Where To Place Your Online Ads To Increase Bookings

Most businesses go to great lengths to find websites to advertise on. While you may pick general tourism websites, you could get even better results by fine-tuning your choice by following the simple rule of relevancy and focus.

The essential ingredients to choosing websites for advertising

The first step in choosing a handful of websites out of a huge pool of tourism sites is to think about their readers and the information that they are looking for. You then have:

• People interested in a particular destination
• People interested in particular tourism products

It is possible to persuade people to purchase tourism products that they were not necessarily looking for in an area that they are interested in but it's practically impossible to change their mind about the destination they intend to visit.

Location relevancy

Because you are targeting people interested in travelling to Scotland you may want to look at websites with a Scottish focus instead of websites about travel in general. Advertising on websites with a general Scottish focus is particularly recommended to businesses operating and selling tourism products at country level.

You can now refine your choice further. If you are based in Fife or East Lothian or your services have a regional focus, then you are particularly interested in targeting people keen on travelling to those places.

You can now narrow down the pool of possible partner websites to those about these places. If you are offering a tour to the fishing villages of Fife it's more effective to advertise on a website about Fife than on one about Scotland in general.

Drilling down to find regional websites or pages has the added benefit of being cheaper. The demand for advertising on general Scottish websites is greater because businesses from all over Scotland want to advertise on them. This drives prices up considerably. The demand for ad space on regional and local websites is much lower and as a result, advertising is much more affordable.

Most businesses jump at the chance to advertise on a website with a general focus because they believe lots of people will see and click on their ad. Unfortunately, there are also other ads competing for the same visitors and in most cases, they may simply not be interested in the area where you operate.

People visiting local and regional websites have already decided in what area of Scotland they are interested which makes them more qualified prospects. Because they are interested in those place, they are more likely to pay attention to products and services in that area. Advertising on several such websites will bring you the same number of prospects as a general, more expensive single website.

Product relevancy

Now that you've established whether to advertise on general, regional or local websites, you must refine the choice further by taking into account the readers' interests.

Your ad must be related to what the visitors are actually looking for, both in terms of location and type of product. Advertising the North Berwick golf course on an East Lothian walking website is not as effective as advertising on an East Lothian golf or sports website.

Because people interested in a particular place need a variety of services in the area ranging from transport, accommodation, tours and trips, activities, etc you can choose to advertise on websites where your products may prove to be complementary. A Highland walking website may prove to be a good choice for advertising your wildlife watching tours, your B&B or even yourself as a guide.

How to find the best tourism sites to advertise on

• The first step is to search on Yahoo or Google for websites related to the area or areas where you operate. If you do boat trips from Anstruther then you should search for websites about Fife. If they have a separate section on Anstruther, even better.
• Find those pages with information that may be of interest to tourists. This includes accommodation, activities, attraction, eating and drinking in the area, transport, etc. Tourists may not be interested in say, housing schemes in the area but may be interested to know whether there is a bank nearby.
• If the website has a page about boat trips in Fife then that is the page for which your ad is most relevant. This doesn't mean that you should not advertise on other pages on that website, just that the returns for that page will probably be higher.

To look for general country websites related to your products and services search in Google for 'Scotland boat trips', 'Scotland trips' or even 'Scotland boat'. The nearer the subject of the website to what you actually have to offer, the bigger the returns from advertising on it will be.

If the website has a section on Fife then you've found a suitable candidate for your budget. If it doesn't, then choose those pages that are closest related to 'boat trips'.