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)

There’s a little tourism/sporting event happening in London in 2012. You may be aware of it. From what I could tell while in Docklands earlier this week, there are certainly lots of cranes and men in hard hats endeavouring to ensure the Olympic Stadium is completed on  time.  (Thanks to suburbanslice on Flickr for the image of the Olympic Park.)

But there is another 2012 milestone accelerating towards us that will have wider construction implications for travel and tourism businesses.  As Greg Dowling, Head of Analysis at Nokia, informed me at eMetrics San Jose a few weeks ago – by 2012 more than half of those accessing the internet will do so from a mobile device.

As a research geek, I like to know the sources of such eye-popping statistics.  I wanted to check for myself that I had understood what he had said correctly and (apologies for the distrust Greg!) that the amazing numbers I was being told were accurate.

And it seems they are.

Leading technology industry analysts, IDC, report in their Digital Marketplace Model and Forecast (June 2008) that:

“Users will access the Internet through more than 1.5 billion devices worldwide in 2008, including PCs, mobile phones, and online videogame consoles. By 2012, the number of devices accessing the Internet will double to more than 3 billion, half of which will be mobile devices.”

And I can tell you Nokia are taking this very, very seriously indeed.

Remember when we all stuck our brochures on the web?

I mentioned the big construction implications of the mobile web.  And like London preparing for the Olympics, tourism providers must realise that the mobile web is a similarly massive event and ask themselves, “Am I ready for these visitors?”

Like parts of London where infrastruture must be upgraded to meet the challenges of an influx of visitors, so there are web offerings that, if not changed, will not be fit for purpose come 2012.

We cannot simply throw existing website content at mobile users and think “job done”.  People will be using devices that are geographically aware.  They are looking for downloadable apps they can carry with them.  People will expect (because its already do-able) that they can use their mobile devices to locate a nearby restaurant that meets their tastes and that has a table now.

Are you ready for that?

It is not an either/or of course.  Mobile is not “replacing” the fixed web – it is augmenting it with a time sensitive, location sensitive layer – one that is arguably also more flexible for interactivity with both objects and other people.

Travel and tourism is where fixed internet users first experimented and became more confident in researching and communicating online – there is no reason to believe that their mobile internet experience will be any different.  Travel, tourism and “familiarisation” applications will lead the way as internet users add another layer of enrichment to their experiences.  In fact they already are – these three excellent posts from Stephen Joyce, Norm Rose and the New York Times give you a flavour of some of the great applications already being used by visitors to navigate their way through unfamiliar places and travel processes.  Where the early adopters lead, the bulk of visitors will soon follow.

So is there a 2012 tourism connection between mobile and the Olympics?

There sure is…  Just as the Sydney Olympics were revolutionised by digital photography technologies, distributing images globally in minutes, London 2012 will be the first heavy test of the mobile internet.  And provided London Underground don’t decide to strike rendering us thoroughly immobile, there is a compelling case (as made here by the Mobile Data Association) that London will be the “mobile Olympics of 2012“  As they explain:

“As early as 2010, all new mobile phones will be mobile internet and mobile email ready and will have sophisticated camera functionality as standard. Mobile social networking and sharing rich moments with friends and family, will be a commonplace occurrence. Therefore visitors to the 2012 London Olympics will be recording and sharing their own personal memories of the games. This “of the moment” dynamic view will provide a great opportunity to experience the Olympics in a unique way.”

They go on (and is this is where it gets interesting for the tourism/travel business):

“By 2012 we will be using our NFC (Near Field Communications) enabled mobile phones on the underground and public transport systems of London as an Oyster card replacement. There are significant opportunities to combine mobile internet, GPS location and mapping to provide visitors to the games with travel plans (using public transport), avoiding congested areas, making reservation in hotels and restaurants, tickets for the games and real-time security alerts and warnings.”

So great, the London Olympics will have even more people glued to their phones and may even edge towards being a “cashless” Olympics if the transactional kinks can be ironed out.  But why is this remotely significant to, say, a hotel in Glasgow or an attraction in Leipzig?

Well, here’s a few reasons to start with:

• Critical mass – many times we have heard that “this is the year of mobile” only for that promise not to materialise. But now a perfect storm of handset advances, content/application development, increasing wi-fi network availability and a major trigger event such as the Olympics means 2012 is a very realistic horizon for the mobile internet to become an absolutely mainstream platform in travel.
• Mobile phones are beginning to be used ‘transactionally’ – even if not quite yet as the purchase device  (booking a table for a nearby restaurant in 15 minutes time is a transaction, even if the purchase is completed in the restaurant).  At the moment, phones are typically acting as really smart guide books…but this kind of transactional development means that people should start using them to first move closer to the point of purchase, and eventually to keep and spend money.
• The combination of User Generated Content, Social Networks, GPRS and Mobiles means that information will be shared among a target group more quickly – this has benefits (eg you are shifting stock at a discount to clear it) and drawbacks (word gets out quickly if you’re product is duff).

So, peer to peer communication, as epitomized say by Trip Advisor, becomes even more rapid, even more geographically sensitive, even more context aware.   As one leading phone manafacturer who will remain nameless pointed out “not only do we know where you are right now, we know who is in you address book” – those things can be easily pulled together for custom recommendations.

Doesn’t that have the potential to dramatically increase the power of peer to peer influence and word of mouth?  And will you be ready?

