Tracking Tourism: The Tourism Research Blog Archive for the ‘Marketing strategy’ 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)

What business are you in?

Knowing what business you are in gives you clarity of purpose.  This, in turn, gives you focus and an enhanced ability to understand and meet customer expectations.  But surely we all know what business we’re in, right?

Well, think about Domino’s Pizza for a moment.  Domino’s are not in the catering business, they’re in delivery.  Fast, fresh, reliable delivery.  Customer’s don’t call them for a slice of authentic Italy - they want big, hot pizza and they want it now.

Likewise, people don’t buy a drill because they want a drill - they want a hole.  More important still, they want a hole to make a shelf to put their son’s first football trophy on.

In the same way, people don’t visit a destination because they want a tourism experience - they want any number of things, from privacy, to exhilaration, to a convenient place to break a journey - to complete brain-switch off in the sunshine.

No, what business are you REALLY in?

A simple answer to that might be “the one you’re customers think you’re in.” What is the fix you deliver to their problem?

That might initially sound a little too simple and prescriptive - after all, it seems to suggest that you can only ever be defined by what your customers think you do now and that any strategies or messaging to alter this are doomed to failure.

So it’s probably more constructive to start to answer that question by thinking in terms of: “It’s not about me, it’s about you.”

Those of you that have an awareness of strategic marketing might recognise this in terms of ‘features and benefits’.

In other words, it’s not about whether you have, for example, 30 museums and 100 five star hotels, rather, in this example, it’s about cultural enrichment and pampering. It’s not about a list of products and services, it’s about what these mean to your visitor.

Let me explain what prompted these musings….

The first recent occasion was at a conference in Glasgow launching the Scottish customer feedback initiative.  As well as discussing feedback, there were also destination presentation highlighting approaches that could be take in marketing an area .  I was comparing my notes taken during presentations by  Santiago de Compostela and Prince Edward Island and realised that very different approaches were being taken in how they were portrayed.

Santiago de Compostela seemed to concentrate on its features to define itself of the destination whereas PEI explained how they had done research among their visitors and had then defined itself based on the benefits it had found within this research.

Undoubtedly both approaches work - visitor numbers had risen in both location.  But I had a niggling sense that Santiago de Compostela could have gone a step further as they seemed to lack a distinctive narrative or personality (although Santiago de Compostela  would undoubtedly argue that it does indeed have a personality -  that it’s a culturally vibrant place to visit).  However, While they could come across as being a place with ‘lots of things to do’, they could be just be one culturally rich European location among many.

On the other hand, PEI’s research suggested that it’s visitors thought of it as ‘a gentle island’ and to me this seems a more meaningful and human differentiator.

Or, to put it another way, one was about the products and the other was about the customer.

But in this example, I’m still not sure whether one was was superior to another. From a personal perspective Santiago de Compostela sounds more interesting (I prefer cultural tourism to relaxation) but I’m not sure that I would choose it above many other culturally rich places.

Destinations everywhere - but how many really stand out?

While there is ambiguity in the examples above there was less experienced walking round the exhibition halls at  ITB in Berlin.  The choice of destinations  could be not so much mind-blowing as mind-numbing.

The trouble was that I often struggled to think of a reason why Destination X was better than Destination Y. Golden Beaches? Check. Local Cuisine? Check. Authentic experiences? Check. Compelling reason to visit above competitor destination? Not sure…

“We are in the happiness business”

So, to return to the conference in Glasgow where the last session was delivered by Gregg Patterson who runs the The Beach Club in Santa Monica.

For me, the key sentence Gregg used in his session was “we are in the happiness business.” Others might have said, “we operate a high-value members-only hospitality facility” or “The X Group run mid-market hotels aimed at the leisure market.” And they would be right - while also missing the point of why they exist, as they would be defining themselves from a product, not a customer perspective.

They would be emphasising their features, not their benefits.

