Tracking Tourism: The Tourism Research Blog Travel industry thinking from Stephen Budd and Vicky Brock at Highland Business Research

How one online company found that small numbers of customer problems were often the tips of large icebergs…and turned this insight around to improve conversions and sales

I thought I would share with you one insight from the eMetrics Summit about how one travel sector company used feedback mechanisms to identify seemingly small problems…and then discovered that these were not isolated incidents but issues affecting appreciable numbers of customers each day, resulting in avoidable loses.

The company is a major Online Travel Agent dealing with a huge number of global transactions and queries each day. Their site has tools that capture (anonymously) all consumer sessions on the site so, if there is a problem, they can work to find out exactly what was going wrong in that specific instance.

In practice they have two big ways of capturing customer interaction data on site. The first is by offering the customer the ability to pass comment throughout the booking process. Therefore, if my valid UK address was not being accepted at the booking page, then I could leave a note to the site owners to do something about this.

The second way of capturing data is by effectively recording each user session for playback. The point of this is to see how the customer actually got to the position they did - something that becomes vital in those situations when the site really shouldn’t act in that way and an action seems to be failing for no apparent reason.

With this dual approach, when an issue was identified the OTA was able to define some parameters that allowed them to use all the data of previously recorded sessions to see whether other customers had also experienced similar problems but had not complained about it. Rather they had simply walked away from the site and possibly taken their business elsewhere.

What they discovered was that, in some cases, one or two people complaining were often the tip of the iceberg and that one small issue was in fact potentially affecting literally hundreds of customers. The company declined to offer figures but it is easy to imagine that if the average transaction was, say, a couple of hundred dollars, then this apparently insignificant issues would soon add up to serious money over the year.

By using the same analysis techniques that led them to discover the size of the problem, the company was able to monitor whether the problem was still occurring after a fix or whether its incidence had dropped to zero or acceptable levels.

So what?

We can’t all afford the kind of systems that this company was using but the business approach they took is available to everyone and I would summarize the insights as follows:

• Always take customer comments seriously and probably indicative of a larger silent body of suffering customers
• Have systems that allow these comments to be captured
• See if you can work out how many other customers this might be affecting
• Have a system that allows you to work out what the impact is on your bottom line - this will either help you to prioritize next steps or present a convincing case to your boss if larger steps need to be taken
• Use your Research RADAR to ensure that the problem has been solved – if you are still seeing it occurring, then it hasn’t been fixed. If you don’t look to see whether it is still occurring, then you won’t know whether it has been fixed or not.

As an aside, the company this post is about stated that anything written about them had to be passed through their PR department. I think this approach is a little heavy handed and not one I’m happy to participate in. I also sensed that their heavy handedness might continue had I gone down the compliant route and, frankly, that’s not what this blog is about. Which is a pity because I think they have a great story to tell but I’m afraid they will remain anonymous is in this instance.

Thoughts from the San Francisco eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit

With my jet lag subsiding a little and my brain still buzzing with ideas overload, I thought I’d share with you some of the insights that I took out of last week’s eMetrics Summit, the world’s foremost gathering of people working in online measurement and optimisation.

This was the year that qualitative research came to the San Francisco conference - a clear signal that businesses are beginning to try and understand the hearts and minds of their customers as they optimize their online channel, as well as their click tracks.

For me, this was an exciting and overdue development, as I think it signals that the online sector is maturing to the point that it is starting to look at 360 degree view of the customer experience - and the business implications of this.

Tom Davenport, the conference’s first keynote speaker and author of “Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning” , demonstrated how the highest performing enterprises are building their competitive strategies around data-driven insights. He cited the travel and leisure examples of Marriott and Harrah’s Casinos who are using analytics, data modelling and deep research to identify their most profitable customers, build innovative pricing models, manage customer experience and identify the true drivers of financial performance.

And as conference chair Jim Sterne explained in his wrap up, we’re passing the point of having to persuade the leading businesses why to measure their effectiveness online, because these firms are now using analytics more smartly than ever before and are “looking over the horizon at real competitive advantage”.

My top three picks

My top three practical insights from eMetrics were all qualitative in flavour and all different, but obtainable, examples of how so companies are tackling those fuzzy questions of “Why?” and “How do people think/feel..?”

1. Jakob Nielsen, paying attention to user behaviour in the moment

It was terrific to finally see usability guru Jakob Nielsen speak. I’m a great fan of his articles (you can read more at useit.com) and he inspired the user research approach we use in Highland Business Research (as described in this earlier Tracking Tourism post).

In his presentation Jakob made great use of video of accompanied surfs/user testing interviews to demonstrate the frustration and confusion people encounter as they negotiate their way through websites. He highlighted the importance when conducting user research of paying more attention to what visitors are doing, than what they’re saying - as users missed error messages, failed to find key information and physically recoiled from unexpected music and unskippable videos.

He made the observation that people may think they’ve successfully completed their task, even when they’ve failed (for example, by paying the wrong bill, failing to complete a transaction, missing an error message) - which is why seeing people’s behaviour in the moment has more practical value than self-reported data.

Another critical point from his presentation was the important of starting your visitor insight/user testing process with no preconceptions about the nature of the problems - because “the thing where people think the problem is, is often not where it is at all”. Instead of diving into what you think the problem is, simply get users to undertake the top five tasks on your site.

Just how relevant is this to travel and tourism businesses? Personally, if I could only do one type of online research with clients websites, I’d choose these accompanied surfs that Jakob demonstrated in his videos. The following quote is an excerpt from a research session in which a user booked a flight using his preferred airline, then some competitor sites - I hope you see what I mean:

“Southwest airlines? Best website ever. Other airlines just don’t get it…I quit taking other flights from other airlines because these guys get it right.
[Goes to another airline site]
Do I want to choose on price, flexible dates, schedule? They can just $*!*? off with that… They want to know where San Diego is? That’s just $*!*?… There are too many choices, I haven’t used this airlines site in years but it is still remarkably poor - who has the time for that? I won’t fly this airline, its web site is junk!”