The Tracking Tourism team is currently in Berlin attending ITB and, courtesy of PhoCusWright, the conference organizers, attending the PhoCusWright@ITB conference and Bloggers Summit. All in all, a fantastic chance to meet with the great and good of travel and analyse where the industry is, where it is going and what the heck can be done about it.

And what a day one it has been – social media optimism, mobile as critical to business strategy, a new word “moxie” for the vocabulary – oh, and a dash of economic apocalypse.

We’ll have a series of posts over the next few days looking in detail at some of these themes, but we thought we would kick off with a quick report from the opening day, including the Bloggers Summit part of the conference.

Wise words from Philip C Wolf

The briefing from PhoCusWright’s CEO, Philip C Wolf, is always a highlight for me, and this year was no exception. With a self-confessed “keen sense of what’s hot and what’s not” he proclaimed 2009 as the year of 4 Ms:

• Money - not just lack of it, but also in terms of low interest rates and “bottom feeding” investors

• Media - “its all rough and tumble right now” with pay per click and user generated media really impacting travel distribution models.

• Mobile - “2009 is the year when mobile platforms become a strategic business imperative” (quote of the day in my opinion!)

• Moxie - (for readers outside of North America: verve, pep, know how and guts). The business acumen to “be comfortable swimming against the tide”

As Philip explained, it takes lots of moxie to control costs in the operating plan, while simultaneously investing in capital expenditures/innovation. For if companies only play defence then at best they may preserve their business entity – “but what if you work really hard to preserve something that is out of sync when the tide starts rising?”

Philip was careful not to dwell on bleak economic scenarios. His focus was primarily on identifying opportunity and “the big rewards for gutsy innovation”. He explained the signals of recovery that his analysts are looking out for.

The views at the ITB Convention Future Day was both more apocalyptic while actually reinforcing some of Philip’s sentiments.

You don’t even want to hear the worst case scenario…

I guess “Tourism in Times of the Global Financial Crisis” was never going to be uplifting. In the course of his introduction, Professor Max Otte, author of “The Crash Comes” managed to depress the audience into shell-shocked wide-eyedness with promises that “there are lots of bombs still to go off”, that the global banking system is technically insolvent and that in the worst case scenario of global depression “all bets are off“.

Professor Lipman of the UNWTO tried to raise spirits but somehow “as the economy goes so goes tourism” didn’t achieve the desired bounce. He did however express the goal to get tourism on the table as part of the G20 stimulus package discussions, due to its critical role in two way trade.

Some good news to be had the fact that a lot of the fundamental shifts in responding to the customer in travel have already been underway for some time. Meaning those who have already invested in understanding what the customer wants and building business models that enable them to deliver on that are in a stronger position. But as Dr Auliana Poon of Tourism Intelligence International warned:

“Customers have long memories… destinations and companies not on track with what the customer wants will fall by the wayside… customers are deciding”.

People still want to travel – I loved Dr Dieter Semnelrioth of the TUI’s analogy that “25 million Germans are sitting on their packed luggage.” But the early bird offers are not working, bookings are down – operators may move straight to last minute deals, eroding margins. As we have heard previously, customers are not trading out completely, but they are trading typically down (though it is the middle ground, 3 stars, feeling the most pain).

“Transformative” was used a little too much for comfort – the point being that there remain opportunities and that to quote Dr Poon “this recession will force us to live differently and travel differently and travel differently.” But transformative sounds kind of apocalyptic to me – after all, isn’t transformative what they said about the Black Death?

However, the themes mentioned at the PhoCusWright session earlier – particularly Moxie and Money – also made an appearance at an earlier presentation by Rolf Frietag, delivering the results of the largest worldwide travel survey in the form of the ITB World Travel Trends Report.

Put simply, if you have the guts to invest in the present climate, then there are great opportunities – construction costs and interest rates are low but you’ve got to be able to ride out a recession potentially lasting until late 2012.

I (Vicky) have lots more notes from this session, with each sound bite more depressing than the last – but for all our sakes I will handover to Stephen and the cheerier travel bloggers and their discussions on social media in tourism and travel.

The Top Social Media Trends for Travel and Tourism

The bloggers workshop sessions explored what blogging folk from within the industry believe are the top social media trends for travel and tourism.

Asked to choose a main theme for the coming year, the panelists opted for:

* More Twitter
* Better understanding how to use social media
* Increased use of social media as a PR tool
* More Twitter
* Employing a social media guy

These issues were then put before the audience to vote on what they thought of these prognostications. Despite the endorsement of Twitter from the panel, I seemed to detect a degree of skepticism in the hall and Twitter got lowest audience votes on key trends – suggesting perhaps that people feel the need to drive philosophy change and strategies, rather than simply focus on specific applications.

The discussions moved onto practical applications of social media within travel organisations. Klaus Hildebrandt reminded the audience that businesses didn’t used to be able to see how the web could deliver revenue – they finally saw that it comes with investment and effort. To get buy in to social media is to highlight the business cases, the good examples of how to add this to strategy.

Kevin May of Travolution cited the Queensland Dream Job as the perfect example of an integrated destination campaign using both traditional PR and social media marketing.

Stephen Joyce summarized the workshops with the sensible conclusion that “your customers are talking about you anyway. How are you, as leaders in your organisation, going to step into the conversation in the most meaningful way?”

However, while PhoCusWright is following a deliberate policy here of focusing on the can-do in the programming of the conference on the basis that wallowing in gloom isn’t really going to help any of us, I think there is still a world represented here at this conference that is a) frightened at what’s to come and b) has bigger fish to fry than considering the best way to use Twitter.

