How to implement the top 3 blogging products

Our data shows that there are three products used the most by our affiliate bloggers. They are the Inspiring Search Box, the Links tool and the Deals Finder. Here’s a bit more information about each product and how you can use them most effectively:

1) Inspiring Search Box:

This search box is designed to stimulate your readers’ wanderlust. It’s aimed at readers who want to travel to a specific country, but who need that extra bit of inspiration to decide where to go in that country.

How does it work?

When a reader enters the name of a country they want to visit, the Inspiring Search Box will show the top three destinations in that country, along with a list of other cities in the same country.

Where can I place the Inspiring Search Box?

The Inspiring Search Box is quite wide, so it’s best suited to pages with a width of at least 500 pixels. It tends to work best when it’s placed in the middle of the page – that way, your readers can’t miss it. Remember to leave enough room around the Inspiring Search Box to make it stand out from the rest of the content.

Useful Tips:

• Size: An Inspiring Search Box can be as wide as 1100 pixels, making it ideal for home pages or destination-specific landing pages.
• To get you started, we’ve created four preset sizes for you to choose from. If you prefer, you can also select your own custom size.
• Customisation: To help inspire your readers to travel to the places you promote on your site, you can preset your country choice in the box. You can also choose your preferred language, currency, colour and font.
  
  

2) Links

The Links Tool allows you to create affiliate deep links (or hyperlinks) that connect your website to any Booking.com page, apart from the homepage. The deep links Booking.com offers can connect to:
- Airport pages
- City pages
- District pages
- Generic landing pages
- Hotel pages
- Island pages
- Landmark pages
- Region pages

Which links work best?

There’s no single page type (eg. city page, airport page etc) that works best for all bloggers. We highly suggest adding links that are most relevant to your website. For example, if your page talks about Milan, then you can add a link to the Booking.com city landing page for Milan or the Search Results page, which shows a list of accommodations in Milan. And remember that bookings are more likely to occur when you’ve added plenty of quality original content.

Useful Tips:

• Link to specific pages, but don’t limit your options. For example, if your website contains content about specific destinations, you can deep-link to a relevant region, city or district landing page on Booking.com. You can even link to a preselected accommodation search page.
• Use the Booking.com brand to your advantage. Booking.com is a well-trusted global brand, so displaying our logo on your website can encourage your readers to book. It’s a good idea to explain some of the benefits of Booking.com – low rates with no booking fees, 24/7 customer support and free cancellation on most properties – so that your audience understands why you’ve chosen to partner with us.
  Here’s an example of our co-brand partners, KLM.com: http://www.booking.com/index.html?aid=356081
• Personalise your search results based on your blog.You can customise your search results, based on the content and style of your blog, to better target the needs of your audience.
  When creating your link, you have the option to preset:
  i) Property type (hotels, hostels, resorts etc.)
  ii) Review category (‘Exceptional’, ‘Very good’ etc.)
  iii) Star rating (5 stars, 4 stars etc.)
  iv) Themes (Romance/Honeymoon, Shopping, Luxury, Family break etc.)
• Implement links where your users have the intention to book. Remember, you should provide a link when the reader would be most interested in clicking on it. For example, if your blog post has the following structure, you could add links to these pages:
  Introduction to the city → Link to Booking.com city page
  Must-see attractions → Link to Booking.com landmark page
  Where to stay → Link to Booking.com hotel page
• Avoid using too many different affiliate links in a single post. In general, Google indexes pages by analysing both the quality and the number of links that are in a page. With this in mind, you want to avoid having too many links that redirect users to your affiliate pages. Again, always keep it relevant.

Tracking:

Unlike with other Booking.com widgets, it’s not possible to check the performance of links in the 'Product Performance' section of the Partner Centre. To see if a reservation resulted from a specific link placement, you can simply label your links and track the results that way.

How? When you set up a link in the Partner Centre, you have the option to add a label of your choice in the Advanced options. It’s a good idea to use a label that relates to where the link is placed. For instance, if you’re using the link on your index page to redirect traffic to Booking.com, you could call it ‘index’. For a link used in email marketing campaigns, you could use the label ‘email’:

3) Deals Finder

With the Deals Finder, you can build a stream of deals for hotels in any destination that we cover on Booking.com. The technology used to build the Deals Finder allows us to update the widget in the background automatically. That way, you’ll always have an updated product that shows the best converting hotels for the specific day and destination you choose.

When you create a new widget, the destination and date fields are compulsory. After filling in the destination, you can customise the day of the week and the number of nights for which the deals will apply.

Useful tips:

By testing the Deals Finder widget with a number of partners, we’ve found that it converts better when implemented on destination-specific pages and sites.

For example, if your site is about Southern European summer destinations, create a deal finder for a summer destination page like Barcelona. We suggest creating multiple widgets to cover the individual destinations you promote on each destination-focused page.