good use of IP address tracking

As per the entry from a few days ago, I'm checking out travel arrangements for a trip to Athens, and found myself on Tripadvisor looking at a hotel called 'the Four Seasons'. Sadly, it wasn't part of the chain by the same name, but annyywhooo, look what happened when I followed a link to the Tripadvisor page:

Yep, those clever folk assumed that if I was looking for a hotel in Athens I might also need to book a flight. Add into that my IP address identifying me as being in Sunderland, and I was presented with a 'personalized' ad for flights from my local airport.

web and email = different

Probably a 'cut and paste' error - but check out the contact email address at the bottom of this [it's from a promotional poster]

Of course, an easy fix would be to have set up the email address as shown [it is possible to have almost anything before the @ in an email address] and have it forward emails to the correct address [student.helpline@], but at the time af writing, the published address was bouncing emails. D'oh!

excellent advertising practice

I have been quick to criticise poor advertising, including poor landing pages. However, TravelRepublic.co.uk excelled itself when I was looking for a hotel in Athens. Regular readers will know I have been a frequent visitor to the Greek capital, and so I knew of two hotels in which I would like to stay - so I searched on their names on Google. The first was the Residence Georgio*.

One of the AdWords ads listed was with TravelRepublic and I clicked on the link, which took me to 'their' Georgio page that included a calendar for me to select my required dates**. Here's the resulting page
After checking the price I returned to Google and searched for the Park Hotel. Again, TravelRepublic had an ad, so I clicked on it ...
And here's the good - no, make that great - bit: the TravelRepublic landing page for the Park Hotel already had my travel dates pre-selected. Excellent.
If you're wondering, its all magic - probably - done with IP address recognition. This should be standard practice for advertisers.

* footnote #1 - this hotel actually changed its name last year [to the Melia] and whilst there is a website on this name, the hotel seems to have retained its own brand online. A lesson on the problems of changing a brand/organization's name when it has an established online presence.

** footnote #2 - for any burglars reading: I have changed my actual travel dates on the examples shown

keeping shipping costs a secret

I was shopping for some contact lenses online, and came across some at a good price on lenstore.co.uk ....
... but the problem was that I had to register before I could see what the total cost was going to be.
Guess where I didn't buy my lenses from?

google speaks the lingo

This wouldn't work for everyone, a bank would be unlikely to get away with it for example, but this is the call to action at the bottom of a page promoting the search giant's new 'buzz' feature. As Mr Burns would say .... excellent