As a Twittersceptic (note not a Twitter-phobe!), I thought the more practical suggestions from the panel included:

• The role of mobiles will increase (more on this in a coming post)

• Using 2.0 for PR in a more savvy way and integrating this messaging with traditional forms of PR will grow

• Feedback 2.0 – tourism providers might start to listen to what their customers are saying across multiple channels.

• Context rather than content will become important – you need to get to the real info you want, not wade through interminable irrelevant guff.

• ‘We must do our homework’ – Companies must take a hard look to define what goals they want to reach, what target groups do we want to reach?

• Traditional metrics for online activity are inadequate for measuring social media.
• New metrics such as ‘volume of mentions’ will become important in judging success.

We look forward to tomorrow’s PhoCusWright@ITB09 conference.

Wouldn’t it be great if…people understood the distinction between User Generated Content and social media?

This is one of the most common muddles that we come across and this confusion can have investment implications so it’s important to be clear about what the difference is between these two.

While similar information can appear on these channels, the tourism provider that says, “I’ve gotta get me a Facebook page” but is unaware of the stinking reviews they’re getting Tripadvisor and the videos of their cockroaches on Youtube is getting their priorities wrong.

Wouldn’t it be great if…businesses saw the recession as a long term opportunity rather than a short term one?

I have this (probably unfounded fear) that lousy tourism providers in the UK will get a boost this year on account of the weakness of the pound and the growth in domestic tourism.  What I would like to happen is that this is treated as a rare opportunity to show visitors, domestic or otherwise, what’s great about travel in the UK.  I fear though that some might feel that it’s an opportunity to gouge a market where demand has grown, while cutting back on service and value delivery as far as possible.

Wouldn’t it be great if…A/B and Multivariate site testing became mainstream?

That’s probably not the sexiest sentence I’m ever going to write but it amazes me how, given free tools to measure how changing a website layout affects response rates, few businesses (those in North America excepted) can be bothered with this.  Come on folks – this is a quick and easy win! Surely, as Tesco would say, every little uplift in conversion rate helps?

Wouldn’t it be great if…people checked their assumptions before starting their marketing?

A case in point: we’re doing some work at present that reveals that a destination is wanting to attract Category X visitors and assumes that their marketing message is sufficient for them. But they are actually missing pressing the buttons of this category and are actually speaking directly to other less significant markets by accident.

They have assumed, rather than tested, that they know what Category X visitors want and have based all their spend around those marketing messages. But because they’re the wrong messages, all that investment is in essence wasted. Challenging those assumptions through testing at the campaign development and early roll out stage would have avoided this waste.

In a way, this is a repeat of the old adage that ‘you are not your customer’  but it’s something worth reminding yourselves and checking to make sure you are getting your comms strategy right.

Wouldn’t it be great if…protectionism didn’t return to travel?

I don’t think that there is any suggestion at the moment that protectionism is about to rear its head in travel but remains a fear of mine that it could make an appearance at some point.  If it happens within the EU, I suspect that it would be under the guise of a green initiative but globally it would be about protecting home carriers.  Watch this space if things get reeeally bad.  

Wouldn’t it be great if…the issue of peak oil had gone away?

Well, in a sense, the issue of peak oil has gone away owing to the immense demand destruction we have witnessed over the past eighteen months but the fundamental issue is that demand outstrips supply in oil production was poised to come true at the beginning of 2008 and there is no reason why it won’t be true again when the world economy picks up.  Which means that some of this stimulus money will have a lasting legacy if it is spent in a way that prepares the infrastructure for a world in which oil is really expensive.

Wouldn’t it be great if…over to you!

In writing this post, I am aware of approaching this issue from a specific perspective but am aware that there are probably a lot more ‘wishes’ out there to be claimed – so get contributing in the comments box below.

Post by Stephen

Although the concepts are clearly interlinked, lets take each of these themes in turn and examine their implications.

Transparency

At a broad level, transparency works in two ways.

Firstly, there is the need of businesses to be transparent. Secondly, transparency is imposed on businesses by the consumer whether that business likes it or not. But let’s unpack those two sentences yet further.

When we are talking about transparency, it is not just a case of being honest about the building site opposite your hotel but about allowing your consumer easy access to both your product and reliable information about that market.

Ian cited both:

• the demand for the right results fast, with absolute intolerance of slowness; and
• the desire to see through the blizzard of choice to get to where we actually want to get to

Added together this means a ‘culture of convenience’ in which consumers are simply more demanding and less tolerant of the slow and vague. As Joe Buhler discussed at Canada e-connect last week, the web 3.0 nirvana for the customer is the shift from searching to finding, from ‘pile ‘em high’ to personalised.

It should be appreciated that while the blizzard of choice might seem confusing at the outset, this blizzard is actually the crowded market place in which the consumer can be seduced by a huge variety of options and so the producer therefore needs to work harder to attract the consumer’s attention.

Until the semantic web nirvana arrives (see a great little video on what that means over at Buhlerworks), customers are having to do all the hard leg work of searching and researching. No wonder they’re impatient! It was suggested last week that people typically look at 17 websites while planing a trip (I don’t have a source on this, so don’t treat that as fact!)

Even the best website has just a few seconds to speak to and successfully sign-post the prospective visitor. 7 seconds used to be the number often quoted – now (as we’ve seen in user testing) its considerably less time than that.

“People want sites to get to the point. They have very little patience.” Jakob Nielsen

So in this context, transparency is about easy provision of information.

