put yourself in the customer’s position – try to anticipate the questions they want answered before they book. Make sure your description is rich in information, place names and keywords.
• Does your product have a good number of photographs? Customers like to see pictures and this is proven to boost conversion. Clear, high-resolution photographs are the best!

Try editing your product descriptions with these points in mind, and then track performance using the Analytics Tool. If you have any questions, your product manager at GetYourGuide will be happy to review your listings and suggest improvements.

More sales and brand awareness through the “GetYourGuide – Official Supplier Badge”

Official suppliers and partners of GetYourGuide not only benefit from our extensive marketing support, but also have the opportunity to use our wide range of marketing instruments. One of the most effective tools in this range is the “GetYourGuide – Official Supplier Badge”. Integrate your personal badge today and…

Benefit from the popularity of GetYourGuide

Increase your sales

Improve your customer retention

Improve your brand awareness

The Badge is easy to integrate into your website or e-mail signature and can be specifically designed for your business. You can download the Badge in two versions:

Option 1:                                            Option 2:

You now have the option to show ‘Opening Hours’ instead of ‘Starting Times’. Opening hours are suitable for a supplier who has an attraction or tour that commences at any time of the day, i.e. a City Card, Hop-on-Hop-off tour, museum or most other attractions. You still have flexibility to choose specific times and dates for the days that are open – seasonal opening hours are common, and the GetYourGuide engine is capable of variations in opening hours across all dates.

The technical team here at GetYourGuide are constantly improving our site based upon the feedback we receive from suppliers and customers – we implement changes regularly, and if you encounter a specific aspect of the site that you believe could be improved feel free to contact your Product Manager about this! We want to deliver the best possible site and hearing about usability problems is a good way to ensure we are constantly improving.

Note: Please don’t use this new feature for private tours with flexible starting times as we currently are working on a solution for private tours with custom starting times. Thank you for your patience.

As you already know the payment process for suppliers is 100% automatic. The net prices for all tours that have taken place during a given month are being credited right onto your bank account at the beginning of the subsequent month. Since we neither need an invoice nor the customer tickets, you can save the money for stamps although we don’t mind Christmas cards! :)

Therefore we added a new section on our customers vouchers/tickets, which now displays the critical part in both English and German:

1. Direct bank transfer to your local bank account every month regardless of the total amount.

2. No fees.

No more PayPal, Moneybookers or any other solution that was inconvenient for our suppliers. Just plain and simple bank transfer directly to your bank account.

We therefore ask all our suppliers who used a different payment method to enter their bank information into the supplier administration:

The tags will then be displayed on the tours:

We also display the tags in the sidebar of our city and country pages in order to help customers narrow down their choices on GetYourGuide:

Important

• Please let us know if you have a better suggestion to tag your tours!
• Our tags aren’t perfect yet but we will keep on improving them. We will also add new tags so they can fit your products more accurately.
• Not all tags that we have are yet displayed. We are still thinking of ways to, for example, display a tag that says “private tour”

1. Improved tour profile with the first booking step directly on the product page.

2. Added a “Recently viewed” box on most pages so customers won’t get lost anymore.

3. Shopping Cart for customers.

4. Added various texts and icons to increase trust on the site.

5. Improve search with AJAX suggests for destinations (coming soon for the “What” search as well).

And many other small improvements such as improved continent and country pages as well lots of features in the pipeline!

This neutral quality screen is extremely relevant to gain consumer confidence and receive more bookings. Therefore, GetYourGuide has created a Badge that can be easily placed on your company’s personal website, so your customers are aware that you are a certified GetYourGuide supplier and feel confident to purchase your products.

The GetYourGuide Badge will link directly to your profile on GetYourGuide and thus increase the ranking of your profile in Google search results and will very positively impact on your ranking on GetYourGuide.

This is how you can obtain the GetYourGuide Badge:

1. Log into the Supplier Administration

2. Click on the link “Product Promotion” (see picture below)

3. Copy & Paste the Code in the GetYourGuide Badge box into your website

DONE!

