GetYourGuide makes a rigorous quality check for all suppliers on the website, including background checks of insurance documents and trade registers, reputation with local tourism boards and customers. As a result, companies that distribute their products through GetYourGuide have been screened carefully for excellence at delivering the services that they load and manage on the website.

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.

Due to popular request, we have added the feature to preview & print your own product vouchers that will look exactly like the voucher a customer would show you. We have also recently added the feature to preview new products that haven’t been approved by GetYourGuide yet. This way you can preview your products before they go online.

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

Customers prefer to book products they understand and because we are currently cooperating with partners in the German-speaking area, we would love to display your products for our German partners as well. With just a few steps, you can literally double your potential customer base.

If you have product descriptions in German and would like to add them to your products, here’s how it works.

1. First go to your supplier administration and click on Manage in the top menu. Then click on the German flag to start the translation tool.

2. Once the translation tool is open, you can add the German description. If you have the description in your catalogue, you can simply copy paste them into the text fields. Alternatively, you can also send us your descriptions by email and we can add them to your products.

We will be adding more languages in the future so stay tuned!

Browse all GetYourGuide Tips

A few days ago, we moved the login and info pages for suppliers from the header to the footer, and made our search engine more prominent by embedding it in the header so that it will be visible on every page.

Even though our IT focus lies on improving the functionalities for our suppliers and distribution partners, from time to time we make changes to our customer website based on user feedback. And because our search engine is our most important feature for potential customers, it was only logical make it more prominent. We also keep on improving our search algorithm in order to make search results more relevant. Browse all GetYourGuide News

The late American author Arthur Miller once said that a good newspaper is a nation talking to itself. Although we do not aspire to such literary heights, we at GetYourGuide believe that a good newsletter should be a conversation between us and our suppliers.

Ever since GetYourGuide re-launched in October 2009 there have been many changes. We have become the fastest-growing platform for tours, attractions & activities, and we are adding more suppliers and distribution partners to the GetYourGuide family every day.

With the newsletter we want to keep you – our suppliers – up to date with news and updates going on at GetYourGuide. In particular, we will have 3 categories of news (more might be added later):

1. News: Here we will publish any general news and updates that you should know about.
2. New Features: Here we will tell you about new and important features on GetYourGuide, e.g. our new free-sale booking engine.
3. Tips: Here we will publish tips about how you can sell more products, e.g. how to write good tour descriptions.

But most importantly, for this to be an ongoing conversation, we need your feedback. If there’s a feature you’d like to see, tell us. If there’s a travel company you’d like us to approach, let us know. Interact with us: comment on our articles (we promise to reply to all your comments), send us an email or call us (you have our number)!

GetYourGuide’s goal is to connect as many suppliers with as many customers as possible. But to do so, we first need to connect with our suppliers ourselves. That’s why starting today, we’re launching our newsletter for suppliers.

Browse all GetYourGuide News

Our IT Team is releasing great features more quickly than we in the business team can manage to tell our suppliers. Therefore we will be introducing new and important features in short articles here!

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

Ever since we started GetYourGuide, our strategy has been clear and simple: create the platform with the largest amount of tours, attractions & activities in the world, and then distribute these products through both our website and through strong distribution partners. We are convinced that this is the future of the tours & activities market.

Since the launch of our new website just 4 months ago, we have already attracted close to 1000 tours & activities from over 200 suppliers. This makes GetYourGuide the world’s fastest growing platform for tours & activities products. We believe that as the platform as a whole becomes more attractive, all suppliers will benefit from it.

At the same time, we are in talks with distribution partners ranging from big OTAs and hotel websites to travel communities and official tourism boards. Therefore we are extremely pleased by the speed of how Travel.ch – the leading OTA in Switzerland - has already integrated our products into their website. Travel.ch’s approach is to create pages for popular destinations and list the flights, hotel and activity options for each respective destination. You can see one example here: Barcelona (scroll to the bottom).

This is just one possibility how GetYourGuide products can be integrated into partner websites, and even with Travel.ch we are already working on deeper integration possibilities. We’d like to thank Travel.ch for being a fantastic partner to work with and for their invaluable advice. The team around Travel.ch clearly has a firm grasp on the future of travel.

If you know any distribution partners that you can recommend, drop us a note and help us help you sell more tours & activities. More information about our partner program can be found here.

