Tracking Tourism: The Tourism Research Blog Archive for the ‘Food and hospitality’ Category

Getting better insight into your online marketing campaigns and why this matters

OK, I’m guessing that many of you already know which websites send you what kind of traffic.  I don’t just mean whether search engines send 60% of your traffic but also what other sites are sending you that other 40% of visits.   Such as press mentions, local directories, online articles, blogs that mention you etc.

But if this is all you know, then you could still work your data a lot harder - with the ultimate goal of less spend, more results.  With a little bit of web analytics customisation to your campaign activity, you could be able to answer questions like:

• Which paid button on XYZ page gets me more traffic - the one in the section about golf or the one in the section about fishing?
• Do either of these buttons lead to more people booking than the free text link also on that site or the direct email I sent to my newsletter subscribers?
• Is the banner ad I ran on the front page of a directory three months ago more successful than the one I am running there at the moment?
• I’ve been pushing a special offer to my email list and online - what’s the value of each approach?

What we are doing here is moving from just tracking generic sites and marketing efforts as a whole, to tracking specific Campaigns.  To do this you need Goals.  And for a travel and tourism company wanting to maximise their return on investment in today’s climate, this is a vital step forward.

So,  if you cannot yet answer questions like those above about your site, then you need to look at some form of campaign returns analysis.   This involves campaign link tracking, setting specific goals within your web analytics tool and pulling results together in a way that factors in cost.  This is something you can do easily through most web analytics packages and a simple Excel spreadsheet.

Tracking Campaigns - an example.

Imagine that you run a hotel in Scotland and you decided to place an advert with a link on the front page of a  site like http://www.extramilescotland.co.uk/ to link to a great deal you have for golfers. In addition you also want an advert on the same page linking to a great deal for anglers. Just looking at your traffic sources in your Google Analytics data will not let you tell these adverts apart.   One of them may have worked, one may be a complete waste of money.

And, at the same time, you decide to email your past fishing customers telling them about a deal with a link to your site and you do the same for the golf customers.   It is starting to get really difficult to isolate precisely which of your activities are moving the needle.

BUT - there is a way round this.  Just a little tweaking of the names you give those links, you can tell all your ads apart without needing to do anything to your website.

Not only that, once you tweaked that URL, you would start to get really detailed marketing effectiveness information that would tell you a lot more than just where the visitor came from.  This is the wonderful world of campaign tagging (OK, not really that exciting - but so very useful!)  The “how to do this” is spelled out further down the post.

By identifying how people responded to different promotions, you can start to take control of what’s working for you.

But you need to take just a few more steps to start to make this really really powerful stuff.  You need to define what success is for you. You need to define what you want you visitors to do.  You need to define your Goals.

Campaigns + Goals = now analytics gets actionable

As Vicky argued in a previous post,

“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!).”

In other words, you need goals.

Let’s revisit that example above and, had we tracked each different campaign correctly, we might get some figures like those shown in the table below:

The table above shows us

• The number of visitors to the site each type of campaign attracted,
• How many completed goals can be attributed to those visitors attracted by the particular campaign,
• What percentage of visitors per campaign achieved the goal.

If you did not have a goal defined, then you would simply know that more people came to your site but you would have little understanding of how they behaved.  It would be a bit like advertising a shop opening but not bothering to record what your customers bought - or if indeed they even bought anything at all.

Put simply, Goals allow you to assess how successful you are at getting your customers to do something you want them to do.  And some campaigns will be more successful at getting them to do that special something than others.  In the example above, we can see that the ‘golf email’ link was the campaign that was the most successful in getting customers to do what you wanted them to do.

A goal can be anything from a sale through to anything other tangible action you want a visitor to do on your site - for example, a brochure download or visiting the directions page.

But if you do sell (or make reservations) through your site, then we can take the final steps and start to measure very exactly what these different campaigns did for your bottom line.  If we assume that your site is ecommerce enabled, then the table above could start to look something like this:

And what could we conclude from these (fictitious) figures?

• A lower percentage of ‘fishing banner’ visitors’ complete their goal (’make a sale’ in this example) than ‘golf banner’ visitors - but the ‘fishing banner’ visitors spend more when they do get to the site.  The activity cost more than the email activity, but it paid for itself.
• The emails in both cases got more people to convert than the banner ads for the same interest area - but the revenue from them was much lower (perhaps the emails drove more last minute cheap deals than the high margin banner ads).
• Despite the lower revenue generated by the fishing email, it represents a superior return on marketing investment to the fishing banner ad because of its low cost.  It was a quick win and by no means a worthless activity!
• But look at the golf banner - in this instance our marketer spent £500 yet only acquired revenues of £300.  The activity had a negative return and doesn’t justify being continued.

Note that not all analytics packages will automatically calculate a Return on Investment or a Cost of Activity figure for you (Google Analytics does for adWords but not for customized links). Even if your package  doesn’t, it’s pretty easy to work this out from your data.  You simply need to paste it into a an Excel spreadsheet, and if you’re interested, the ROI formula we’re using here is:

(Revenue from marketing activity - Cost of marketing activity) / Cost of marketing activity.

So what?