Jakob’s presentation was packed with clear evidence that people aren’t going to work round a bad website, they’re simply going to take their business elsewhere!

2. Ebay, making themselves at home in your home

Elissa Darnell, Director of User Experience Research at ebay, did a great presentation on how they use a blend of offline and online research techniques to go back to the basics of who the user is, what they do and how ebay can deliver them the best possible experience.

Elissa talked in depth about a number of the techniques they use to get closer to customers and optimize their site experience accordingly, but I’ll just highlight two:

Follow homes - just like some offline firms have done for years, ebay are following their customers into their homes to observe them using the site in their normal way and in their normal environment (with all the distractions that come with that). Using a video camera and taking notes, they gain valuable directional, qualitative information that they can combine with their number based information sources.

Its not just the research team that take part, staff from right across the company - from CFO & CEO to developers and service reps - are taken into their customer’s own context, to learn for themselves that critical lesson of “we are not our customer.” The insights they glean from this regular follow home process means they learn things about their user’s needs and behaviours that they would not otherwise even think to ask about. They also gain direction on where they made need to focus further testing and development.

Cheap paper based user testing - before pages are even developed, ebay conduct quick and dirty user testing based on rough paper mock-ups of what the page might be like. The tester is asked to use their finger as the mouse and indicate where they might go on the page and what information they might expect to find as a result.

They can quickly go through rapid generations of the paper tests, quickly and cheaply, before ever spending money on software engineering. Jakob Nielson described the cost savings of this approach as being around 100 times cheaper than testing actual pages. So clearly ebay are using tactical pre-development testing make sure they get maximum user focus for their money.

3. Pay Pal, quantifying the qualitative

Pay Pal, the online payments provider, receives thousands of open comments each week from its user feedback pages. More than one person can manually react to and keep in their head at any time.

So their challenge (one I think many tourism businesses can relate to) is how do you quantify and semi-automate the process of analysing these open comments, so that you wring maximum value out of the feedback?

Step one, is they have applied a Google search engine tool to the data and made it available to internal staff to search through as they wish. This means that managers can at least get an overview of what is being said about specific interests (and in what volume) on a regular basis. The advantage is no training burden and no resourcing of the data analysis.

Step two, they have also semi-automated the process of categorising their comments, by bundling like comment types (through an in-house natural n-gram language statistical process). Once bundled into like themes (without needing to pre-develop a naming structure) they can get the comments out to all the right people to read, on a two weekly basis.

Step 3, now they are working out a system that automatically triggers alerts as new bundles of comment types emerge, or certain types of comments exceed their acceptable threshold.

It may sound complicated, but essentially with the help of a good statistician, they have built a simple system in-house that achieves most of their needs, but avoids using a highly expensive Meaning Based Computing system like Autonomy.

And finally…

As a final conference highlight (at least from my perspective!) - both Stephen & I were pleased to present at eMetrics this year (a kind of Highland Business Research double bill).

I was also honoured to be elected to join Web Analytics Association board of directors. So thank you very much to those WAA members that voted for me and I look forward to helping drive the organisation forward for the benefit of members and the web analytics industry worldwide.

Industry interview with Tina Fitch of EzRez

As we recently explored in this Travel 2.0 post, many of the recent online innovations driving Travel 2.0 have been demand led and consumer facing. The “killer-app” for the supply side, the thing that will improve the lives, productivity and profitability of travel and tourism businesses has seemed more elusive.

But as I have stated before that I see massive opportunity on the supply side of Travel 2.0 in delivering:

1) Joined up visitor data at a destination level (who is visiting, where do they go, what do they do, how does the whole consumption process look across a destination)

2) Cross sector/cross destination reservation analytics (ie supercharged benchmarking, predictive analytics and responsive pricing based on what is happening in the whole market, not just at the door of one attraction, hotel or destination).

Given that I’m currently in Silicon Valley, I’ve been catching up with leading travel technologists who are working to drive supply side value from Travel 2.0 technologies in these specific areas.

It was a great pleasure to catch up with Tina Fitch co-founder and CEO of EzRez Software to kick around some ideas and enjoy some fine San Francisco cuisine.

Tina leads a company which venture capitalists claim “is disrupting the online travel market through its next generation, web-based solution.”

EzRez is in essence providing a travel market place, supplying transactional services to a network of tourism businesses, along with deep analytics across that network that allow clients to get an end to end view of a visitor’s transactional behaviour.

Its software solutions include a plug-and-play solution that enables a company to sell travel components online, plus they bring inventory providers and distributors together through a system that syncs with the existing infrastructures of both parties. They have also developed a powerful set of analysis tools that allow businesses to drive deeper understanding and metrics from their loyalty points and transactional/merchandising data - and these tools integrate with web analytics products such and Omniture and Google Analytics.

Tina and her team of developers, business data analysts and travel specialists see the value of what they can offer in terms of the power of viewing a visitors booking behaviour not simply in isolation, but across the multiple travel experience touchpoints - from booking flights and travel packages, to car hire and attractions.

Because regardless of what a visitor may say about their intent, travel plans or intended purchases or expenditure (if you can even get that information) - nothing gives a clearer picture of visitor activity than the associated purchase trail.

She has the tools, she has the transactional information - now as EzRez grows, particularly fuelled by success in the Latin American and Asian markets, Tina is demonstrating to the industry in true Travel 2.0 terms that joining up their visitor data will reap rewards for everyone.

Tina took the time to demonstrate why this is so important and what the challenges of joined up data have traditionally been for the travel industry:

Vicky: Do you think that so far the travel sector has been slow to embrace web analytics and online business intelligence, compared to say the e-commerce sectors?