Yet it is  this recognition of the benefits from a customer perspective that allows a “different” approach  taken.  One that more intelligently communicates with customers, connects with them emotionally and identifies how best to deliver to them at a product level.

It enables you to develop strategically and tactically. In the case of PEI, the local DMO has been liaising with the local authorities to develop facilities that help deliver on the promise of being ‘a gentle island.’

At a tactical level, it has shown The Beach Club how important the ‘dignity’ of customers is. This might sound like a rather odd or old fashioned term but it means recognising the visitor as a person, not as another number.

So how do you start to understand what business you are in?

For me, the starting point would be some form of qualitative research to determine what the area/attraction actually means to your customers. What is their emotional connection? What is the narrative behind their visit?

And there are many ways to pick up this information.  For example, there is user generated content online.  What are people saying about you and how are they saying it?  What images are they posting, how are they branding you?

Also, what terms are people using to find you online? What kind of sites things are they looking at as well as your own?

And there is always the more traditional research method of  destination audits, street research and focus groups which can also really help to drill down and identify what it is that really makes your destination memorable (or infamous!).

Ultimately, whichever research methods you choose - the challenge is to see yourself as others do.  And to react to those perceptions, even if they differ from your own.

Posted by Stephen (26/03/09)

“Tough times call for creative ideas”

There was an audible gasp at Canada eConnect a few weeks back, when Tourisme Montréal, Montréal’s destination marketing organisation, announced that they were spending their 2009 budget entirely online.

Rather than indulgent risk taking, Tourisme Montréal’s decision was the result of a reduced budget forcing tough choices - where would they get best results from a more modest spend?   It also reflects a strategic decision to target traveller motives, tap into emotions and intrigues - and do that in a very granular way that is both relevant and touches at travellers in multiple online places and in multiple formats.

“It is about interacting with the consumer….If we are choosing to be only on the web, we have to be everywhere”
Tourisme Montréal

Much of that spend will be going into online direct response, such as paid search marketing.  However 20% will be allocated to awareness/social media meaning a very different measurement and marketing environment.  Social media may involve litte in terms of media buy cost, but it certainly requires significant time to service and a new way of thinking about return on that investment.

As Carmen Ciotola, Vice President, Communication and Marketing of  Tourisme Montréal explained to the CEC audience:

“What is freaking us out the most is that the 20% will be 80% of the work”

She’s right of course, but Tourisme Montréal seem well placed to lead the way to the 100% online budget leap.  They appear to have a culture of online analytics running back to 1994 that has evolved in line with the sophistication of their efforts.

A strong focus on analytics, complete with an understanding of what is driving conversions and buzz means they are not making risky marketing decisions in the dark.  It is how they have the data and evidence base to know that their limited resources will deliver maximum results spent only online.

They may be breaking ground, but I suspect we will soon be hearing other destinations describing TV & print as “nice to do if we had the budget.”  It acknowledges the reality that travel research and purchase decisions are to a staggering degree made online.

Consumer research based on social values

Another of the reasons, at least as it seems to me, that we see a major destination from Canada tapping in so completely to social media and online marketing is that Canada has built a national strategy based on profiling and segmentation according to social values, not demographics.

One of the things that holds true online is that communities and networks of people online share common values and outlook characteristics, but may have little in common in terms of demographic factors such as age, location and income. People who share a postcode or zip code do not behave the same online.

“Brand Canada” has tried to build a solid online marketing strategy by tapping into the fact that social media allows us to tell stories and that at the heart of stories are shared experiences, personal emotions and excitement. By engaging with this, they are serving up tailored experiences that inspire action – ie conversions/a commitment to purchase – in the visitor.

Canada of course is hardly alone by trying to focus on visitor experiences and emotional factors.  Many of the DMOs and national tourism bodies I speak to are taking exactly the same approach and I have featured examples from Washington DC and several others.

But what the Canadian Tourism Commission has done is build a systematic research tool , now being rolled out across the DMOs and major tourism partners like Parks Canada (an example at the Tourism VC blog here) , that offers a new way to match visitors with experiences tailored to what they are seeking.

