Laffitte Conseil

Hotels.com adds interactive rate calendar

Hotels.com unveiled a new room rate calendar feature that helps travelers quickly identify the best room rates available at the property of their choice. This tool is available for the full hotels.com selection of lodging options, including hotels, resorts, vacation rentals, and bed and breakfasts.

The rate calendar, which appears on the “Rooms & Rates” tab for each property on the hotels.com site, is color-coded to give users a quick, at-a-glance view of pricing levels for each day. Green indicates the lowest room rates, beige indicates moderate prices, and orange indicates the highest prices. In addition, the calendar displays the actual price for most properties, so that users can compare specific cost differences among different dates. hotels.com provides calendar data for six months into the future.

“For travelers who are flexible in their plans and mindful of costs, the rate calendar is an invaluable tool,” said Scott Booker, chief hotel expert for hotels.com. “This site feature is designed to help customers make a more informed decision; we will continue to focus on providing resources to help make the property research, selection and booking process as simple as possible.”

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Travelocity launches new trip planning tool

Travelocity has announced the beta launch of the RoadTrip WizardTM, a new tool that streamlines and simplifies the road trip planning process. First to launch the RoadTrip Wizard platform, Travelocity customers can now benefit from a new way to plan every aspect of their road trip all in one place—a task that previously required multiple Web sites. This tool is available through an alliance with LeisureLogixTM, a new travel and navigation services company.

“Road trips are a part of the American culture,” said Andres Fabris, vice president business development Travelocity. “What our customers were missing was one place to plan their road trips based on what they want to see and do. The RoadTrip Wizard will not only fill this gap, it will also allow them to personalize plans based on what they want to get out of their trip.”

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Cinq clés pour optimiser son taux de conversion

   

Pour rentabiliser des investissements de plus en plus conséquents dans le domaine de l'acquisition de trafic, il est impératif de réaliser un important travail sur son offre et sur son site Web, étant donné que ce sont, pour les cybermarchands, les deux leviers qui leur permettront d'optimiser de leur taux de conversion.     

Pour ce faire, il n'y a pas de secret selon Omniture : il faut revenir à la règle de marketing direct des 40/40/20, qui précise que la réussite d'une action dépend à 40 % du ciblage du public, à 40 % de l'offre en elle-même, et à 20 % de l'exécution créative.   

Cinq clés pour adapter cet adage aux contraintes du e-commerce.

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How user friendly are your top internal entry pages?

In the world of long-tail searches, chances are pretty good that visitors are having their initial contact on your site by landing on an internal page of your site rather than your user-friendly home page. But have you ever had a look at one of your internal pages from a “brand new visitor” perspective? Because if you did, chances are good that you might be surprised to see that you are not really giving those new visitors a very sticky experience. So try looking at one of your top internal entry pages through a new visitor’s eyes.

Okay, so we all are just a little biased when it comes to how we see our own sites, especially ones we have poured blood, sweat and tears into. And while doing an eyetracking study can be expensive, you can easily do a poor man’s version of something similar. Sit a friend, preferably one who has little knowledge of your money website, or perhaps a bit of knowledge of the market area without having been a visitor of your site previously.

But first, you need to pick which pages to test. You will need to have a look at any analytics or stats program to find out which pages are your top entry pages (meaning the pages that new visitors on your site visit first), and pick a couple of internal pages that have the highest % of entry page visitors. Then you want to pick a page with a high bounce rate. If you have two pages that each account for 20% of entry page views, but one has an 80% bounce rate while the other is only 25%, it makes sense to use the page with the 80% bounce rate, because for some reason, 80% of all people that visit that internal page will view just that one page before they leave the site. Obviously it makes the most sense for you to figure out why so many people leave after their first page view on your site! You will also want to do a quick check of the page to make sure there isn’t something obvious that is accounting for such a high bounce rate, such as a coding error breaking the page after the header or another equally obvious problem that you can attribute the high bounce rate to. Nothing is more embarassing than bleeding money from a website due to your own mistake! But also look to evaluate what you think of the page overall.

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60 modèles de navigation pour satisfaire vos internautes

Un site Web, c’est comme un bâtiment. Il y a des règles à respecter. Mais cela ne doit pas conduire les fondateurs du site à dupliquer sempiternellement un seul et même plan, car il existe des nombreux modèles de navigation. Seule contrainte : que ces derniers soient adaptés à la nature et au positionnement du site et qu’ils aident les internautes à trouver ce qu’ils recherchent.

Telle est l’ambition de ce livre. Présenter 60 modèles de navigation, avec pour chacun, les bonnes pratiques à appliquer sur une double page. Un livre écrit non pas pour les techniciens mais pour des acheteurs et des constructeurs de site afin de leur donner, dès le début, les bonnes pratiques d’ergonomie, d’accessibilité et de référencement.

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