Tina: We do feel it has been slow – but not for lack of interest or desire from the travel community, but due to the fragmentation and complexity of the systems that power travel.

We have observed companies who embrace the concept of web and transaction analytics, but have a difficult time weaving the two together. It involves the challenge of tying something like Omniture or Google Analytics to their reservation system, and potentially their CRM program. Many of these tools can play well together, but need technical expertise and analysis of each system to have them really hum.

Many technologies in travel developed originally as silos – some are large, like Sabre, some are extremely narrow, like a car hire company’s proprietary database – but regardless of size, they are limited by lack of a common interface, tracking tools, and definitions across the industry.

In any event, our experience in the market place is that nearly everyone is looking for an analytics solution to help drive their business forward. Understanding of not only one’s own business, but the local market, competitive set and overall network performance is critical to the success of any analytics program. Most importantly, data must lead to actionable steps to capitalize on the insight gained.

Vicky: Given that travel is a sector where many different businesses interact to deliver the visitor their end to end experience, do you think the industry has to start looking beyond its own “data island” in order to best understand visitor behaviour and boost ROI?

Tina: Travel companies are frustrated by lack of context to the data that they can collect on their own site – even if a company understands what their own conversion rates are, or what types of customer profiles are purchasing which destinations or inventory types, it can not see how that positions them in relation to the rest of their industry segment, geography or even online travel overall.

Travel companies can also have a difficult time understanding how their own customer interacts with other systems, products and services outside of their silo. This is because there are few common platforms that give visibility to performance across different verticals, different locations and product types.

Why is this important? Without measurement, there is no management of your business – and without context to more global measures of success, you are isolating yourself to limited benchmarks for performance.

Without understanding how your customer shops and books travel wherever they are, you can’t determine ways to get broader share of wallet from the customers who already shop with you. Industry-wide, or more granular sub-set analytics, will give you a lot more information that can feed into your pricing, merchandising, and marketing strategies.

While privacy will always be a consumer concern, those same consumers have come to expect that a system is intelligent enough to factor in their location, basic preferences and previous habits – even on a generic level – to deliver the most relevant results.

Vicky: Could you tell us a little about how EzRez has developed this cross-network approach?

Tina: We work with a whole range of companies - such as legacy airlines, global financial institutions and hotel chains as well as boutique resort operators, regional wholesalers and niche travel sites.

Our position as the booking, rules and transactional engine across these different verticals, markets and inventory sources allows our clients to leverage greater visibility across their own activity, but also allows them to understand how they are performing against the network as a whole.

This gives EzRez customers a new level of network transparency that enables them to see consumer and agent shopping and buying dynamics and trends more quickly. This, in turn, gives them the chance to have the right product in the right place at the right time – and at the right price. This can drive real revenue growth and customer satisfaction.

Vicky: Is EzRez only relevant to the global players or are you also targeting the smaller businesses that represent the bulk of the industry in terms of providers?

Tina: We tend to focus on companies that have an existing, captive audience since they can best leverage the range of tools and products that we offer. Large companies absolutely need business intelligence tools to learn how they can move the needle on their revenues.

However, smaller companies gain by understanding untapped potential in the market, and using data to make strategic and metrics-driven decisions on where to focus their emerging business. So, we are also relevant to local players trying to capitalize on market conditions while learning from similar companies in other markets.

Vicky: How do you think travel and tourism businesses can stop using data to “look back” and start using it to make forward looking tactical and strategic decisions?

Tina: This is the really exciting part about network analytics - when you can apply historical and current activity to predict or influence future behavior.

Imagine if you, as a travel company, knew that even though many competitors traditionally offer packages from London to Istanbul in the month of March, you have started seeing increasing patterns of search and booking activity from that origin market into Dubrovnik? What if you could further target the opportunity by understanding what the average spend is in that destination, what rating level is most popular for hotels, and then offer an automated merchandising tool to not only preference that offering to people who come to your site, but also send that package proactively to an audience from that origination point?

What if you are an airline, and you have a system that logs click-through and purchase behaviour on specific hotels in your hotel engine based on city pairs searched, or even which day of week or fare class air bookings are made. You could take that intelligence and offer a cross-sell tool in your air booking path that immediately offers up the most popular hotels for that user profile automatically and capture higher conversion and share of wallet from the same consumer.

This type of application of business intelligence not only drives more revenue to the companies who leverage it, it engenders more loyalty by way of convenience to the consumers who shop with them.

This type of business intelligence is actually already possible to obtain if you are on a platform like EzRez, and we are seeing more and more companies participate and benefit from that type of tribal knowledge.

To conclude

Predictive analytics used to be the holy grail for sectors like online retail and financial services. But tools evolved that started to allow online sellers to show first adverts then actual product offers/combinations based on likely best performance, all driven by the analytics data. Companies like Amazon have massively increased upsell by investment in their recommendation engines - essentially by pioneering predictive analytics.

What is exciting, in my view, is to see this emerging in travel in the way that EzRez are driving it - which is across a network of travel and tourism businesses operating in different touch points of the same visitors experience. Analytics is therefore not occurring in isolation (never ideal for an industry where the purchase and consumption process is as fragmented and complex as travel).

As Tina describes it, network analytics means participation in and benefit from a type of tribal knowledge. Sounds a lot like supply side Travel 2.0 to me!

Local destination management and marketing groups face a challenge.

They need to make a strong demonstration of their value and impact in order to attract and retain the participation of local tourism businesses. Yet their outputs are not necessarily easily expressed in terms of direct sales.

National tourism data is rarely expressed in a way that reflects the specific geographic area of interest to the local organisation. Nor do they necessarily get to see the member businesses sales data that arise from their efforts - making straight return on investment calculations challenging.

So, how can local destination marketing and management groups demonstrate value?