Browse all GetYourGuide News

Why good descriptions?

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engines and our ranking algorithm reward relevant content, so writing good descriptions will increase the chance that a potential customer will click on your product page.

2. Increase Conversion

Now that the customer is already on your product page, you want him to actually book your product as well.

How to write good descriptions

1. Use good keywords

Think from the customer perspective and try to use general keywords like “tour”, “activity” or “adventure” and keywords that are relevant to your product offering. For example, to get customers for a boat ride, use keywords like “cruise” or “water”. You can use Google Insights for Search to help you find good keywords.

2. Don’t describe the tour, describe the experience

Travel people are in the business of selling dreams so instead of writing what the tour is about, you should be writing about what the customer will experience. For instance, “see the Great Wall of China” sounds less inviting than “When you walk on the Great Wall of China, imagine life as a border soldier defending the country against invading barbarians”. Stephen Joyce made this good point in his blog article Writing Compelling Content for the Web.

3. Write a detailed description

Would you buy a $5000 car that only has a 3 sentence description and some bullet points? No one wants to read a novel, but from our experience 80% of tour descriptions tend to be too short rather than too long.

4. Point out the highlights of your product

One trick that professional presenters often employ is that, first, they tell you what they are going to tell you, then they tell you what they said they would tell you, and finally they will tell you what they just told you. That’s why you should reinforce your product description with catchy product highlights. When people compare different products, it’s the highlights they will use to compare products (and the price of course).

5. Use all the fields available

Buying services is a matter of trust and having more information about what to expect makes customers feel more confident about booking. Therefore try not to leave fields empty when using the product wizard on GetYourGuide.

The reason many people use the internet is because they can compare things online. And travel is already a crowded market. So if you want your products to stand out, writing a nice description is the first and probably most important step to take.

Browse all GetYourGuide Tips

It seems that nowadays everybody is talking about the opportunity of online travel in China, and perhaps with good reason as according to a recent research by Phocuswright, “online [travel] distribution growth continues at an impressive rate of 19% in 2009, in spite of the overall downturn in travel”.

However, the solemn fact remains that few foreign travel outfits have actually been successful in China, especially online. Just ask Expedia about how its China acquisition eLong is doing… Despite being the country’s number two OTA, eLong is still struggling with profitability given its huge marketing expenses. To be fair, foreign web companies have a difficult stand in China in general, and Expedia is in good company with businesses like Google and eBay – both struggling to gain market share. Nonetheless, Expedia’s or rather Tripadvisor’s latest foray into China with its platform daodao.com may actually have a good shot of succeeding, but it’s still too early to tell.

Overall, when talking about travel in China, there are 3 main market segments:

1. Inbound travel
2. Domestic travel
3. Outbound travel

Previously, all market segments were dominated by (formerly) state-owned travel agencies such as CTS or CITS, both due to regulations and learning-by-doing expertise. Inbound travel is probably the market area that is the most competitive with foreign companies such as Gray Line being quite successful here. However, because of high market fragmentation and low entry barriers, this is not a market with large opportunities to be reaped.

The domestic market, despite being fairly open, is dominated by local players given their expertise about local consumer behavior and their ability to adapt quickly to changing market conditions. Foreign companies have little competitive advantage here except for their financial clout (see Expedia) and technological edge (which is eroding quickly).

That leaves the outbound market, which has been the most regulated market segment due to fear of unlawful emigration. However, regulations have changed recently and now foreign companies are allowed to offer outbound services to Chinese customers without going through the hassle of finding a Chinese partner with a valid and costly license. Given Chinese traveler’s interest in traveling abroad, this is without doubt the new big opportunity for suppliers of destination activities around the world (think of a Chinese couple booking a Venice gondola ride). And, of course, we at GetYourGuide strive to be at the forefront of it all.

This post is for all suppliers, who are not sure yet whether to upload products or not. Our Sales & Customer Support Team receive many inquiries from users that are unsure how to use the service and are afraid it would cause them a lot of unnecessary work. Here are some short cuts that on how to quickly understand how the platform works and how you can make the most out of it for your company.

1. Is GetYourGuide the right platform for my products?

If you are a company offering tours, attractions, activities or other local touristic services, GetYourGuide is certainly a great platform to sell your products.

