Call me a stats-geek, but one of the first questions I tend to ask tourism website managers is “are you measuring how well the site is delivering?” Increasingly – thanks to products like Google Analytics and Nedstat Pro - the answer to that question is yes.
However, the very next thing I’m often told is how many hits the website has, or that page views are increasing. Beyond this, businesses often admit they are largely in the dark.
Counting page views isn’t measuring how your website is delivering for your business. So what if your page views are up? Are revenues from the site up too? And why are page views up – is it because you’re spending more on marketing – and is that extra spend worth it in terms of results?
Maybe page views are up because lots of people are arriving at the site and are going round in frustrated circles because they can’t find the information they require. Perhaps a key phrase on your page is attracting hoards of inappropriate traffic from search engines.
Page views alone don’t give you much useful information, but counting hits is an even surer route to bewilderment and confusion, for they bear little meaningful relation to your website users.
They may give you satisfying big numbers on your reports, but hits should actually be ignored completely. Hits simply count the number of requests for page elements – a single page can generate ten or more hits – they are not an indicator of website success.
So, to get past being in the dark about the success of your website, it is important to spend a little more time counting the things that really matter to a tourism business.
A little more time – isn’t that something of a rare beast for most tourism businesses? Well, applying a little time each week to measuring the effectiveness of your website is like the proverbial “stitch in time”. If you’re already tracking your site, you have the data you need to spot a trade volume drop before it becomes serious. You’ll also have the tools to help you reduce wasted advertising. Cutting out the hit and miss aspect of promoting your website will save time, money and anxiety – and will drive more business from the web.
What three things can tourism websites measure to really uplift online performance?
1. Conversions
Conversions are success outcomes tied to any pre-defined customer action – enquiries, bookings, and newsletter sign-ups etc. In simple terms, they are often the primary reason your website exists. So what is more important, the absolute number of page views you received last month, or the quantity of online bookings? I’d wager it’s the bookings and that is where I’d start counting success. It is generally best to look at conversions as a percentages (the conversion rate), rather than absolute numbers and to observe the trends of whether your conversions are rising or falling.
Conversion rate = Total target actions completed / Number of Visits
2. Voice of the customer
Your website data provides actionable clues to your customer’s needs and behaviour – from the search terms they use, to the language they speak and the country they live in. Getting a good picture of who is using your site is a great way to lift the sense of mystery about your website’s success.
For example, the following image shows how by using a tool like Google Analytics to breakdown the country of origin of website users, it is possible to segment the comparative “bounce rate” by visitor country. (Bounce rate in this context is the proportion of single page views across the site – basically, people who arrive and then bounce off again without looking at any other content).
This particular tourism site may have a problem with its English-speaking visitors - they seem more likely to immediately leave the site than those viewing translated content. Why? Should the site be doing more to encourage American visitors to engage with it? The numbers alone don’t give the answer, but they do raise important questions that the site owner needs to address in order to improve business from the website.
3. Benchmarks for hindsight and foresight
Thinking about the conversion trends coming through from your web traffic data means you can begin benchmarking your relative performance and can be quickly be alerted to any drop-off in activity while there is still time to remedy it through promotional activity.
Comparing business from referring sites will help you to understand who has sent traffic to your website (and dependent on your analytics tool, how much of that traffic then converted according to your pre-defined goals). When calculating the referred traffic, don’t forget to factor in what you paid for it, eg the cost of a paid directory listing or paid search words. Again, this can all be done within Google Analytics and many other similar products.
You can use the seasonal cycle patterns that become visible (from search terms to conversion rates) to start planning promotional tactics on a more informed basis. This is particularly valuable when you consider that the period when visitors are researching online is generally before the moment they have made a purchase decision and so there is still scope to influence behaviour.
Using hindsight to give you foresight means you are actively cutting out the hit and miss aspect of promoting your site, which will save time, money and anxiety.
Is this really practical?
So, can a tourism business – particularly a small one, with no specialist staff – really use website measurement to increase the business their website is delivering? They can and they are - and the people I have spoken to regard it not only as practical, but essential for managing their business.
There are examples from interviews in this blog – such as this one with Rene Looper - as well as many other tourism businesses for whom the web is now the primary sales channel and web measurement a primary research tool.
If you are already using website measurement to drive your online tourism marketing, I’d love to hear what you are doing, how it is working for you and what challenges you face.
This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Online customer behaviour, Web analytics and web measurement. 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.