After a lot of hard work (and looking/borrowing design ideas from other websites) I finished our Brittany Gite website in January 2005 and we did fairly well with bookings for our first rental year last year.
This year we started off better than I hoped and have already booked out Easter and August and about half of June and July - three of the bookings being returning guests.
Of our 14 bookings last year, 9 came through ebay and 5 came through notices on mine and a friend's company notice boards.
I'm fairly happy with the website design (although there's always more things to change) and customers that are referred there for more details (from ebay or work adverts) say it's informative and well laid out, but it's just not seeming to get ANY enquiries or bookings from "internet marketing".
Would appreciate some other points of view.
Some other details on my frustrations:
- I've been advertising on Google Adwords since June 05, have had 1043 clicks (at a cost of £129) and believe I've only received one enquiry that I can attribute to Google (and that didn't turn into a booking)
My Google analytics reports show over a 3 month period that I've had 489 visitors via Google adwords but they viewed on average 2.8 pages, only 1% has looked at the contact us page and 9% the rates page.
Similar results from Google, MSN and Yahoo searches, my "most interested" customers (in terms of average page views) have come from ebay, my weblog (only started on Jan 1st) and GiteLink
Thanks, Geoffrey