2. How can I start using GetYourGuide?

This is in fact one of the questions we receive very often and the answer is quite simple: Sign-Up and upload your first product. If you need help, please refer to the help section or contact us. Most of the general questions are also covered in our supplier FAQ. Our contracting team will get in touch with you to negotiate a commission, as soon as your first product goes online.

3. How does GetYourGuide sell my products?

GetYourGuide is only a platform, so we do not sell your products, we help you reaching a large audience of potential customers. We are doing this by promoting your products on our website and also distribute it on various travel websites.

4. How much work do I need to do?

GetYourGuide is actually very simple to use and you can upload and edit products in just a couple of minutes. Even if it takes you a little while to adjust to the system at the beginning, our suppliers become by experience very efficient in using GetYourGuide in just a couple of days.

5. Will GetYourGuide help to grow my business?

We think it will! Your products will get a great exposure across the web and your company brand will remain associated with it. As long as you design interesting products for the consumer, you will see that GetYourGuide will push your sales.

We are currently preparing the World Travel Market in London. We will attend between the 9th and 12th of November, so if you want to meet us, please drop us a line to info@getyourguide.com and we will notify you about a feasible time as soon as possible. We are very much looking forward to see as many of you as possible at Excel in 2 weeks!

Today we are launching the closed beta of GetYourGuide!

Our alpha version has been online since June last year and there has been an abundance of learnings brought forth by a series challenges but also successes. So for the beta version we went back to the drawing board and not only rethought technical aspects but also where GetYourGuide needs to go from a business perspective. The result is a redesigned platform with almost every line of code rewritten, lots of new features, and it’s an understatement to say that we’re extremely excited about the weeks and months to come.

Initial testings with selected suppliers of tours, attractions & activities have yielded good results but there’s still a lot of work ahead of us.

If you’d like to join the closed beta, please contact us (currently for suppliers only).

And if you think that this is all a bit vague, simply watch this space for more to come!

GetYourGuide office @ Technopark Zurich

As described in a recent blogpost, we have concentrated on sourcing suppliers of tours & activities in the last few weeks. Needless to say our highly motivated team has progressed quite rapidly and we are already halfway through our target locations in Germany, Austria, Switzerland & the Top 20 touristic destinations worldwide. See the blackboard screenshot to track progress :-)

So what are our first learnings, surfing on dozens of travel websites each day and entering contact information into our database. Not much you would think, right? Wrong!

First of all it is just mindblowing how many companies are out there. We are just at the very tip of the iceberg and already found a couple of thousand potential tour & activity products. So if they are so obvious to find, why don’t we all book our diving courses and golf lessons online?

We believe the magic word here is structure. Looking at all these websites, I just find it amazing how unstructured some of these products are presented. It is sometimes unbelievable companies get bookings through their websites, when it takes you 20min to find their contact information. However I would be mean to pretend that all is bad. In fact many SMEs also have very good websites and integrated Shopping Baskets (e.g. Google Checkout). However this alone is not enough, as you also need to actually find their site. For many tour & activity providers Tripadvisor is a good opportunity to enhance their Google ranking and increase traffic to the site.

It is also quite notable that many suppliers have set up a blog (probably hoping to attract new customers). To us it is reassuring that some suppliers already integrated such Web 2.0 applications by themselves as it shows that they are eager for technological innovation.

We will keep you updated on further news, as we progress with our sourcing activities…

Gadgets and accessories are one of the necessities in life and sometimes they are even useful. I asked each of our team members (Martin, Tobi, Pascal, Johannes and myself) to name three essential things that they cannot live without on their travels, and this is what we came up with.
 

Martin

1. Oakley Greg Lutzka Signature Edition

"Funky"

2. Nixon Nomadic Headphones

"Funky 2"

3. Suunto Core All Black

"This one touched the top of the Mont Blanc. Indispensable."

Tobi

1. Swiss Army Knife “Giant Knife 2007″

"Of course I need all the functionalities"

2. USB carabiner

"In case I need to write a line of code"

3. Laptop Pillow

"For a good night's rest"

Pascal

1. VW Bus

"Better to travel with more people than without"

2. Billabong VLAND board shorts

"Essential"

3. Paraglider

"Freedom"

Johannes

1. Amazon Kindle

"Much better than hauling heaps of books with me that I end up not reading anyway"

2. Ray-Ban RB4125 Sunglasses

"Looking good"

3. Garmin nüvi 760

"Never lost again"

Tao

1. Tivoli Audio iPAL

"No better lake-side companion than a Tivoli"

2. Reef Leather Smoothy

"Quality of life"

3. Audio Technica ESW9

"Life is too short for bad sound quality"

And there you have it.

