As the owner of MFW Vacation Rentals, Cheryl Quist needs to reach an almost invisible sliver of the Internet audience: People who are looking for a short-term rental near the little town of Mendicino, Calif.
Her company manages six rental homes in the Mendicino area. They are luxury bungalows, with names like Chez Baleine ("watch the whales from just about any room") and rent for about $2,500 a week.
To reach her potential audience of luxury vacationers, Quist advertises on a couple of vacation portals, like VacationRentals.com. But her main marketing tool is buying keywords on the Overture search engine. "I couldn't run my business without it," she says.
Though her cost to advertise on the portal VacationRentals is $100 a year, and her yearly Overture expenditure runs close to $3,000, she still feels Overture is a better value. The engine's results are included within the results of thousands of search engines across the Internet, and ads for MFW Vacation Rentals appear only when searchers enter selected keywords. As a result, searchers qualify themselves as being likely prospects.
"The keywords that people use when searching for vacation rentals allow you to carefully target your audience," she says. Quist gets about 60 to 70 percent of her leads from Overture.
Two Techniques
Quist tried using Google keywords but says she found it unsatisfactory. In her view, Google's account management interface is "way clunkier" than Overture's. And she likes Overture's cost management function better than Google's.
"I can absolutely control my spending" on Overture, she says.
Overture enables her to bid on her keywords -- which can get pricey, which requires careful expense controls. Her top keyword "started off at about two dollars a click, and now it's up over three dollars," she says.
Overture's account management tool allows Quist to view what the other bids are. She usually beats them by a penny. Her goal is to always come up in the top three paid search results.
To get the most out of her Overture buy by attracting only the most qualified leads, Quist has learned two techniques. First, chooses keywords that are not merely targeted, but hyper-targeted -- even "Mendicino lodging" is too broad, Quist says she has found.
She now uses "Mendicino vacation rental." Despite the cost of each click -- she averages about eight clicks a day -- having more qualified leads makes for a better ROI.
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| MFW Vacation drives most of its luxury rental business from Overture listings. |
Quist's second key technique lies in good advertising copy. In the Overture results page, search marketers like Quist enter a short description of their products -- so, Quist knows she must romance the customer into checking out her company's homes.
Seasonal Flux
Quist greatly appreciates that she can vary her Overture expenditure based on seasonal changes. In the summer, of course, she spends more because more people are vacationing; Thanksgiving is also an expensive ad season.
On the other hand, she stops spending the minute a listing is no longer needed -- thanks to the ability to quickly activate or de-activate keyword campaigns.
"When I'm full-up, I can take my Overture listing offline," she says.
But she always goes back online with Overture. "Mendicino is a pretty rural area, and it's difficult to make connections with people looking to come to this area," she says. "The Internet, and particularly this tool from Overture, is phenomenal."
| Vital Statistics |
| Name: |
MFW Vacation Rentals |
| Founded: | 2002 |
| Database backend: | Proprietary |
| Visitor analytics system: | Proprietary |
| Ad server: | Overture |
| Hosting provider: | Mendocino Community Network |
| Number of employees: | Two |
| Number of tech staff: | One |
| Key strategies: | • Carefully manage search expenses
• Optimize for seasonality
• Solid ad copy |
James Maguire is a contributor to eCommerce-Guide.com. His column appears every Friday.
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