Defining success on your terms

Until you really define success, you can’t measure it. But again, at a local destination level, it isn’t always easy.

For the individual tourism business, success is ultimately defined by revenue. No profits, then eventually no business. Occupancy rates, spend per head and customer satisfaction are all useful performance indicators - but cash is king.

At a national level, tourism success is judged by criteria closely allied to government goals and interests. These include economic indicators (such as tourism share of employment and gdp, or growth in revenues). They may also be linked to inward investment, international image and brand perception.

But for local destinations and their marketing groups - from tourism groups, chambers of commerce, to formal destination management organisations - simply defining success can be a lot harder.

This is because the tourism marketing goals of local destinations are not always simply a case of increasing overall visitor numbers. But pinning down that definition of success is critical, because it is what all goals, strategies and demonstration of results ultimately hinge on.

So what form might success take for a local destination?

• increasing or widening the distribution of visitor spend
• shifting the brand position, for example to a more luxury destination
• growing spend, tax revenues or number of bednights per visit
• boosting local employment off peak season
• increasing online visibility of the destination
• regenerating economic or environmental decay
• building a sustainable community tourism model
• increasing visitor participation in events & activities
• improving the competitiveness or attractiveness of the destination, compared to others

There may even be a degree of social enterprise, redistributing the benefits of economies of scale to community businesses.

So, with so many possible options for what success might constitute to a local destination, defining precisely what the goals and objectives are is the first major step towards demonstrating how successfully they’re being achieved.

From there it becomes easier to match those goals to possible performance indicators.

Know where you are now, as well as where you want to be

It is only possible to demonstrate the impact of your efforts if have some kind of starting point to measure from. Ideally that means a proper destination audit, including an honest assessment of the current performance and resources. When doing this kind of research, we tend to look both at the supply side resources, quality, capacity and distribution. We also look at the demand side by speaking to visitors about quality of their experience and where possible examining comment data.

Its also important to define a timed framework of where you want to get next - after all, sometimes success for a destination in simply stopping further decline.

Once you know where you are and the time frame for action, it makes it easier to look at your data sources and pick your benchmarks.

What are your data sources?

Perhaps more than any type of tourism organisation, local groups suffer from lack of ownership of the critical revenue and satisfaction data they need to measure their success. Therefore as I see it, at least two options are open.

1) Do a really good job of convincing local business to share their data with you. This could be by offering more value and analysis from that information than it would have in isolation (ie the whole visit view, rather than a view of one link in the chain).

2) Pick benchmarks that you can control and relate to the data you do have access to. This could involve doing your own periodic surveys, using local tax data, using web analytics data, or as I have described previously - working with something as practical as sewage data!

These are not exclusive, of course - you can do both. But there is no need to let the fact you can’t get sales data be a barrier to measuring your success.

Selecting your measurement criteria

Ultimately, you won’t know if you’re successful or not if you don’t measure consistently.

A handful of key performance indicators, ratios that are benchmarked over time, will reveal your progress.

And these don’t need to be hugely complex. For example, a key performance indicator related to increasing visitor participation in events & activities could be the ratio of non local postcodes amongst total event attendees.

Keeping measures/KPIs strongly aligned to the goals/stated success outcomes also helps to really tighten the focus on what information is going to be needed from others.

If the tourism group then needs to ask member businesses for specific information to help that measurement, or they need to conduct research directly, they will be able to restrict their efforts to just looking at those factors that matter (as opposed to thankless task of trying to measure everything!)

So, to conclude, the key to getting to grips with local tourism success is first to really define what a successful outcome is.

From there, gather relevant supporting evidence to assess whether the goal has been achieved (by gathering your own data or asking local businesses to provide only what is really required). Keep it simple by only measuring and reporting on what really matters to you. Finally, communicate your success back to the area, backed up with tangible data!

Ditch default - it’s all in the set-up baby!

The majority of the tourism businesses that I speak to who are measuring their online activity use Google Analytics to track their websites. But I also find that the businesses using this free tool are often missing out on the best functionality by sticking with its default set-up.

I completely understand why. The set up section of any tool is rarely sexy and the terminology can be off-putting. If it seems to function pretty well with out clicking on those set up links, so why risk making it go wrong?

But if you’re using Google Analytics and haven’t yet customised the set up your goals, filters and multiple profiles - you’re operating on just a fraction of the power available to you. Not only that, but you’re not getting the clearest view of what is really happening on your website.

So - here are five GA set-up tricks which if implemented today, will have you operating on super analytics speed for tomorrow morning!

1) Set up your goals

Google Analytics lets you track in depth up to 4 success outcomes for your site - I strongly suggest you take advantage of this.

Why? Because ultimately, online success is not about how many people come to your site in total, its about those people that come to your site and then do what you want them to do (or not!).

What might your goals be? Well think about why your site exists - what do you want people to do when they’re there? Those are your goals. They may be sales, form completion/enquiries, newsletter sign-ups, downloads or views of specific content pages. By telling Google Analytics what you’re trying to do, from tomorrow morning onwards you can start to track how well you’re actually achieving it.

For example, newsletter sign up is an objective on my main website, so I have used the newsletter confirmation page as one of my Google Analytics goal. I have inputted the thankyou page that is shown to people who complete a newsletter sign-up. Now I can track not only how many times that goal is achieved, but can also look at the steps people took to achieve the goal, what proportion of visitors actually converted, which segments of visitors converted (based on language or geography) and the cash value of those sign ups to the business.

GA gives you the option of assigning a monetary value to your goals and I would recommend doing this wherever possible.

You may know your average order value from a web form enquiry, but other cash values can be fairly arbitrary. But its still worth doing - you may decide that the value of a downloaded brochure is £10, compared to the cost of posting a printed one, or that a newsletter sign-up is worth £50. By including cash values to goals, you can really start to see in revenue terms how well (or otherwise) your website is working for the business, even if you do not transact online.