Trust

So, why do companies also need to be transparent? (Apart from the fact that whatever you’re hiding, it’s already on the internet somewhere!)

Because, in turn, transparency engenders trust.

From focus groups we’ve done, we’ve found that there is a residual distrust that areas (especially) marketed at a national level through a tourist board are simply not going to be how they are presented. It’s as though the consumer now feels that they are not going to get the full story about what the place is really like – is the pretty old town actually just a small part of a grimy industrial city for example?

It is no wonder, as we wrote about here, that the traveller places less trust in brand marketing than they do in user reviews and ratings. In fact, reviews/ratings from other travellers were seen as twice as influential in the online travel planning process than brand and significantly more important than recommendations from friends and family.

As Ian noted, “Less and less the consumer trusts advertising. One major consequence is that every tourism organisation or business needs to work hard to preserve whatever authority and trust-worthiness it has accumulated.”

So your brand still has capital, even though you can’t control communication. An organisation has to respect the fact that it is no longer the only information source, but acknowledge that it still has the potential to influence. By embracing – and having a strategy to manage and respond to – the authentic views of others, the business has the opportunity to benefit even when those reviews reflect an image removed from perfection.

Trendwatching have coined the term Brand Butler’s to express this concept:

BRAND BUTLERS “If consumers value the authentic, the practical, the exclusive, and they’re also forever looking to make life more convenient, even save some time, then why persist in bombarding them with one-way advertising campaigns? Instead of stalking potential and existing customers, why not assist them in smart, generous, relevant ways, making the most of your products and whatever it is your brand stands for?” Trendwatch Feb 09 Briefing

Technology

Of course, technology has been at the forefront of enabling this explosion of choice and views. If you think back to as little as 15 years ago, for ‘real’ views about a place we would consult either our travel agent or read a Lonely Planet guide (which I ended up not particularly trusting!). In terms of pricing, it was a lot simpler and often a case of ‘take it or leave it’.

The internet has of course opened up much of the industry to closer scrutiny as well as offering far wider choice (not that the choice wasn’t always there – it was just harder to find).

Search, meta-search & price comparisons, user generated content, dealing with multi websites simultaneously – and the fact that none of this stuff goes away – has changed the information gathering landscape.

Clear…as mud?

Interestingly, Ian also noted that

“There is a counter trend to everything transparent, in which opaqueness is accepted by tourists. Many tourists will accept an opaque offering, if that experience consistently delivers and surprises. Also, a lot of tourists like to keep things simple. They want to save time. They don’t want to make all the decisions. In other words, if you operate and deliver in a superior way, consumers may actually be happy and they don’t want to spend valuable time researching or engaging in conversations with you. They will trust you to do the right thing. Surrender control in order to get on with more important business. If your business or destination is opaque, it means you are one of the best, but you have to work at it to maintain that trust.”

It seems to me there are two things going on here. The first is the organisation that can anticipate and over deliver – the ability to surprise, and delight is trusted, presumably due in part to great word of mouth.

The second is the “easy life” compromise and sounds like the Easyjet scenario to me. Hidden extras I have to uncheck if I don’t want them added, a fairly unlovely experience alround and I don’t want to engage with them. But they get me there, its quick and its cheap. I’m not sure that’s trust, but its certainly willingly surrendered control, in exchange for convenience.

So what do I take away from this?

I guess for me this prognosis should be read as implying that these ‘Three Ts’ are about more than saying it’s a good idea to respond to user generated content such as hotel reviews. That’s certainly part of the environment but I think this is also talking about fundamental ways of doing business.

One of the cardinal lessons I would stress from this is the importance of ensuring access to the product. I don’t mean this in terms of being able to get to a destination but rather in terms of making sure that the custsomer’s voice is heard and served amidst the cacophony.

So, on a practical level, we’re looking at usability issues, we’re looking at understanding your customers and their behaviour, we’re looking at making sure that they are able to get information and maybe convert in a style that suits them, not you.

Ultimately then, it’s about trying to create a win/win transaction and the ways of getting to this state are indeed being fully explored both at the level of the here and now (see out recent post about the Phocuswright Innovation Summit for example) and as a meaningful future concept (again, see our post on Travel 3.0). 

And, for me, one of the most exciting parts of this is the fact that these developments are aligning themselves to the fundamentals of doing business – they’re not just filling some strange need for a new fad (although there are exceptions…) but rather they’re about building trust, they’re about delivering value to the customer in a way that suits them and they about enabling  voices to be heard in an ultra-competitive and challenging environment.

Filed by Stephen (29/01/09)

I started this week at the University of Guelph, one of Canada’s most prestigious Schools of Hospitality & Tourism Management.  It was a privilege to meet with and teach the next generation of industry professionals, ranging from hospitality MBAs to first year undergraduate students. In an industry where staff recruitment and retention can be so challenging, it was wonderful to observe both the job fair and alumni/student evening as well as the very practical approach to bringing the hospitality and tourism businesses together with its bright young future employees.  This is something which must surely enhance Canada’s future competitiveness as a tourism destination.

Also contributing to Canada’s strong future focus is Canada e-connect, the e-tourism strategy conference running in Toronto this week.