This Explorer Quotient tool is a method of identifying visitor needs, interests, expectations and desires based on their values about travel.  As Greg Klassen, vice-president of marketing with the Canadian Tourism Commission explains:

“The EQ model is unique to the industry in that it recognises and operates on social values, not demographics. Commonly held social values are in fact, much better indicators of consumer preferences - including travel consumption preferences - than demographics.” Read more in this DMO World interview with Greg Klassen.

The EQ model is based on a solid research foundation. Through adaptations of Environics Social Values model, the CTC can develop a user profile based on the reasons why people travel, including qualities of someone’s personality.

The CTC can then suggest Canadian experiences that are relevant to the traveller and consistent with the traveller’s EQ. The tool feeds back into segmentation activity and allows CTC to build a profile of travellers, and offer experiences, that are not just region based.

To create a profile travellers complete a 25 statement questionnaire dealing with travel habits and motivations. The tool includes an accuracy checker “does this sound like you?” Apparently 95% of EQ travellers say that the EQ groups partly or completely describe them.

Mine was certainly bang on!

Marketing activity then feeds into the visitor EQ type, presumably further building the visitor profle, and allowing for an ever more customised and granular marketing approach.

Tesco’s Clubcard meets travel?

So is it print on the bonfire and goodbye TV?

IF, and it’s a big if, you’re ready - then just possibly yes. Particularly if shrinking budgets force your hand.

But, I think a perquisite is a serious use of analytics and research to understand the visitor, their motivations and their online conversion behaviour.

Marketing must always be relevant - not to ourselves - but to the consumer. If your analytics data and your customer is telling you that online is the primary travel research and planning channel, then your customer is actually already giving you the answer to where should I spend?

The tourism and hospitality industry of Canada has been on impressive form this week and offer, I believe,  some lessons for the sector worldwide.

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”.

Bad news for the little guys after all?

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

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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!

Using Google Insight for tourism and travel research

I recently wrote a post on using Google Trends for tourism and travel insight and this post expands on some of those themes by talking about the Google Insight product.

Before I do so, it might be as well to remind ourselves of the difference between Google Trends and Google Insight.  As I noted in the previous post, “…Google Trends shows data relating to traffic to websites while Google Insight shows data related to search terms.”

So, in a nutshell, Google Insight offers a great way of understanding how people search for particular terms and, more importantly,  the contexts in which they do it.  For a tourism destination, for example, this means that it is possible to judge where your destination lies in comparison to competitor destinations and whether there are opportunities to broaden your market offering.  For a specific tourism or travel business, you can capitalise on the fact that brand names are increasing dominating searches in order to see where you stack up against competitor businesses.

It’s probably best to illustrate this with a concrete example and for this I’m going to look at some tourism businesses in Aviemore, a destination that offers year round outdoor activities close to where I live.  I’m going to concentrate on two businesses - the Aviemore Highland Resort and the Hilton Aviemore. I have selected these two simply because they are both large hotels, they both cater for a similar clientèle and they both undertake marketing expenditure.

Inputting the brand search terms ‘aviemore highland resort’ and ‘hilton aviemore’ brings up results that look like this (or click on the image below for a larger version).  I’ve applied filters to the results so that I receive data based on the relative popularity of the two search terms from people within the UK in the period Jan 07 through to October 08.

You can see from this graph that the two hotels pretty much shadowed each other up until about July this year when the Aviemore Highland Resort started to drift away downwards from the Aviemore Hilton.  Now, there have been periods of divergence before but this recent period strikes me as being longer lasting and deeper than previous splits so, if I were Aviemore Highland Resort, I would now have concrete proof that for some reason, I was no longer making as big an impact when compared to my close rivals. As such, I would either know why (eg marketing budgets might have been changed) or I would be starting to ask serious questions to find out why.

