How one piece of visitor information can supercharge your marketing
If there is one piece of data that really pulls it weight, it has to be visitor origin data. I’m not talking about full postcode or zip code data, but simply the country or geographic region that your visitors or potential customers come from.
Whether you’re a small business doing all your own research and marketing, or you are part of a substantial marketing organisation, visitor origin is a simple piece of data that can help you make better marketing decisions.
Visitor origin data is a key component of all of these common questions:
· Where do my customers come from?
· Where should I be advertising?
· Which markets am I most competitive in?
· Who visits my website?
· Is my website equally successful for all my target markets?
· Should I be translating marketing content – and into what languages?
· Where do the visitors to this country come from and are they finding my business?
Successfully tackle the issue of your visitors’ origin and you can begin to answer these bigger questions.
So where do you find visitor origin data?
You’re likely to have at least two internal pools of visitor origin data.
Firstly, there is your sales/bookings and enquiries data (or customer comment/survey data if you don’t have direct bookings information). This is your view of what is actually happening in your business. Systematically recording visitor origin at a country or county level in Excel or similar will let you track trends over the season, as well as year on year fluctuations.
Secondly, there is your website data – this is more like a view of what could be happening. This is because you see the geographical origin and spoken language, not just of those people that become customers, but also of those who do not enquire. (You can compare the proportions of origin of visitors to your enquiry page, to the visitors to your whole sire, for example) Furthermore, if you are conducting paid search engine advertising, you also have this same data for the effectiveness of your pay per click advertising in different countries and regions. You can typically export this data into Excel, for analysis alongside your customer data.
The real power of visitor origin data comes when you compare the information about your customers/visitors, for example contrasting booking information with information from your website. You can even factor in background data sources, such as national visitor statistics.
As an example, you can look for differences in proportions in the proportions of visitor origin between your website data and your booking data. You may find that while 20% of your website visitors are from Germany, only 5% of your customers are.
This is significant and highlights where you need to investigate further. For example, is the 5% or 20% value more typical for your country or region (so are you under performing or not capitalizing on an opportunity to over perform)?
Does the 20% represent an opportunity to improve the effectiveness of the website and do these web visitors come from a specific source (for example a specific search engine or referring site)? Is there anything in the general Internet usage statistics that are widely available that might highlight any potential effectiveness issues (Germany, for example, typically has lower credit card ownership than the UK).
You can also look at the actions of your website visitors and customers along country/regional lines. In the example that follows (from Google Analytics, a free web analytics program that you simply need to tag your site with) it is possible to look at the “bounce rate” for the website for visitors from different countries. The bounce rate is the proportion of people who arrive at the site an immediately leave again.
In the case below, far fewer people from Germany and Spain immediately leave the site, compared with visitors from the USA and Canada, suggesting the site is more effectively engaging the attention and meeting the needs of these German and Spanish visitors.
It seems clear that the business should attempt to target more German and Spanish visitors – and of course, it could.
However, the business owner may know that US and Canadian visitors have a far higher spend and therefore a greater long term value to the business. So this difference in the bounce rate may indicate that more persuasion and better targeting of the website to the needs of the US ad Canadian visitors is required in order to reduce the proportions of people that simply bounce away.
Whether you are looking at website information or your booking/enquiries data, I recommend always considering segmenting your key business questions along visitor origin lines. This can range from spend per visit, to time spent on the website, to how the visitor heard about you – whatever the key marketing questions are for your business.
How do you turn visitor origin information into marketing tactics?
Once you look at groups of visitors in these geographic segments, you will find the markets where you are already performing strongly and those that are significant to your region, but where you are not maximising potential. This helps you focus on what to improve.
You also can use a limited marketing budget to best effect if you know where in the world to spend it. For example, if you are conducting paid search and you know you have a higher booking rate from Canada than the USA, or the North of England rather than London, you can easily geo-target your campaigns to take this into account, focusing on those areas that deliver the highest success rates.
Likewise, if you are running a marketing campaign that is generating the best response rates from Germany, you can target more effort here next time and consider how you make the success rate even higher – for example by using translated content and responses.
At a tourism business level, if I could only have one piece of visitor data to support research and marketing decisions, I think I’d choose visitor origin. Of course it doesn’t give a full picture when used alone – but it a component of so many critical questions, that I think that perhaps it really is a data superhero!
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This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Research tools, Tourism market research, 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.