When you only have a finite online marketing budget, you need to know whether you are spending it wisely.  Thinking in terms of campaigns,  goals and campaign returns allows you to work out exactly what is and what isn’t working for you.  It identifies whether marketing in Directory A is better than Directory B.  It enables you to work out whether emailed customers (for example) are more likely to buy or complete a goal with you than visitors coming via other sources.

This is giving you near-real time information about how successful your marketing is.

The technical bit - how it’s done

Although I am aware that there are a wealth of analytics products out there, Google Analytics is the most commonly used at the moment and so this section uses this tool as the building block.  The process would be broadly similar in other packages.

Campaign tracking: Campaign tracking looks daunting to begin with but essentially it means adding a bit of code to the URL you to direct people to your site from your banner ad, text link or whatever. For Google Analytic users, there’s a useful tool here to help you out.

Setting up Goals: I can do no better than to echo Vicky’s earlier post by recommending Justin Cutroni’s article here and  his video here.

Integrating adWords and ecommerce: try Google’s intro here.

Still confused?  Well…you can always hire us to sort out the issue!

Filed by Stephen (17/06/09)

Former VisitScotland marketing analyst counting new success in Cromarty

Sutor Creek café, in the town of Cromarty is a bustling tourist hot-spot in summer. Unlike some Highland establishments, it remains open in winter, where it is at the heart of a dynamic local community, hosting films, salsa dancing, the book club and other events. Sutor Creek is owned and run by Colin (pictured) and Sarah Munro who took over in June 2007.

But prior to his training as a chef, I knew Colin in another guise: as a web and marketing analyst for Scotland’s national tourism marketing body, VisitScotland. In fact, Colin was pretty much the only other web analyst in Scotland at one point, meaning we had a lot in common!

So I caught up with Colin to find out how the transition from tourism marketer to tourism business has been - and what data he is measuring these days.

But first, I had to understand why anyone would abandon beautiful data and lovely trends in order to become a chef.

Colin explained: “I’m quite an impatient person. And measuring marketing campaigns and activity, and to understand those impacts – which was my job – is very hard and often slow. You’re always striving to measure impact, but in reality that is very difficult to gauge.

It is not always possible to clearly see the responses to what you’ve done, even after a period of time. So, I think that is why I was attracted to the action-response model that a restaurant business like this offers. There is this terrific immediacy in customer response when you are serving them food. And, of course, I love cooking!”

Well, as an analyst myself, that makes sense. It also confirms my theory there is a direct relationship between the complexity of data and the quantity of food required to resolve it.

Did previous experience at VisitScotland help in the running a tourism business?

Sutor Creek was already a successful going concern when Colin and Sarah bought the business, so they weren’t starting from scratch. From the very start, they realised that rather than concentrating on marketing, they had to focus their efforts on getting the core product right – specifically food and service.

“Our philosophy was to concentrate on the core product, so marketing was a little bit at the back of our minds. And that was deliberate as it would have been all too easy to get carried away doing marketing, which was something I was comfortable with and I liked, and not spend enough time on those areas where we had more limited experience”.

Colin strongly believes that getting the product right in terms of quality will generate good word of mouth that will greatly assist marketing efforts. The café is featured in the new edition of Scotland The Best, for example. He’s also employing varying techniques, such as events and email marketing, that would not of been out of place in his VisitScotland days.

But where his VisitScotland background has really helped, he says, is in understanding what the organisation actually does, and how they as business benefit from that.

“The Dutch and German people who turn up here in Cromarty are a direct result of what VisitScotland do. It is their business to market Scotland abroad and to act as a resource for visitors once they’re here. A lot of businesses don’t see that.

I know they are not here to market my individual business. But I am aware that they offer another route to market, if its appropriate and if I choose to advertise. For example, they are setting up a café trail, which we’ll be part of and that will be a great piece of promotion.”

So how much of a role does research and analysis play in daily life now?

As with almost every tourism business we talk to, it’s revenue and the related metrics that are the priority for the business.

Sarah’s background is in finance, so they’ve done lots of work on cost of sales and staffing cost so they can quickly determine which days of the week are worth opening. “By keeping a close eye on the data, we can make a decision and act on it fast. For example, we quickly realised there was no point being open on a Thursday night in winter”.

Web analytics hasn’t been abandoned (see the part 2 video interview for more), but the reality of the long hours and intensive summer season means that right now wider research and web measurement is largely a winter activity for the business.

And Colin adds “You get such good anecdotal feedback when you are this close to the customers, that right now, that’s my customer research. If we got people focussing more on handing out comments cards, for example, we could lose their focus on quality service for little additional research gain.”

Happily, Colin’s analytical streak is as strong as ever. He explains, “we’ve been meticulously recording all sorts of data – so once we’ve run a full year we’ll have like for like for comparison. And that will be really interesting to see if we’re growing the business!”

It was great to catch up with Colin and to see him and his wife really putting everything into growing what is both a tourism and community business. I wish them every success. And believe me, if you’re ever in the Highlands its worth making a detour via Cromarty to check out Sutor Creek!

Video interview with Colin part 1 - how have the first 6 months of business been?

Video interview with Colin part 2 - what are you measuring these days?

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