Hosted by the Tourism Industry Association of Canada and organised by fellow T List blogger Jaime Horwitz, I feel e-connect day one successfully delivered attendees three critical things:

1. A dose of digital reality

Not only has the world has changed -  “deal with it” – but here are some strategies to help you deal. (Strategies, note, not just tactics as is so often the case  at tourism industry events).  This was about a grown-up approach to e-tourism and emarketing – not just a bunch of cool stuff you can do, regardless of how relevant to your business and customer.  This included:

The 4 ps of digital marketing.  Because this conference was about so much more than tactics, it was interesting to hear Dr Ian Fenwick talk both accessibly and inspiringly about the shift in marketing fundamentals that lie behind digital marketing strategy.  The traditional 4ps of marketing (price, product, promotion, place) take a shifted focus in a digital environment, a theme reiterated through the day.  The principals of digital marketing, whether we’re talking mobile devices or email communications, come down to:

• Permission (opt in, easy opt out, non interruptive/invasive, frequency as agreed by customer)
• Participation  (customer participation in content creation, what the brand stands for etc)
• Particulars (collecting customer data drop by drop)
• Personalisation (relevant, timely, valuable to customer)

What I found interesting about many of the speakers in the course of the day was that they didn’t simply focus on the 2nd P – participation – and managed to avoid getting fixated on  promotion/user generated content at the cost of everything else.  Exactly the lesson I was teaching to the marketing students at the University of Guelph earlier in the week.

Message before  medium. In one of the best analogies of the day, Adam Keats of Weber Shandwick explained that when Moses chiselled out the 10 commandments from God, it wasn’t because he had some really neat stone tablets that he wanted to fill with content – it was because he had these messages to get across and the stone tablets were the best medium to hand.

He concluded by saying let’s not ask “how do I blog successfully?” but instead ask “what stories can I tell?”In both the mobile strategies session and the blogging session, it was illuminating to hear panellists say “this may not be for you.”

Likewise, in the mobile strategies session panelists urged businesses to think about what your customer does when out and about on their phone (and other mobile devices such as in car gps) – and define where in that process you can bring them extra value that is highly relevant and timely.  If you don’t deliver extra value in that customer’s personal context – then maybe you don’t need a mobile strategy.  And if of course you do, then contextual is a word you’re going to be uttering a whole lot more in future!

2. An enhanced view of customer centricity

The travelling customer was not invisible at this conference.  Instead of being entirely supply-side or product focussed, there was talk of permission, personalisation, customer centricity etc.  But it was Diane Clarkson of Forrester that really delivered a powerful reminder of the customer’s importance in her lunchtime address on delivering the valued customer’s experience in a web 2.0 world.  Because economic conditions are meaning travellers are spending less, taking fewer trips and are reducing accommodation spend (either downscaling rooms or establishments).

“Travelers don’t care that the economy is tough on you too”  Diane Clarkson, Forrester

Diane highlighted that critical to embedding the valued customer’s experience across the organisation are the principals that the customer must feel:

• Fulfilment of their needs, both in terms of the product delivery, but also their emotional expectations
• Respect – for their time, for their money, for their experience
• Communicated with – by name, authentically, personally

Right now, 3 out of 4 people do not feel valued in the email communications they receive – they are product/supplier centric, rather than centred on delivering value to the customer as an individual.  She warned that based on the evidence of their research, it was clear that the current strategies of many tourism businesses focus inwards on the company, rather than outwards on the customer.

Fortunately, the conference content offered businesses strategies to address that!

3. A clear view forward, not a glance behind in the rear view mirror

I found, judging from day one, that e-connect was suitably forward looking and pitched very appropriately.  It didn’t take the line of “you must get into web 2.0 or be left behind.”  In many ways it took for granted that businesses were already in that space, or at least wrestling with the questions provoked by the 4 new ps listed above.  Instead the conference looked intelligently ahead – based not just in terms of technologies, but more importantly in terms of customer needs, expectations and digital usage.

While not at the bleeding edge of travel innovation in the way that the PhoCusWright conference is, it nevertheless featured the thinking of those innovators and translated it into relevant terms for the mainstream Canada tourism industry, without (in my opinion) being either too basic or too backward looking. And that is critical to getting any form of innovation embedded into the wider market place.

Good job Jaime and TIAC – I think Canada is leading the way in e-tourism in so many ways.

And to give the final quote to Sean Shannon of Expedia Canada, who talked about balancing the intelligent use of information with respect for customer sensibilities:

“It’s not always what technology can do, but what you decide to do with it”.

The Web Analytics Association released their Outlook 2009 Survey Report this week.

As a Board Director of the WAA,  I was one of the people who presented the research findings to members in a webcast.  And I was struck by just how much relevance the findings have to anyone marketing a business or organisation online, in particular to some of the travel and tourism marketing questions we have discussed here at Tracking Tourism.

So while the full research and podcast is available to WAA members only (one of many good reasons to join!) I thought I would share some of the report’s findings.

WAA members can sign-in to access the research and download podcast, or if you’re not a member you can find out more about the Web Analytics Association here.

My pick of the research findings

A total of 653 web analytics users (from online marketers and finance  to business intelligence analysts and business owners) from around the world participated in the WAA survey. Respondents were asked questions that included their use of web analytics today, their planned usage in 2009 and when they envisaged their 2009 investments to be made.

1. Measuring what matters to the business bottom line

The WAA found that making sure business decisions are driven by analytics will be the big motivator in 2009.  They explain “It was also a top focus in 2008, but there’s a significant increase in the number of organizations keeping this top of mind in the next year. Clearly, when budgets are tight, demonstrating ROI is going to be key.”