Move from assumptions to proof

But now let’s introduce another search term into the mix to get an idea of whether it’s more a case that the Hilton is performing exceptionally rather than the Highland Resort performing poorly.

In this example, I’ve introduced the term ‘Aviemore Hotels’ as my benchmark term.  Whereas the previous terms are brand terms - and likely used for navigational search by people who are already aware the establishments exist,  ‘Aviemore Hotels’ is a more open search term that requires no knowledge of existing brands in the area.  Therefore it is more of a general benchmark indicator of the broader level of interest in hotels in the area. The result is shown in the graph below (click for a larger version or visit Google Insight here).

One thing that you should notice quickly is that the Hilton seems to trend more closely with the ‘Aviemore Hotels’ line than the Aviemore Highland resort does.  Indeed, the raw data enables us to determine that there is a stronger statistically provable correlation between ‘Aviemore Hilton’ and ‘Aviemore Hotels’ than between ‘Aviemore Highland Resort’ and ‘Aviemore Hotels’. In other words, the Hilton is performing in line with the market and the Highland resort less so.

Incidentally, even if we take the figures for Aviemore Highland Resort in isolation, using the raw data (available if you have a Google Account), we can see that the term ‘aviemore highland resort’ is now performing outside of control limits (defined as standard deviation x 3 - see more here about control limits) as shown in the graph below.

As virtually all web sites have cycles, we should expect to see some changes throughout the year but this suggests that the current change lies outside of what might be expected within these cycles:

So what does this mean?

For the Aviemore Highland Resort it means something may be wrong, beyond the level of a mere seasonal wobble.

My first actions would be to look at spend, bookings and occupancy data to see if there has been a corresponding drop in revenues.  (Afterall we are just talking about search activity here!)

I would look in depth at web traffic and conversions to identify which visitor segments and traffic sources I have lost search activity and potential business from.    I would also look closely at marketing activity and assess whether a drop in advertising spend has lead to this drop in search volume - and whether there is a cost effective way of rectifying that.  Afterall, it is common for people to respond to TV and other forms of offline activity by going online and searching on the brand name.  Is this what is occurring here - and does it even matter to the bottom line?  I’d want to know.

And if I were the Hilton Aviemore?  Well, I be heading off to Google Trends and comparing our overall website traffic for clues.  I’d be looking at my revenue and web analytics data to see if I was benefiting from this displaced search activity - and whether I was converting it into revenue.  And I would bullishly be looking at what I was doing right and be tempted to invest in doing more of the same.

So, Google Insight - used wisely - has the power to act as warning device for your business.  It’s free (and this article has only really touched on a small number of its features), so can you afford to ignore it?

Filed by Stephen (03/12/08)

At an event as large as WTM, I find that a degree of mental fatigue can sometimes set in even to the most open-minded of souls. Yeah, I know that Country A is different from Country B in many important and significant ways and that the inhabitants of both would be very upset if I got them confused.

But the time can come when a man tires of stands offering similar offerings and needs to go in search of something else. Perhaps a walk on the wild side.

So, with that in mind, I decided to venture (within the safe confines of WTM) into the ‘axis of evil’ - in other words, I decided that I would visit the stands of countries that draw a fair amount of opprobrium and see how just how they were marketing themselves from a…errr…negative brand position.

The end result? In some cases, ‘ethical’ concerns might matter but I suspect that this can successfully be got round by some nifty marketing that addresses the emotional fears that unethical actions are a proxy for.

What do I mean by it being a proxy? Well, for example, if I believe that a government ready to imprison and torture its citizens seemingly on a whim, then I fear that there might be a chance that I might be subject to the same treatment, equally on a whim. But, there are ways and means around these unconscious fears that can help present destinations in a more favourable light. And the stands here are WTM might well be interesting insights into how to deal with these perceptions.

Take Cuba for example.