Salzburg Sightseeing Tours (GrayLine Salzburg) was the first supplier on GetYourGuide integrating the widget on their website. The company is one of the leading Austrian sightseeing tour companies and is famous for their cool bus tours through Mozart’s hometown. Here is a picture of the Badge on their website.

1. Sample Vouchers

To use an example, we have a created “London Sightseeing Tour”. To view a sample voucher, click on “Manage” in the upper menu bar and follow the link as shown below.

2. Preview new products

After you have created a new product, you preview your new products before they go online. To do so please follow the links as shown below.

Then you will be able to see your product as your customers will see it.

View all New Features

New feature: Free-sale bookings

What is it: Suppliers that have free-sale bookings enabled don’t need to confirm bookings. Normally, for on-demand bookings, suppliers needs to confirm new bookings within 48 hours. Otherwise the booking will be cancelled automatically. On-demand bookings is the default setting for all suppliers.

Purpose of the feature: Many suppliers with high-volume products don’t wish to confirm bookings for products that will be available anyway, e.g. hop-on hop-off bus tours.

How to get access to this feature: Besides the commission rate, this is the only feature that we need to set for you. Email us to enable to free-sale bookings for your products. Once free-sale is enabled, you can specify which products of yours you wish to designate as free-sale. That means you can then have both free-sale and on-demand products in your portfolio.

View all New Features

Although much has changed in how payments are handled and the general eagerness to pay online has drastically increased thanks to big players such as eBay & Amazon, I would like to argue in this blog post that online payment systems still lack essential features that are needed for the further developmet of state-of-the-art e-commerce solutions.The rapid growth of social networks and the overwhelming success of Google’s AdWords application has brought Internet pioneers to think that e-commerce is a 90′s thing and the future of the web is in some form of advertisement or “premium feature” business model. I strongly disagree. At least the start-ups that have been recently backed in Germany & Switzerland mostly have solid e-commerce business models. VCs seem to have a clear preference towards transaction based business models these days. Just take a look at the newest offspring from Marc, Alexander and Oliver Samwer’s Rocket Incubator and you will see a variety of 90s style e-commerce start-ups centered around common consumer goods. Whether such websites are technologically innovative (and/or successful in the long run) or not is another discussion, but it underlines that e-businesses rediscover their original approach: Make money the straight way!

Now, it is clear that the landscape has changed. At least since Amazon’s move to integrate third-party suppliers on its website, payments are not straight forward between customer and supplier as they used to be in 1999. Still, payment systems such as Paypal. Moneybookers or Amazon Web Services have not fully adapted, yet. In my eyes the main problems small e-businesses currently have with the existing online payment options are the following:

1. The gateway systems and developer’s frameworks that can be built in a website are still very poor in functionality & flexibility. Let’s say you have a product for which a customer pays on your website, but you need to process this payment further to a couple of secondary suppliers at distinct points in time. Imagine some entity in your supply chain cancels a payment and you need to reverse the money flow and cancel automated transactions…All these things mentioned are really common sense to most web businesses (notably in the travel space, where everyone earns commissions), but very hard to execute in the given payment frameworks.
2. Integration of payment interfaces into third party solutions are still VERY ugly and look like webdesign in 1995. I understand that it needs to be safe, but you could certainly do a better job to improve the look-and-feel. After all design and intuitive UIs are extremely important for purchasing decisions.
3. The margins of payment providers are still completely outrageous. For instance Paypal commissions between 3-4% for credit card transactions, even if you have a reasonable turnover. There is a great need for better payment solutions (particularly micropayment) that carry less risk than the antique credit card business. And I don’t mean paying only with your Paypal account.

At least Paypal announced that it would launch a new flexible Payment API soon (see Techcrunch article here). Whether this will be sufficient to allow new innovation in e-commerce business models is still to be seen….

As a special feature our new maestro in visual arts and graphic design Philipe Fatio, who decided to leave Zurich lake shore for the daytime and join GetYourGuide, drew a picturesque Matterhorn. Now we are only waiting for the first guide to really offer this tour :-)

Over the next couple of weeks we will present to you some of the new exciting tours on GetYourGuide and discuss upcoming ideas, while making our next steps.