Receptional speaking at SES in London

Receptional have again been asked to speak in London on the session 'Measuring Success Case Studies & Tactics' in June. The two case studies are based on Leisure Direction, one of our largest clients.

Case Study # 1: www.leisuredirection.co.uk

One of our largest clients. They actually came on board with us around 2003 and have been using the same tracking for all that time. They are a major UK outbound travel company with short break inventory to Europe. In 2003, they decided to enable five UK Search companies to build search friendly brands based around their holiday inventory. It was not ideal for search… (and still isn’t) but the tracking was very interesting. They rewarded the SEO/SEMS based on daily uniques, but tracking everything through to sale. The daily uniques used Hitslink, but every SEO/SEM also had their own direct dial phone number, with (at that time) an extremely expensive call centre tracking solution.

Interestingly, the client (Leisure Direction) then sent out an email to all five SEMs every month, for the last four years or so, telling us all how many daily uniques we each got, and our conversion rates, and they also gave us the main Leisure Direction brand stats as a benchmark. The effects were extremely interesting. Of the five original SEM companies involved, only three remain and the others have been replaced. The new guys are finding it harder to win, of course, but the reports keep coming… month in, month out. What I think is useful here is that the client built a system that not only gave an extremely easy way to monitor the key performance indicators, but also enabled him to compare his suppliers, build in a feedback system in the monthly email and the feedback system acted either as a stick or a carrot as the case may be. He managed to change the emphasis from the SEM directing the client, to the client directing the SEM.

Case Study #2

In 2005, we helped Leisure Direction set up their affiliate program. They have left the original SEM tracking system in place, but the problem with the scalability of this system was that the expensive call centre tracking technology could not be replicated across hundreds of affiliates. Every new phone number cost Leisure Direction money and affiliates would have had to do considerable work to integrate the holidays into their own sites. Leisure Direction also had the challenge of encouraging users to phone the call centre, but without discouraging affiliates. We have therefore helped them build an affiliate system into their call centre technology, which integrates the affiliate ID into the web page – both into the telephone number extension that the user dials and into every holiday booking reference. It becomes very difficult for the call centre to complete a booking online without integrating the affiliate ID into the sale.

Back 04.05.2006.