Visitors go through a specific cycle of research, purchase and trip preparation online – a process we refer to as the visitor engagement cycle. Visitors systematically fulfil a hierarchy of information needs and during that process they engage with multiple organisations and sites. The one constant tends to be the search engine, so utilising visitor search data can give you valuable clues about when visitors are actively engaged in the holiday research process.
One of the tools we use to understand the visitor engagement cycle is Google Trends. This free tool, first launched in May 2006, allows you to see how often specific search terms are being entered into the Google search engine. The result is a year view cycle of when people are actively searching on specific terms.
This example contrasts the search activity for 1) T in the Park, 2) Edinburgh Castle and 3) Edinburgh Festival. (Up to five terms can be compared). Notice the differences between the annual cycles for the three terms and the comparative growth in recent years of T in the Park compared to Edinburgh Festival:
So, if you’re targeting T In The Park goers – for example for up-sell or cross-sell purposes – then when are the critical times in the year when they are online and active in order to be exposed to your messages? The following one-year snapshot (for 2006) shows 3 distinct peaks of activity:
Google Trends can also be used to assist competitor benchmarking activity, provided you can pin down appropriate and comparable search terms. The challenge is finding those terms (there are other free tools to assist with this). The example below contrasts UK and Ireland markets, although the terminology I have used in this example could be argued to favour Scotland somewhat:
The advantages of Google Trends:
- Gives a periodic snapshot of search activity on key terms and phrases.
- Allows businesses to see the visitor engagement cycle and plan activity accordingly.
- Provides some degree of benchmarking against other destinations or organisation.
- Data can be sorted by time, language and geographic location, which gives you visitor engagement cycle snapshots for specific market segments as well as for specific time periods.
Some disadvantages:
- It only works on high volume search terms, so it is more useful on destination or major attraction key terms, rather than a small business names.
- It is better for multiword searches, or very unique search terms – place name searches can be really distorted if, for example, a major corporation or sports team shares the name.
- It is Google search data only – Google has exceptionally high penetration in the UK market, but this is not true of every country market.
- What happened last year may not happen next year – look at multiple years’ data and use the news reference index that comes with Google Trends to validate whether an exceptional occurrence has impacted the cycle.
In my view, Google Trends is a great tool that can really assist in identifying those critical times when potential visitors are researching their holiday plans online. It gives a periodic and segmented view of the visitor engagement cycle, provided suitable search volume data is available.
Just ensure your critical faculties are engaged and you apply common sense to the results.
This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Online customer behaviour, Research tools, Tourism market research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.