Since the early days of the Internet before the 2001 Dot-Com-Crash one big issue always troubled e-commerce: How to receive payments?

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….

People have been talking now about the semantic web and how it will revolutionize the search engine businesses for quite a while. Personally, I have not given too much thought on this entire “semantic search business”, as I have always felt that my searches were quite “unsemantic” and more directed to websites that I already knew (like “kayak amsterdam” or “tripadvisor amsterdam reviews”). However, I have to admit that my search patterns have changed over the last months and my searches are getting way more complex. Recently I find myself writing or copying entire sentences into Google – with varying results. Yet, we have the big Google competitor Bing now on the scene, so today I tried how well both search engines handle “semantic” searches in comparison.For starters, I tried out a search that is in my opinion very ordinary semantic search and quite important to the online travel industry. I decided to look for a hotel in Amsterdam next week, thus entered “book hotel in amsterdam next week”. The result in Google and Bing is quite sobering:

"Book hotel in Amsterdam next week" on Bing

"Book hotel in amsterdam next week" on Google

I don’t know whether I am too demanding here, but none of the searches are presenting my anything in particular for next week. No special deals, no availability information – really nothing in particular. I could have just left it out and just searched for “hotels in amsterdam”. Even more interesting is that none of the Ads even recognize that I want to go next week and thus promote special deals. I mean really, for all the money hotel websites pay their online marketing agencies, someone could have at least thought about targeted ads concerning dates and times.

Furthermore I thought it was quite interesting how very different hotel companies pop up on either Google or Bing as first results, which once again demonstrates the power of the search engine to specifically promote sites optimized to their standards. It’s quite funny how Bing ignores Booking.com, which is by far the No.1 hotel platform in Europe by now.

Whiteboard in our office (Technopark Zurich)

We are currently sourcing companies offering tours & activities in the Top 20 travel destinations of the world, as well as in Switzerland, Austria & Germany (strengthening the homebase…).  The idea behind this acquisition strategy is to build a strong local network here in the German speaking countries, where the competition is weak (so far) and where we are rooted and thus have good access to suppliers and distributors alike. On the other hand we need to serve potential B2B partners in the travel space (Online Travel Agents, Travel Communities etc.) from the first second, providing them with appropriate content in the destinations, they make most money in. The resulting list of target destinations is compiled on our whiteboard, which you can see here:

Each day we are working ourselves further down the list, sourcing dozens of potential customers in each of the places listed above. Currently, we have covered central Switzerland, London, Vienna, Prague, Paris and some Berlin. Following a couple of basic learnings we have made already along the way of this first global sourcing effort:

1. The competition only covers the tip of the iceberg using their “hand-picked tours” approach: There is plenty more colorful fish in the ocean, which might not fit their mainstream approach, is very interesting nonetheless!
2. The Long Tail in Tours & Activities is not as obscure as you might think: Although some offers are definitely niche content, there are professionals focussing on these very specific services, building a reputation and brand around it. For instance in the field of biking tours a very vivid, professional and interconnected scene has emerged (see for instance Pedal Power in Vienna)
3. The market cries for a better standard: Apart from one or two companies and its affiliates, there are just one million separate websites that all look different and offer different functionality. As a customer, you have no idea where to start and need to apply some really hardcore tricks on the search engine (or knowledge of the location) to get to interesting content.

So far a first oversight…more updates, as soon as the sourcing is further down the road…

Auf Einladung von unserem guten Freund Philipp Treyer haben wir am Metapeople Suchmaschinenmarketing Kongress im Mövenpick Hotel am Zürcher Flughafen teilgenommen. An dieser Stelle einen herzlichen Dank an Metapeople, die wirklich eine erstklassige Veranstaltung organisiert haben!

