Absolutely mainstream and absolutely heating up
In case anyone was doubting that the Internet is absolutely mainstream and absolutely critical to travel and tourism, here is my spring pick of statistics that I think deserve some serious attention:
1. Average UK Internet users now spend 164 minutes online each day, compared to 148 minutes spent watching TV. The research by TNS (on behalf of Google) demonstrates how profoundly consumer behaviour is changing online. The Internet is still regarded as some tourism businesses as a niche, somehow still less significant that other channels. The reality is that the Internet is absolutely mainstream and is challenging and surpassing more traditional media types.
2. Jakob Nielsen points out that only 25% of people travel through a site via a homepage - the rest use search and arrive deep in the site. This BBC article tells you more.
What is the implication of this? Well, many people imagine all their visitors arrive through the site’s front door and they design their site accordingly. Time and effort goes on improving the home page, while deeper pages are ignored.
How does your site fare in terms of navigation, clarity and usability for the 75% of people who enter down the chimney and through the windows of the site, rather than though the front door?
3. Google properties now drive 36% of all UK Internet traffic (source Hitwise).
What does this mean to you? Use your web analytics data to understand your share of traffic from Google. If it dramatically exceeds the 40% mark, you may need to look at building other sources of traffic and improving repeat visits to your site. If Google accounts for only a small proportion of your traffic, there may be a need to look at your organic search engine optimisation strategy.
4. comScore reports that in March, 221.2 million Europeans conducted 24.6 billion searches, averaging 111 searches per searcher. Searchers in Finland exhibited the heaviest search activity with 143 searchers per searcher, followed by Portugal (128 searches per searcher) and the U.K. (124 searches per searcher).
Search is critical to your business success online. But for the travel sector, search optimisation and visibility doesn’t stop at your own country activity (such as google.co.uk), as the next statistic shows.
5. comScore also showed that Google Sites account for more than 19 billion European searches conducted in March, representing 79 percent of the European search market.
“With nearly 80 percent of all searches conducted in March, Google is far and away the leading search property in Europe,” said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore. “However, we are seeing key local players show leadership in Eastern Europe where English is spoken less than in Western markets. With Russia’s online population now the fastest growing in Europe, it is likely that some of these local search engines will continue to gain traction and market share.”
6. 73.7 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in March 2008. comScore report that users viewed 11.5 billion online videos during the month, representing a 13-percent gain versus February and a 64-percent gain versus March 2007. Nearly 139 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 83 videos per viewer in March.
Video is being found to drive travel and tourism conversion rates and consumers are both familiar with using it and increasingly search out accommodation, destination and activity related video as part of their travel research process. They are also uploading their own video reminiscences, which fuel future travellers’ decisions.
7. It’s not just the US that is seeing the impact of video. Hitwise reports that UK traffic to online video increased by 178 per cent between February 2007 and 2008, now accounting for one in every 45 Internet visits.
8. Competition is hotting up and so is online spend. Advertising spending online looks set to overtake spending on TV by the end of 2009 - the implication being that prices will rise as more advertisers chase the same inventory.
9. In 2008 12% (7.4million) of all mobile phone users in the UK are using mobile Internet services (source Continetal Research, on e-consultancy). Forrester Research project this will rise to 38% of mobile phone users in Western Europe by 2013.
This mobile phone based Internet activity often utilises ‘dead time’ while travelling and is associated with ‘task based’ activity such as checking train times, restaurant directions etc. Right now, those handful of sites doing mobile well are in a prime position to see the benefits in their bottom line.
10. As so many of these points suggest, the Internet is now absolutely mainstream for travel.
PhoCusWright’s latest Consumer Travel Trends Survey, due June 2008, reports that requent travellers and seasoned online buyers continue to dominate, but now the former “diehard” offline users have begun to use the Internet as their usual method for travel shopping and purchasing. PhoCusWright point out that as novice users, this majority of late adopters possesses different travel and purchase behaviours, have varying levels of online skills, requires different messaging and is demographically unique.
This entry was posted on Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Future trends, Internet usage statistics, Tourism statistics. 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.