More on setting up goals from Justin Cutroni and in this 7 min video from WebShare

I should point out that e-commerce tracking is covered later in this post, in point 5

2) Set up on-site search

If you’re using search on your site, I beg you to take 2 minutes of your life to switch the track search function on - you’ll find this feature invaluable.

Switch this on from the home page by going into profile setting and editing your main profile information. Add in your site’s search parameter (in my case its simply s, as shown here after the ?: highlandbusinessresearch.com/?s=test) and you’re ready to go!

This excellent post from Justin Cutroni at the EpikOne blog tells you all you need to know on setting up search in GA, including how to identify your search parameters.  (By the way, I’d also highly recommend his Google Analytics eBook, particularly to experienced users).

What will you be able to measure once search tracking is activated?  Ultimately, the voice of your customer, because internal search is how users talk to you.

Tracking internal search helps you understand the purpose of visit and the main pain points. You can also see what ratio of searches have to be refined in order to produce results, how many searches lead to site abandonment and of course what specific words are used.

3) Creating multiple profiles of the same site

The tracking data for your site is stored in a profile. Google Analytics allows you to have multiple profile views of the same site.

Why on earth would you want more than one? Well GA analytics lets you slice and dice your data in all sorts of ways by a process of filtering - basically a set of rules to include and exclude things. Using different profiles lets you set different rules to see different things.

Some of the profile views I use are as follows:

1) Main view - the website, excluding any traffic generated by me, my company and my web company

2) The website with no filters at all - (it lets me see if changes I have made are tracking OK)

3) A view that includes UK visitors only

4) A view that excludes UK visitors, so is international traffic only

I use some additional ones, too, but some of these are pretty geeky. The key reason I use these different profiles is to allow me to take segmented views of what is happening the the site. This gives me clearer understanding and therefore better strategy.

The key thing to making these profiles works is using filters, as covered in the next point.

4) Filters are your friends

You can get really smart with GA filters and do all sorts of customisation, but to stop your heads exploding I will try and keep it simple here.

And at their simplest filters work like gates. They either allow you to specify which bits of website data can pass through into your reporting (includes) or which bits of data must be excluded.

GA has some predefined filters, such as exclude all traffic from a domain or IP address, plus the facility to let you customise your own filters (for example based on location or browser language).

If you do nothing else with filters, at least exclude your internal traffic from your main view of the site. That is you, your call centre, your web developers etc.

Traffic from you and your staff does not represent a genuine opportunity to do business, so including these page views just depresses your conversion rates from the site.

Your own behaviour also distorts the picture of how the site is being used, as insiders will use a site very differently to potential customers.

You can filter out internal traffic by excluding specific IP addresses or addresses - Google Analytics explains how. And (of course) Justin Cutroni also has some great tips for how you can exclude a single computer - especially handy if you have a dynamic IP address.

5) If you’re selling anything at all, switch the e-commerce tracking on

Lastly - if you’re selling online, start tracking those sales in detail by implementing the e-commerce tracking feature. Installed correctly, this embeds transaction receipt data into your reporting and again, installed correctly you can usually track transactions even if you use a third party shopping cart facility.

Strictly I shouldn’t include this in this list as you’re unlikely to get this done by tomorrow morning (it enquires code addition/modification on your site) - but if you’re transacting online, it is just too important a set-up procedure to leave out.

A rather dry overview of instructions can be found in Google Analytics help and if you’re struggling, the Google Analytics eBook mentioned earlier will prove its worth.

So who wants a default view with this tasty stuff on offer?

I hope I’ve inspired you to ditch the default set-up. With the exception of the e-commerce feature which will need additional tagging on your site, everything else can be done right now from your desk and be live and kicking by the morning.

Finally, its worth remembering that these are all changes that will take place from this point forward - changes made to Google Analytics do not alter the historical data.

Let me know how it goes!

Now, I appreciate that when you write for a blog with an emphasis on travel and technology, you’re supposed to be positively evangelical about new media and technology opportunities.

The man who couldn’t see the point of Twitter? Image copyight of www.hmbateman.com

But I have a guilty secret. I think a lot of the online social networking phenomena are downright silly and I generally refuse to participate in some aspects of it.

Notice that I say ‘some aspects’ though. I have embraced blogging for example. I watch clips of ancient cricket matches on YouTube when I think no-one is looking. I have checked out my accommodation on trip advisor and I follow the debates on WIWIH as well as those on sites by my fellow bloggers.

But am I the one being silly? Heavens forfend but could some of your customers feel the same way as well?

So what’s my problem?

Well, here are three thoughts to start with:

• Just because a new 2.0 site is cool, it doesn’t mean it will remain that way. Mass migrations can render them useless in months.
• Because a site is cool, it doesn’t mean I have any use for it. My own dancing badger might be pretty cool to own but I don’t actually have a use for one.
• Anyway, I don’t care about cool, I want a site or technology to have proved itself and know that it will continue to prove itself.

Let’s take those in turn:

I find the propensity for rapid mass migrations from one ‘cool site’ to another a little unnerving. There are already signs that Twitter (the yet-to-come ‘next big thing’ for some people) is old hat and that people are really just gearing up to run off to their next watering hole. Myself, if I go somewhere I like to think that can at least catch my breath before my travelling companions decide that we have to sprint from location to the next…and to the next….and to the next. And if I’m left behind or told to make my own way there…well, there’s a certain pleasure in taking things at your own pace and looking before you leap.

I was a member of Facebook for a while but ultimately can’t see any purpose for it. Despite my penchant for wearing loud tweed, I’m quite a quiet fellow and don’t feel the need to broadcast my every move. I don’t think anyone beyond me would really give a hoot knowing that my current location was a bothy in Sutherland or that I had thrown a sheep at someone I vaguely know.