Hier eine kurze Zusammenfassung der Talks, die ich besucht habe

1) Keynote von Andreas Rohde, Industry Head Google Schweiz

Es war eine einleitende Keynote, die einen breiten Überblick über das Thema Suchmaschinenmarketing (SEM) gab. Die wesentlichen Take-Aways für mich waren zum einen die Einschätzung, dass es bezahlte Abo Systeme für Online Zeitungen geben wird (z.B. eine monatliche Gebühr zum Lesen von 5-6 Zeitungen). Dies von einem Google Mann zu hören erstaunte mich sehr, da ja gerade Google sich in den letzten Jahren sehr für kostenlose Inhalte in diesem Segment stark gemacht hat.

Weiterhin ging Andreas sehr auf den Einfluss von Online Werbung auf die Kaufentscheidung des Kunden ein. Laut Google wird lediglich das schalten von AdWords die Brand Awareness enorm (selbst wenn man nicht auf die Werbung klickt) und vervielfacht dadurch ihren Wert. Angeblich werden schon jetzt 40% aller Kaufentscheide basierend auf Internet Werbung oder Vergleichsseiten gefällt, welches überproportional zur Nutzung des Mediums im Vergleich zu TV oder Radio ist. Die Argumentation forcierte also noch einmal den ja schon bekannten Gedanken, dass das Internet gezielte Werbung ermöglicht deren Nutzen deutlich über Werbung liegt, die auf den traditionellen Kanälen geschaltet wird. Weiterhin stellte Andreas kurz das Google Tool Insights vor, welches es ermöglicht Statistiken & Trends für  Suchbegriffe abzufragen. Wer es noch nicht kennt, sollte es benutzen, ist ein sehr hilfreiches Werkzeug!

2) Patrick Singer, Agency & Product Consultant Google

Patrick leitet Google AdWords Schulungen bei Online Marketing Agenturen und hat das neue AdWords System vorgestellt. Google hat über einen längeren Zeitraum Kunden beobachtet und sich einige nette Dinge ausgedacht, wie man es dem Kunden noch leichter und schöner machen kann AdWords zu schalten und Kampagnen zu administrieren. Hier die wichtigsten neuen Features:

• UI ist stark modernisiert und sieht sehr schön aus
• Man kann einen Alarm einstellen, sobald ein spezifisches Keyword keine Impressionen mehr erzeugt
• Man kann seine Keywords gegenüber allen anderen Nutzern dieser Keywords benchmarken (mein Favorit!)
• Man kann ähnlich wie beim Google Website Check eine Marketing Kampagne testen und bestimmen ob sie sich signifikant von einer laufenden Kampagne unterscheidet. Dieses Feature ist noch in Entwicklung und Patrick hat nicht zu viel darüber verraten, aber es hat sich sehr gut angehört.

Zum Thema Google Website Check hat Patrick einen Use Case mit L’tur gezeigt, wobei sie bei einer identischen Flugbuchung nach Mallorca auf dem Buchungsbutton einmal “Jetzt buchen” und einmal “Auswählen” geschrieben haben. Nach einer längeren Testreihe war das Ergebnis überraschenderweise, dass “Auswählen” eine um 10% verbesserte Konversionsrate liefert. Ich fand das Ergebnis sehr uninuitiv, wodurch die Nützlichkeit des Tools noch einmal bestätigt wird.

3) Philipp Treyer, Campaign Manager Metapeople

Philipp hat einen sehr interessanten Talk zum ominösen Google Quality Score gehalten. Der Google Quality Score entscheidet neben dem Gebot für bestimmte Keywords über den AdRank, also die Platzierung einer Werbung. Je höher der Quality Score, desto höher ist die Wahrscheinlichtkeit, dass man relativ weit oben bei den Werbungen neben den Suchergebnissen erscheint. Nützlicherweise kann eine gute Quality Score sogar dazu führen, dass man im Mittel 30% weniger für ein Keyword bieten kann und trotzdem (falls die Quality Score optimal ist) oberhalb eines durchschnittlichen Mitbieters platziert sein kann. Anders herum muss aber für eine miserable Quality Score bis zu 600% draufgezahlt werden um gleich platziert zu werden, wie ein durchschnittlicher Mitbieter.

Was sind also die Parameter, die die Quality Score bestimmen?

