Since the beginning of this year, we have been working in the field of online conversion optimization for Van der Valk Hotels and Restaurants. Van der Valk internet is the central internet organization that supports the hotels with services for their online service. It also manages the falcon.com website. This umbrella information and reservations website is promoted online. Because of the in-house team, people have the ability to make their own immediate improvements.

Seeing first, then believing

Gerard Schomaker, the general manager of Internet at Van der Valk, always uses the principle with collaborations: “First see what it brings and then we'll look further.” We took up that challenge. Based on our vision and method of approach, we went looking for:

• The organization's capabilities with respect to yield optimization.
• Where technically easy to make adjustments to the website.
• Where visitor dialogue does not run as it should

Booking the landing page for each hotel turned out to be the part of the website that was most eligible for conducting a 1st conversion optimization test.

Optimization based on hypotheses

We guided the organization in figuring out how to improve the visitor dialogue and in what way to translate to the web page. Three hypotheses emerged:

• We suspect that the visitor is not being properly shown how to begin booking.
• There is too little promotion of attractive offers, last-minutes and packages.
• We need to better convince the visitor through a marketing offer that when he books with us there are advantages over booking elsewhere

Low hours investment

The conversion optimization test conducted answered these questions. As a result, valk.com got to know its visitors better. In addition, the best performing designed page variant 13% gave more unique bookings. We achieved this result with the investment of 40 hours by valk.com and 40 hours by Online Dialogue, with follow-up testing (due to one-time software work at startup) taking only 20 hours internally and 20 hours externally.

View or download the detailed case study

Watch the detailed presentation of the valk.com case below or download the PDF of this conversion optimization case study.

Web analytics conference valk.com workshop

At the web analytics conference 2010, Online Dialogue will give a workshop on conversion optimization on June 1. Several teams, guided by one of our specialists, will work on variations for a page of the valk.com website. Van der Valk internet will be present to explain the typical valk.com customer. Besides conveying the conversion optimization method, we will guide you in recognizing the dialogue, coming up with hypotheses and creating the variation. The winning variations will actually be tested and the findings will be shared afterwards. Workshop participants will receive a certificate of participation.

Read more about the web analytics conference at webanalisten.nl