Putting those thoughts together means that I will invest my time in something if it will still exist meaningfully in six months and if it has a enhanced use beyond something I am currently using.

So what?

The lesson is that although you might be wrapped up in the latest tech developments, your audience might not. They might be creatures of habit who are slow to change. Developing a marketing strategy based on the latest NEW! IMPROVED! TWOOTA! TECHNOLOGY! might sound like a good idea but you are taking a risk and people like me will ignore you.

But the refusniks are obviously not all standing athwart the Web 2.0 yelling “stop!” I’m not reinstalling a fax machine in my office and I don’t intend hand writing a letter to a hotel to enquire if they have rooms. But neither am I going to be at the bleeding edge of the next cool thing.

Eternal Verities of the business mind

For me, a business idea works if it fits into the framework of The Five P’s (click here for an overview and explanation). I’m usually a little suspicious of seemingly glib frameworks like the Five Ps but I have found this to work time and again in my experience. I’ll expand on this framework in a later post but suffice to say, new solutions for me must fall within this framework – just because we have news ways of working doesn’t mean that we have become fundamentally different types of beings.

For those of you with hazy memories, the Five Ps are:

• Product
• Price
• Place
• Promotion
• People

It is my conviction that your business decisions are all geared to getting these Ps right – Twitter, Facebook and so forth are just tools to achieving these aims. If they don’t do that, then they are irrelevant.

Now I expect some disagreement with my views – so what are you waiting for?

(Disclaimer: unlike me, Vicky is a very happy Twitter/Facebook/Xing/LinkedIn user. Luddites have not yet completely taken over TrackingTourism.com)

Is the party over?

As housing woes in the US spread around the globe and families feel the pinch from rising food prices and fuel, you could be forgiven a bit of bleak speculation that hard times lay ahead for the travel industry.

From local restaurants to major airlines, tourism related businesses are being pinched by rising costs of raw materials like food and energy. But do they also face the prospect of significantly falling demand?

So are travel plans amongst the first things to be abandoned in economic hard times?

First some good news

1. People won’t stop taking holidays altogether. The evidence suggests that as financial pressures increase, people adapt their plans rather than cancel them altogether.

As Travelmole recently reported, US travellers are “trading down, not out” They quote Peter Yesawich, CEO of analysts Ypartnership, as saying “In the next few months we will see a transformation of vacations, not cancellations.”

“Pragmatism and escapism are not mutually exclusive…. Consumers who are feeling deprived often seek solace in affordable entertainment alternatives. Beer, liquor, movies and home entertainment tend to do well in hard times.” Tuning Into The Recession Mind-Set

“Leisure travel…tends to remain fairly constant. People may alter their personal travel plans in search of more modest accommodations, but they still want to take their vacations,” said Mark Woodworth, president of PKF Hospitality Research in this Travelmole report.

The picture for business travel is somewhat different. When economic activity slows, one of the first expense items to get attention is a company’s travel budget. “Historically, we have observed a softening of corporate and group travel as the most immediate reaction to the threat of a recession. We believe this trend will repeat itself in the first half of 2008,” said Mark Woodworth, president of PKF Hospitality Research.

2. There will be winners as well as losers. Opportunities exist for those who can take an adaptive strategy, or whose services/products represent switch choices.

As Marc E. Babej and Tim Pollak write in this great article on Tuning Into The Recession Mind-Set “Affordable pleasures that aspire to premium perceptions in good times would do well to consider touting their affordability in a recessionary environment. Mid-market resorts and cruise lines, for example, should make a virtue out of being accessible escapes - all-inclusives can play predictable expense to competitive advantage.”

3. Growth is still forecast by the IATA, albeit at a slowed rate compared to previous years. “When we adjust for the impact of the leap year, passenger demand increased by 4-5% while freight was even more sluggish in the 2-3% range. Demand is still growing. But clearly we are in a different league from the 7.4% and 4.3% growth that we saw in 2007 for passenger and freight respectively. Things are slowing down,” said Giovanni Bisignani, IATA’s Director General and CEO.

The diagram below shows the IATA 2007 - 2011 traffic forecast.

Now some bad news

1. Cut backs are being made by consumers. Nearly three quarters of Britain’s more affluent households say they are planning to cut their spending this year, according to research from financial provider Axa.

They claim “72 per cent of households with a total income of £30,000 or higher will be taking steps this year to cut spending and many will be driven to radical measures as middle-class inflation, or those goods and services typically consumed by middle-income families hits 5.7 per cent. 44 per cent said they will be eating out less to cut costs, while around one in five said they would socialise less with friends (21 per cent).”

American consumers are already making changes. Travelmole reports that “More than two-thirds of respondents to the most recent survey by Ypartnership, co-authored with the Travel Industry Association, said they had downsized their trips in some way during the past six months because of personal financial concerns.”

The same article reports a survey by AIG Travel Guard found that 47% of US travellers plan to downscale their vacations to save money. More than two thirds of those polled by AIG Travel Guard said they wouldn’t reduce the number of leisure trips they take in 2008; “slightly more than half said they wouldn’t cut back on the quality. But 22% said they would eat in less expensive restaurants, and a slightly lower number said they would stick closer to home; another 16% said they would choose less expensive hotels than in the past.”

2. Anxiety is contagious. Behaviour is affected even if people are not directly under pressure themselves.

Marc E. Babej and Tim Pollak write in Tuning Into The Recession Mind-Set that “economic downturns instill anxiety. Almost no one is immune. Even people who are doing OK themselves will tread more cautiously as they see their peers cutting back on their spending or worrying about losing their jobs. What’s more, in this particular recession, even households with secure incomes will have reason to be on edge. Energy and food prices are likely to remain quite high, while the housing crisis is diminishing almost everyone’s net worth. So expect even those who aren’t really feeling a lot of pain to act as if they are.”