Prinzipiell gibt es drei Dimensionen:

1. Die Landing Page (macht ca. 10% aus)
2. Die Relevanz der Keywords
3. Die Relevanz der AdCopy (der Anzeige selbst) im Vergleich zum dahinter liegenden Content

Weitergehend spielen eine wichtige Rolle die History, sprich die vergangenen Klickraten bei Werbeplatzierungen, die Ladezeit der Seite, sowie ob es sich um Original Content handelt, der beworben wird. Google kennt keine Gnade für Copy-Paste Webseiten. Dies ist besonders interessant im Zusammenhang mit Travelwebsites, da viele Anbieter ihren Content bei mehreren Distributoren einstellen. Eine gute Diskussion dieses Themas findet man hier.

Überraschenderweise honoriert Google ebenfalls das Offenlegen von AGBs oder anderen Massnahmen zur Transparenz einer Website. Einen intelligenten Algorithmus hierzu stelle ich mir sehr kompliziert vor, aber Google ist ja einiges zuzutrauen.

Für die eher algebraisch orientierten unter uns noch einmal die Formel mit der der AdRank kalkuliert wird:

1: Anbieter 1

2: Anbieter 2

p1 (Preis) x q1 (Qualität) = b2 (Gebot) x q2 (Qualität)

Logischerweise ist der Preis für den AdRank:

p1 = b2 x q2 /q1

In einfachen Worten ist also der Preis des AdRanks gleich dem Gebot des Mitbieters mal dem Quotienten aus Quality Score des Mitbieters und der eigenen Quality Score.

Als nützliche Take-Away Tipps gab Philipp vorallem an möglichst aktuelle und relevante Ads zu schalten. Als Beispiel hat Philipp Live Ads für einen Live Ticker einer schweizer Zeitung  während eines Ice Hockey Spiels genannt, wobei per RSS immer das neueste Ergebnis des Spiels in die Werbung eingeblendet wurde. Die Konversionsrate Click-Through-Rate (danke Philipp!) dieser Werbung lag bei ca. 15% und damit weit über der Konkurrenz. Es gibt also noch nach wie vor Strategien um im überlaufenden SEM Markt mit moderatem Geldeinsatz besser als die Konkurrenz zu sein.

Heute gibt es einen schönen Artikel über GetYourGuide im Punkt.ch. Einer unserer Guides, Michel, wird hierin vorgestellt und gibt auch einen netten Kommentar zur Plattform ab. Danke Michel!

Wir hoffen, dass sich viele weitere Guides von seinem Beispiel motivieren lassen und Touristen die schönsten Ecken ihrer Heimat näher bringen. Allgemeine Anfragen (z.B. Presseanfragen) zu GetYourGuide können übrigens immer auf info@getyourguide.com gesendet werden.

René Obermann (CEO Deutsche Telekom) and Martin Varsavsky (Serial Entrepreneur and CEO Fon) had a public conversation on mobile communications. I tried to capture some of the things they said. Below you can find my notes.

• Mobile business is still in good shape with old business model
• Telekom is part of solution to global crisis, makes huges investements: cover country in broadband (VDSL, fibre optics etc.)
• mobile in the US, a lot of flatrate products -> why not in germany? iPhone, Android, mutual change of information, requires more flat, thus Germany will adapt. But lesson learned is that it is all about innovation to change these things
• US only 4 companies run entire mobile business, Europe is all clutter not consumer friendly, tough : Europe is learning its lesson very fast
• liquidity reserves with Deutsche Telekom are very high, M&A still possible
• Acquisitions: 6-7 billion -> Orange netherlands, Greece
• Very difficult to grow in Germany, markets are saturated
• Problem at Fon is Pound revenues: € is a great thing ;-) Hope that the € stays a strong currency. DT on the other hand can’t hedge currencies, profits are kept in distinct countries
• Roaming: Industry is changing, but not so quickly (first example is paying by the minute). It’s just a matter of time.
• Varsavsky: Zuckerberg wants to connect people – is Facebook a new telecom operator? Obermann: Could be the next way to communicate!
• DT can be a great partner to many companies, but it is not tied to simply one. Thus they would never take over a social network.
• Personal part: Entrepreneur and Company very difficult initially, but DT has changed and is looking for young talented Entrepreneurial spirited people
• Mobile Payments : Will be implemented, but only for small money
• Future of video: Next years high increase in demand, very tough to cover everything with mobile, has to be hybrid mobile broadband and fibre optics