They also suggest that this significantly increased focus on supporting business decisions  is because organizations are more aware of the vital role web analytics plays in demonstrating the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Personally, I think there is also the factor that individuals, teams and entire business units are sharply aware of the need to demonstrate how they contribute to the business bottom line – and are not by implication in any way expendable.

2. Investments in people above technology

A symbol, perhaps, of the maturing online marketing environment – 2009 is the year when people say they will be investing more in people and their training than they will in the purchase of new tools and technology.  The report states that “Training will get the biggest share of budget for over 43% of organizations.”

Hooray!  I have never seen the point in investing in analytics technology, then expecting untrained, inexperienced staff to deliver earth shattering insight from it.  It doesn’t work that way.

Even for businesses that are forced into reducing their staff headcount, it is critical that those who remain are equipped with the skills they need to contribute positively to the bottom line.

3. Online marketing and analytics spend is not in total freefall

At least that’s what the online marketing professionals say.  The research seems to back it up – according to an Epsilon CMO survey, 63% of senior marketing executives intend to increase interactive and online marketing in 2009, 23% expect it to stay the same. Only 14% say it will decrease.

The WAA report a similarly optimistic picture: “Last year, nearly 69% of survey respondents said they would be increasing their investment in web analytics. This year, that number has gone down to 52.1%….Only 4% will be decreasing them in the next year.

4. Video, mobile and consumer generated content are where we’re focussing

As travel and tourism marketers know full well, video and user generated content is where its at – and mobile is finally looming large on the radar.  The WAA report that “Video is strong and will only get stronger, but the biggest growth will be in measuring KPIs for Mobile Media, which will more than double”

Think of us web analysts as canaries in the coal mine – we have to sniff out how to measure the stuff that marketers want to spend on.  So where there’s interest in measurement, there’s money to be spent close behind.  And it seems budget will be flowing to video and mobile.

This is just my pick of the WAA Outlook 2009 report findings that I think particularly relevant to travel and destination marketers.

The full research, podcast, slides and much much more is avalable to WAA members.  Visit www.webanalyticsassociation.org for more information.

Post by Vicky

It’s Christmas.  Time for peace and goodwill.  Hope and joy.

So lets put travel sector doom and gloom aside for a moment. There’s cheer to be found in reviewing our knowledge nugget collection! All those things that have been learned about digital tourism and online travel trends that we didn’t know this time last year.

With the help of all those smart analysts and researchers out there, I am determined to deliver you some  hope and joy in the form of information, insight and illumination.

Here are my four travel and tourism research picks from 2008 – and it is not all bad news.

1) Hitwise reports that the Economic downturn is benefiting budget Travel and Cruise companies.  They explain:

UK Internet traffic to travel websites fell by 4.6% between September 2007 and September 2008, but certain sectors are thriving despite, or in some cases because of, the squeeze on household budgets.

UK Internet visits to budget travel providers, such as EasyJet, Ryanair and Travelodge, increased by 5.3% between September 2007 and September 2008, while the websites of Cruise companies experienced an 8.2% increase in traffic over the same period.

In the same report, they make another interesting and useful observation.  Internet users aged 55+ have continued to flood online and are now the largest group of visitors to travel sector websites:

Internet users aged 55+ now account for 27.3% of UK Internet visitors to Travel websites, making them the largest group of visitors to the industry. The over 45s are the fastest growing demographic for Travel websites, and their tastes are different from younger Internet users. They are more likely to book through agencies than go directly to airline or hotel websites……the section of the online travel industry that most over-indexes with older Internet users is Cruises. Almost 60% of visitors to Cruise websites are aged 55+, with a further 16% coming from the 45-54 age group.

Doesn’t that bring you some hope and joy?  Your online activities need not, must not be regarded as a niche sideline.  Online travel content consumpion is now mainstream to market segments of all ages and all distribution preferences  – for research, direct booking and booking via agents.
2) Despite the disatisfaction consumers have expressed with some travel sites (just last year Forsee reported that the online users were more satisfied with tax than airline websites) it is not all bad news.

JupiterResearch has found that the majority of online travelers believe researching travel online is easier now than ever before, with user-generated content now more influential on the choice of accommodation than brand among online accommodation researchers.

In their US Online Travel Consumer Survey, 2008 (reported in more depth in this Tracking Tourism post) Jupiter found that:

“the 42 percent of online travelers using user-generated content consider the opinions of other travelers to be highly trusted and influential in both accommodation and destination choices”.

For those using user generated content,  reviews/ratings from other travellers were a major influence in the decision making process (after price and location).  36% named user generated content as an influential factor in their decision, compared to 21% citing brand/reputation and 14% citing that old chestnut of family/friend recommendation.

While specific sites, social networks and communities may rise and wane in popularity, the role of reviews and ratings and “real user” validation seems here to stay for the tourism and travel sector.

3) Comscore reported that “mobile search is gaining in both popularity and frequency of use in the U.S. and Western Europe” with the implication that a much heralded shift in behaviour is finally underway, with associated opportunities for those able to capitalise on it.

comScore M:Metrics reported that “in June 2008, 20.8  million U.S. mobile subscribers and 4.5 million European mobile phone subscribers  accessed search during the month, an increase of 68 and 38 percent from June 2007, respectively.  The U.K. had the highest penetration of mobile subscribers using search at 9.5 percent, followed closely by the U.S. at 9.2 percent.”