They also make the great point that those who are not suffering directly do not wish to cause their friends and families additional pain by flaunting conspicuous consumption.

So how do you plan for uncertain times?

Previously predictable behaviour can become much less so during an economic downturn. This makes it even more important to keep an even closer eye on market data, your business data and customer feedback.

Being aware of what is going on in as close to real time as possible, means you can be tactical and flexible. This avoids leaving you trapped in a strategy developed for a more optimistic market.

Finally, don’t bury your head in the sand. Acknowledge that downturns change consumer behaviour and realistically consider how changes in demand and consumption are likely to impact your business. This will leave you in a better position to innovate and respond to new opportunities, while others are paralysed and stagnate.

Before you start measuring your website you are in blissful ignorance.

You probably have the assumption that people come to your website through the front door of your homepage and that they look at things in an ordered manner that somehow relates to your navigation structure. They find the things they are looking for before doing exactly what they’re supposed to do (like book or enquire). Finally they leave fully satisfied, bookmarking you as they go for an easy return.

Once you start measuring your site - whether by web analytics, surveys, user testing or a combined approach - that happy illusion is shattered forever.

Chaos seems to rule. People enter the site all over the place, then leave in droves without seeming to do anything much at all. The deeper you look at the data, the more fleeting and varied that visitor activity seems to be.

Web analytics and user testing provide more information than you know what to do with, yet exactly the right bit still seems to be missing.

So how do you make sense of how people use your site - and what can you do about it?

First, forget everything you know about your site…

The navigation and linking structure, the fact that everything is explained on the homepage, those driving directions clearly given in the 34th paragraph. Your visitor knows none of this.

Things may make sense from the homepage but is perfectly possible that only a low proportion of visitors see the homepage anyway. (Believe me, I’ve seen businesses spending 80% of their effort optimising a page less than 25% of people even see. Meanwhile, visitors arrive from search engines into long forgotten, dusty corners of the site).

A first time visitor typically starts lost and often the experience just goes downhill from there.

So, when survey respondents tell you “I couldn’t find the…” they’re not lying, even if you know exactly where it is. Things are much less obvious when viewed for the first time and its critical to remember that when trying to make sense of how visitors behave. If you’re struggling, why not try some DIY user testing?

Second, know thyself…

Why do you exist? What is the website for and how does it relate to what your business is for?

This isn’t philosophising for the sake of it - when people use websites they are looking to solve problems and achieve goals.

What problems does your site exist to solve?

Think hard about what your different segments of visitor are trying to achieve when they come to your site. Given every visit starts with a problem or a goal, how good is your site at helping visitors achieve theirs? Understanding this context will be invaluable in making sense of how visitors use (or fail to use) your website.

Third, tame your tools…

Taming your tools means identifying your key questions and using your tools (from web analytics to surveys) to answer those questions. What tends to happen is that people let the tools lead them - so they find themselves measuring what the tools hand them (page views, visits etc) rather than what they really need to know.

Start with what you really want to know - think about your question different ways and break it down into smaller parts if you need to. Then look at the tools and data that you already have that may help you to answer those questions. That way, you don’t need to worry about all the information you have, you can just selective measure what really matters to you.

You can pick a few Key Performance Indicators and stick with them. Trends over time are far more important than absolute numbers and will start to give you insight into what is really going on.

But it is important to also tame your tools by understanding their potential and familiarising yourself with how they work. Making sense of how visitors behave doesn’t happen at the top level of information, it involves drilling down beyond the superficial -getting beyond page views, unique visitors and 1 to 5 satisfaction ratings.

If you only look at the front page of your Omniture or Google Analytics, or don’t filter or segment your SurveyMonkey data into subsections of responses - you’ll only being seeing a very superficial view of your visitors.

Four, do something, do anything…

The difference between good websites and bad ones is that someone is generally spending time and effort to continually improve good websites, whereas bad ones are left to stay bad, until some giant overhaul in the far away distance.

An ongoing series of small tweaks and fixes (measured of course, so you know their impact) has a bigger impact on revenues and visitor experience, than a once a decade overhaul!

Now some stuff to help you:

• Jakob Nielsen on 10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities and the Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design

• For those of you who don’t glaze over and twitch when I sat web analytics, check out Context is King Baby: Go Get Your Own at Avinash’s blog
• Getting your Google Analytics right at the outset, from the official Google Analytics blog: How you start is as important as how you finish
• And from Steve at Blackbeats blog: Why KPIs can not come from the bottom up. Management should always participate to the KPI creation and Drilling down into Analytics data
• Making sense of other travel websites’ visitors, courtesy of the compete blog
• Last but definitely not least, Matt Belkin at Omniture has a couple of great posts about knowing thyself and tying your analytics to that. See Don’t Do This! 7 Pitfalls When Deploying Analytics Part 1 and Part 2

Terms like Travel 2.0 and Web 2.0 get thrown about in conversation and it can seem that everyone but you knows exactly what they mean.

Yet push someone for a definition and people come up with all sorts of different explanations or they struggle to define it all.

So this post attempts to give a simple working definition of Travel 2.0. But more importantly, we hope to highlight what that really means for travel and tourism businesses and why you need to care.

But given that no two people seem to agree on precisely what Travel 2.0 and Web 2.0 actually mean, we’re doing the blog equivalent of a duet. We’ll both throw our thoughts in and to avoid making you dizzy, I’ll indicate which or us is proclaiming, so you know who to argue with at the end!

So, we need to pin down Web 2.0 before we tackle Travel 2.0 …. so Web 2.0 in no more than 20 words please:

Vicky: Community, interactivity, reciprocity, two-way marketing conversation, the long tail, create, modify, self-publish, user generated content, rich media, collaboration, see Wikipedia.

Stephen: Technically: blogs, RSS, flash media (no flash = no YouTube). Economically: (almost) zero cost to entry. Socially: critical mass of chatterers.

