Stuck with my fully-featured hotel search webapp

H

hotelmatchpoint

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Dec 6, 2011
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www.hotelmatchpoint.com
A complete newbie here, seeking for some advise :music06:

I built the hotel search website www.HotelMatchPoint.com (Compare Hotel Prices - Best Hotel Deals Guaranteed) some months ago. It wasn't a huge investment, but you know how it works:

- Domain ($10)
- A hundred bucks to a designer for the logo and HTML
- Hosting ($30/month)

The idea was to make it profitable through adwords, meaning that for each penny spent in ads the objective is to get 1.x on affiliate commission.

It has been a huge fail. Sure hotel niche has fierce competency, but I know some peers that are doing big money with this formula.

So I need you guys to help me out on how to improve that, or whatever I need to do for making it profitable.

I do optimized my ads, but it seemed that the keywords are just too expensive, I guess because big players (Booking, Kayak, etc.,) are bidding hard for them.
 


NightG said:
1. Doesn't look very "official"
2. Why isn't the search window centered?
Click to expand...

1. Maybe you're right. The designer came with the "pink" color palette and I tought it looked nice. Do you suggest a change on color scheme? Or perhaps on the logo?

2. Don't know, I guess the HTML code has some error. I'll try to contact the designer to fix it asap

Thx for posting!
 
I don't know what you are doing, but you are probably bidding some some obvious and generic terms that are overly saturated and super optimized by your competition. Maybe look into 5 word keywords?
 
You're right, all keywords I've purchased for my ads contained the word hotel, which is over optimized by big players.

But I don't know how to create an ad for selling hotel rooms without these generic words.

Can you guys give me some clues on where to start?
 
hotelmatchpoint said:
You're right, all keywords I've purchased for my ads contained the word hotel, which is over optimized by big players.

But I don't know how to create an ad for selling hotel rooms without these generic words.

Can you guys give me some clues on where to start?
Click to expand...

Do some KW analysis on pages that are ranking for your current KWs and go after the longtails you find on their pages.
 
Probably need to do a lot more split testing.

How much have you made thus far approximately?
 
I've spent around $3000 in adwords and I earned around $800 from commissions.

That was the first 2 months after launching the site, purchasing expensive KW from the crowded hotel space.

Now I think my best bet is to do what IceToSkimos pointed out (thx!), which is to study competitors KW and go for the long tail (placing ads for low CPCs keywords)

How does it sound?
 
Sounds like a plan.

Also, try to find out how out what people do not like about the other hotel search engines and then try to improve it on your one.
 
I don't want to compete against the big players, I'm only trying to make this website profitable, which in my opinion it's not an impossible thing.

I think it'd be enough having something like 200 unique daily visitors. What do you think?

Now I'm setting up some adwords campaigns with long-tail cheap keywords. Let's see if I can achieve a nice volume visits with my tight budget.

I appreciate any suggestion, tip or whatever :D

I'll keep you posted
 
[gay travel]
[gay vacations]
[gay resorts]
[gay key west]
[gay cities]
[gay resorts palm springs]
[gay hotels]
[gay travel destinations]
[gay resort]
[gay bed and breakfast]
[gay rome]
[gay vacation packages]
[gay resorts fort lauderdale]
[key west gay resorts]
[gay vacation]
 
So far the long-tail adwords campaigns have been a fail.

Nearly 400 impressions - 0 clicks (even the gay keyword campaign did not work).

Adwords says that the quality of the keywords is poor :(

Maybe it's time to abandon PPC and go thru other ways to get some traffic.

What do you think about services that sign up your web in 50+ directories?
Does it worth the $20 bucks?

Do you use other strategies for getting traffic? (Not interested on SEO/Content)
 
hotelmatchpoint said:
So far the long-tail adwords campaigns have been a fail.

Nearly 400 impressions - 0 clicks (even the gay keyword campaign did not work).

Adwords says that the quality of the keywords is poor :(

Maybe it's time to abandon PPC and go thru other ways to get some traffic.

What do you think about services that sign up your web in 50+ directories?
Does it worth the $20 bucks?

Do you use other strategies for getting traffic? (Not interested on SEO/Content)
Click to expand...

I'm sorry the gay campaign hasn't worked.
 
Have you tried foreign markets yet?

Regarding the $800 that you have made, did you track where the commissions came from?
 
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