Their analyst, Alistair Hill clarified the relevance of theis, explaining:

“It is interesting to note that as we see the number of mobile search users increase, the frequency of activity is also growing….. The number of people accessing mobile search at least once a week grew 50 percent in Europe, with France and Spain leading at a rate of 69 and 63 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, the number of U.S. users accessing mobile search has more than doubled as a result of expanded 3G penetration and smartphone adoption, as well as the proliferation of flat-rate data plans.”

As we reported in Tracking Tourism, consumer behaviour is changing and tourism businesses can no longer assume that no one visits their site by phone (or Wii or TV for that matter).  With shifting behaviour comes opportunity for those ready to adapt.

4) PhoCusWright did some much needed myth debunking in The Consumer Travel Trends Tenth Edition. Not only did they show that the number of online travel buyers was not declining, they also showed that all is not lost for online travel agencies.

The assumption that it is only supplier sites that benefits from online travel shoppers, or that people preferring agents are flooding offline, is challenged by their research, which shows that online travel agencies are making a comeback in terms of popularity.

Read more of their myth busting here.

So, its not all doom and gloom.  There is hope.  There is opportunity.

On that note, seasons greetings and a happy new year from Stephen and Vicky at Tracking Tourism.

Post by Vicky

Just over a year ago, in sunny Orlando, we were optimistically looking forward to a Travel 2.0 future where the playing field was level for online innovators.

At the PhoCusWright Conference the travel industry met to discuss the long tail in travel, and envisaged an environment  where (in PhoCusWrights’ words):

“Little guys compete on the merits of the products and services, not the size of their marketing budgets. Big guys are all of a sudden at increased risk if they ignore too many little things.“

Thanks to the long tail in travel it seemed there was a chance for an almost infinite number of destinations and niche providers to find their perfect match online amongst the tiny minority of consumers searching for the very thing they offered.

And thanks to web 2.0 technology, revenues would be shifted along the tail, redistributed from a few big players in the head and disseminated more widely to the many, many players in the tail.  The “new market” shown in the graph.

Well, it turns out we may have been deluded – at least about that whole revenue and profit part.  Research from digital music sales, online retailers – and dare I suggest even travel industry analysts themselves – started to suggest that the long tail does not deliver on its market level revenue redistribute promise.

Google delivered what may be the knock-out blow. As Google CEO Eric Schmidt explained (interview in full here)

“It’s a 90/10 model. We love the long tail, but we make most of our money in the head”.

So Pareto’s Law (the 80/20 distribution of pretty much anything) lives on?  Certainly, an unequal distribution suggests the significant bulk of revenues continue to come from the minority of products/customers – 90% from 10% in Google’s case.  In case he wasn’t clear enough, Eric Schmidt drives it home:

“I would like to tell you that the Internet has made such a level playing field that the Long Tail is absolutely the place to be, that there’s so much differentiation, so much diversity, so many new voices. I’d love to tell you that that’s in fact how it really works. Unfortunately, it’s not.”

An exaggerated death, or the emperors new clothes?

So is the whole concept of The Long Tail dead?

The Register takes a typically sardonic view, declaring: Anderson downgrades Long Tail to Chocolate Teapot status They add that Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, has “downgraded it from “the future of business” to something that’s, er, not very helpful for your business at all.”  In Chopping the Long Tail down to size, another post on The Register, data from an extensive study of digital music sales is discussed – with a quote from economist Will Page that:

“Is the ‘future of business’ really selling more of less….. Absolutely not. If you had Top of the Pops now, you’d feature the Top 14, not Top 40.

Personally, I think even without the melodramatic approach taken by The Register, the evidence has been coming in from the travel and tourism sector that a handful of big players – even if they are Web 2.0 players – dominate when the wider market picture is viewed.

In their great Travel 2.0 webinar earlier this year, Hitwise and Jupiter Research demonstrated that while visits to Travel User Generated Content sites was growing (though still a tiny proportion of overall travel visits online)  – this growth was not evenly distributed along a neat long tail.  Rather than a lot of little players accounting for the bulk of  travel user generated content, instead it is just 2 players that account for almost 85% of  travel UGC market share  (Tripadvisor and IgoUgo as shown in Hitwise’s data below) and 5 players accounting for 99% of marketshare.

Not a long tail scenario.  Instead, TripAdvisor’s dominance could be explained in terms of critical mass, economies of scale, consolidation and its position at the “head” not in the “tail”.

Slide from Hitwise webinar on Travel 2.0

So, the long tail is not dead, just unprofitable?

Chris Anderson himself, writing recently in Wired, tries to square the research coming in with his predictions of more widely distributed markets.  But he has to concede that the data just doesn’t stack up for redistributed revenue:

“I’ll end by conceding a point: It’s hard to make money in the Tail. As Schmidt notes, it’s also hard to make money if you don’t have a Tail (to satisfy minority taste, which improves the consumer experience), but the revenues are disproportionately in the Head.”

So the value of all the little things combined, does not outweigh the value of the tiny minority of big things after all….

Does that mean niche products and marketing activities are over?  Or the little guys competing on merits, not marketing budgets are doomed?  Does it mean that we should forget about the low traffic, highly specific terms used in online search?

No, I don’t think so at all.  There is value in niche activity, tactical search and online marketing -  and the smaller business has to compete somewhere.  I just don’t think we’re going to see that level playing field, or the industry’s revenues shifting from the big players to the small players any time soon.

Stephen adds: Assuming that the Long tail only accounts for 10% of Google’s income, that means that it accounted for a paltry HALF A BILLION DOLLARS of revenue …in the third quarter last year! The Long Tail lives on but with companies like Amazon and Google holding virtually limitless inventory (and having the economies of scale to reduce costs still further), they still hold the dominant market position and this includes that part of the market that can be described as long tail.