So where does Travel 2.0 fit in?

Vicky: Travel 2.0 is a term coined by our friends at PhoCusWright, as CEO Phillip C Wolf explains in this article:

“Travel 1.0 started around 1995; it was characterized by the shift from offline to online reservations and was dominated for a decade by three things: price, price and price.…. Travel 2.0, our industry’s collective fulfilment of Web 2.0, embodies how companies can differentiate themselves in a vast, dynamic space…. New travel researching and planning approaches are empowering consumers in unprecedented ways…. Travellers are keen to take control and find/create the perfect trip, not just the cheapest trip.”

What I take from that is Travel 2.0 is moving on to be more personalized, customer centric and experience centric. At the same time user communities and online tools have evolved for the traveller themselves to share experiences, to help search and define what it really is they are looking for and to pre-experience this though levels of multimedia content before they even make a purchase decision.

Stephen: I think it’s no coincidence that this is occurring in a period of sustained prosperity unparalleled in my lifetime. Put simply, western people have the time and money to be choosy about where they go and what they do. But people always need information in order to spend wisely and Travel 2.0 has effectively been about the vastly improved information flow to people making important investment decisions.

I have this notion though that it might be useful to speak of ‘Tourism 2.0‘ in describing the (consumer) demand-side experience and ‘Travel 2.0′ when speaking of the supply-side reaction to this, although I appreciate that they must meet in the middle!

Is it just jargon or does it represent a change in consumer behaviour?

Vicky: Yes and yes. It is jargon and that can be a barrier to understanding, but it does represent a real technology-enabled shift in consumer behaviour.

It is simply now easier, more satisfying and a richer experience for travellers to interact with other and share online – be that through video, images, reviews or other forms of exchange. Online social interaction lends itself so well to travel (the anticipation, the actual experience, the reminiscences). And the technology has evolved to allow interconnectivity and aggregation of services/content from many sites meaning that the research, anticipation and purchase have become far more fluid and closely aligned.

What it isn’t about is simply a bunch of tools, those of course these play an important part. (And for Travel 2.0 tools galore visit the Web 2.0 Travel Tools blog).

Stephen: Undoubtedly jargon. Some aspects do represent a change in customer behaviour (checking out peer reviews of destinations being a case in point) but other aspects are old impulses in new clothes (Flickr is the modern equivalent of showing off your holiday snaps…but only to people who are interested!). Ultimately, though, I think it is about increasing ease of access, whether that be to information, booking or new experiences.

Why should travel and tourism businesses care?

Vicky: Because its not just teenagers, geeks and weirdos or the “more advanced” North American market in this space – it is your customers, young and old, in Europe, the Americas and Asia. This is where they’re dreaming, planning, buying and reviewing. Sometimes a little edge by participation early on delivers a big advantage, where as getting left behind can leave you dead in the water.

Stephen: Well, if you don’t understand the role of review communities or metasearch for example (price comparison sites like Kayak.com who aggregate price data) then you don’t understand where customers are going to research their travel plans and what is motivating them to do that. That makes it harder to deliver the right message at the right time.

Do businesses need to do anything different?

Vicky: For me Travel 2.0 is also about recognising a shift in the marketing process and “control” of the marketing messaging.

From TV watching to travel brochures, media channels have become fragmented to the extent that the 1% response rate you could once hope to achieve with certain types of marketing/advertising, simply doesn’t deliver the volume of respondents it once did. The one to many model of mass marketing is being replaced by the one to few or even one to one model embodied by The Long Tail.

The old cliche used to be “people who have a bad experience with a service tend to tell 6 to 10 people, but those having good experiences only tell 1 or 2 people”. Word of mouth was generally limited to how many people one person actually came into physical contact with. I don’t think that stands up any more. People have any kind of travel experience, great or terrible, they tell Tripadvisor, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, the blogosphere – they tell their online community.

As people are no longer limited to only telling or consulting the opinions of people they know in the real world, word of mouth has become super-charged and powerful. Your marketing, PR and advertising efforts are not the only thing shaping your reputation. As this post explains, You Don’t Own Your Brand - Your Customer Does. So, personally, I don’t think doing things the same old way is an option any longer, because technology has led customers to dictate a shift in the terms of the conversation.

Stephen: Businesses do need to behave differently but how they behave depends on a number of factors.

A small business (a bed and breakfast for example) needs to be smarter about how they are perceived in the world. Previously, they just needed to concentrate on product and manage their reputation that way but now they have a potentially global audience watching them…and they need to know how to react to that constructively if things go wrong.

Being of a more conservative disposition, I am not sure how much ‘own brand’ social networking in its current form is merely a fad or how much it will be integral to business in the future. I can imagine that things like Facebook will have their place but I’m not sure, for example, that a Hotel Chain own-brand social network really adds any value. Same goes for most attempts (not all) at corporate presences in Second Life.

But the bottom line is that these companies need to make travel easier for their customers - whether that’s at the research, booking, or experience stages.

Who are you Travel 2.0 heroes? Which companies are getting it right?

Vicky: I’m a self-confessed Tripadvisor addict, I also use Flickr for travel research and love sites that pull in Flickr images or permit users to upload their own. Community of Sweden from Visit Sweden are VirtualMalaysia are good for that. In terms of flights, I’m increasingly using metasearch site Kayak. If it was a destination I don’t know, I might consult a site like TripWiser or TravBuddy.

Stephen: I also like Kayak. At a local level I like Bob’s Blog because it is a great example of how a business should be working a blog.

Mmmm, I’m not sure how much harmony there was in that duet, but isn’t that Web 2.0 and Travel 2.0 all over?

What do you think? Should there be a distinction between Travel 2.0 and Tourism 2.0? Who are your Travel 2.0 heroes? Am I deluded in thinking this represents a shift in consumer behaviour?