Post by Vicky

——-

Finally, an apology to subscribers whose email/RSS feed has misbehaved this week.  Tracking Tourism was upgraded to the new version of Wordpress at the weekend and this resulted in a test message being issued to subscribers, via Feedburner (the tool we use to manage email and RSS feeds).  We apologise for any inconvenience and believe the issue is now fixed.  If you continue to encounter any problems with your email/RSS feed, please do let us know the details so we can investigate further.  Thanks,  Vicky!

But what does this mean?

Have a bunch of under-employed bloggers just got a little over-excited and made up a term that has no relevance to the rest of us but makes them look clever?  Or does it actually signify something that will have an impact on the way we do business?

Well, I think it’s a little of both – certainly at this stage.  The ambitions stated for Web 3.0 projects will have an impact on day to day life once realised but I think we’re not close to mass deployment yet so there is no need to start panicking.  However, I thought I would dedicate this week’s post to looking at some of the basic questions surrounding this potential change, starting with the two most fundamental ones, “What is 3.0″ and “So what?”

What is 3.0?

As is often the case, it’s possible to start with a Wikipedia definition of 3.0 which states:

“Web 3.0 is one of the terms used to describe the evolutionary stage of the Web that follows Web 2.0. Given that technical and social possibilities identified in this latter term are yet to be fully realised the nature of defining Web 3.0 is highly speculative. In general it refers to aspects of the internet which, though potentially possible, are not technically or practically feasible at this time.”

Which isn’t really that helpful.

However, the rest of the article goes into some more detail and, overall, the impression is that the ambition of Web 3.0 is to create an internet that is simply with fewer boundaries than we (often unconsciously) experience at the moment.  And while these ideas are mainly being considered at a technical level that baffles the rest of us, there are indicators of what this might eventually mean for how we interact.

The semantic web

For example, commenting on a recent TrackingTourism post, Phil Caines of Tourism Tide said

“As far as where we can look for the next ‘wow’ change, I can only guess, but if you asked Joe Buhler, he would undoubtedly say “The semantic web of course!’, and I think he is right.”

The Semantic Web is a key part of 3.0 ambitions.  Put simply, it is a development that would enable web sites to be able to understand the relationship between things.

Let me unpack that last paragraph a little.  At the moment, web sites can be seen a bit like an encyclopaedia.  For example, there might have entries on separate sites with the following information:

• Boston is in Massachusetts
• MIT is in Cambridge, over the river from Boston
• MIT undertakes work in Biotechnology

As a human, you understand that there is something linking these statements but a computer doesn’t.  So the aim of the semantic web is to enable computers ‘intuitively’ to understand that these three statements are linked. Simple, eh?

So what?

Ignoring the technical practicalities of this, you’re probably asking the question, ’so what?’ by now.  To my mind, this kind of advance has the potential to make the internet ‘blend together’ in a far more efficient way than it does at present.

So, it could be used, for example,  to develop sites that are able to offer best travel packages based on the question, “I live in Boston but I want to watch Manchester United at home some time in October, staying in a budget hotel with easy access to public transport.  What are my best options and when is the best time for me to go?”   This is not an impossible question to answer at the moment but you will probably need to go to 3+ sites to even start to work out an answer.

On the other hand, the semantic web should make that question a lot easier to answer.  All the separate elements of the question (Manchester United playing times, flight times, lodging info etc) would be understood seamlessly and then used to deliver a swift, comprehensive answer.

Another example of how the Semantic Web could be used in marketing is contained in the following article: What the Semantic Web — or Web 3.0 — Can Do for Marketers.

Mobiles and ubiquitous connectivity

As I mentioned earlier, Web 3.0 also seems to imply an internet that is simply more ubiquitous and less bound than at present.  This means, for example,

• The continued march of the internet onto mobiles as well as the simultaneous blurring of the boundaries between those mobiles and computers;
• The rise of ubiquitous computing where connectivity is as common as the air you breathe (see this recent MIT article on the possibility of receiving wireless as you drive for example).

But what does this all mean to travel and tourism?

That’s a difficult question to answer (but one that will seem frustratingly easy in hindsight).  In some ways, the answer could be something as simple as , ‘what we’re doing now – but a lot better’ but that ignores the possibility of developments as revolutionary as Tripadvisor and Facebook have been in the last five years.

So, dipping our toe in the quagmire of prediction, our guess is that the web as an experience will become more of a hive than a collection of isolated websites.  What I mean by this is that one site will have the the potential to blur with another and so the web will be more of a collective than previously. If you cast your mind back to an interview we conducted with travel futurologist Ian Yeoman, one of the main points made was that:

“The traveller will want more in less time or with less effort – this has implications for everything from the format of events through to booking processes and the nature of breaks.”

And, in this context, consumer demand will dictate that they want more efficient access to information than they currently get. In other words, if there are still pain-points involved in reaching your data, then customers will be less inclined to pursue your offering to the point of booking when there are easier alternatives.

Another implication is that sites will need to ‘tagged’ effectively in terms that other sites and, more importantly, customers understand. Perhaps the implication is that we are moving from ’search engine optimisation’ to simple ’search optimisation.’

But the future is still hazy so I throw the floor open to the hive mind of our readers and conclude by asking, “What do YOU think 3.0 will mean and what might it look like for travel?”

Filed by Stephen (11/12/08)