Cuba is not officially a paid up member of the axis of evil but Human Rights Watch (hardly a US stooge) notes that it is still a repressive country but the international public perception of it (outside the US) is that it is, at worst, almost a slightly wayward social democrat country that it is important to visit before it is ruined by nasty commercialism. I suspect that Cuba is well aware of this and, as such, its stand here at WTM is big, brash and confident. Ironically for a communist country, it is is a well marketed and professional destination marketed with considerable commercial nouce.

And it is fun.

As such, Cuba would appear to have listened to research and market forces and responded to consumer demands in improving and diversifying its product.

On the other hand, the Iranian stand (representing a country that is officially a member of the ‘axis of evil’) lacks this confidence. Like many of the Middle Eastern countries, it seems to rely on old images and on a slightly worth line of products. Their product appeals to a bookish person like myself but I think it communicates at the level of the head, not the heart. By this, I mean I need to be reassured that Iran, for example , is a safe place to visit where I won’t be stopped for a cultural misunderstanding. This doesn’t seem to happen and so, despite the attractions, there is still some nagging doubt. Overall, there doesn’t seem to be a suggestion of fun and the emphasis seemed to be on the historic, not the living.

However, fun seemed to be on the minds of the fellow evil-ites in the Syrian stand. Although the cliches undoubtedly abounded here as well, they were living cliches with people enjoying themselves - people laughing, people eating and people chatting. All of which are reassuring images common to all humanity.

While not an official ‘axis of evil’ country, China is nevertheless working hard to improve its image as a destination to visit. They’re not at the Iran level but neither are they are the Cuba level. I think their game is a longer one that will slowly build their brand to the point that they are perceived as a super-charged Singapore - no better or worse but certainly not grounds to avoid.

Finally, I went in search of the really evil Hermit Kingdom of North Korea. However, if they are here, their reputation for secrecy is intact as I couldn’t find them.

So, what can we learn from this slightly silly excuse of a post? Well, I think it is the lesson that destinations need to market to the heart as well as the head. As we noted a while ago, many of us carry conscious and unconscious prejudices and destinations need to address these in order to position themselves effectively. And although I have been using perhaps extreme examples, this lesson applies also to mainstream destinations - I don’t care if somewhere has a spectacular castle if it is an area where I’m likely to be mugged, for example.

Right, I’m off to find the Zimbabwean and Guantanamo Bay stands.

Update 1700: Well, after my mention of the Zimbabwe stand, I did go to and it struck me as traditional (safaris and all that) but…actually good. Despite the situation in the country, the stand suggested safety and fun. Not sure what that means for my theory.

External Links:

GoCuba (Canadian official site)

Iran Tourism

Syria Tourism (actually not a great site in contrast to the stand - you need to come and talk to us, guys)

China Tourism

Tourism in North Korea

Axis of Evil

I’m down in London this week for the World Travel Market and this is the first of a few posts with some thoughts and impression. Given an event of this size, there is always the danger that you are going to miss something and so this is by necessity a subjective account.

WTM Global Trends Report

OK, let’s start off with an overview of the WTM Global Trends Reports prepared in partnership with Euromonitor.

Despite the talk of markets that have growth potential, it is clear that in the next few years, there is going to be, at best, a slow down in the tourism and travel sector. Beyond that, however, there are new markets and new possibilities. So here are a few of the highlights for me from the report:

• Free and cross-subsidized pricing will become increasingly used (but regular Tracking Tourism readers knew that back in March!)

• Customers are downsizing in a variety of ways - but still travelling. In some cases, this downsizing happily coincides with a desire for more authenticity (home swaps, for example, so that you get to live like a local) and in other cases it’s simply a move to cheaper alternatives (good old price elasticity of demand coming into play).

• Destinations are having to cast their nets wider to catch customers. For example, the report cites the Bahamas and the British Virgin Islands marketing beyond the traditional US market. Although not made explicit in the report, this surely means greater competition among destinations for similar pools of customers, something I’ll touch on a little later.

• The downsizing/authenticity nexus can arguably be described as resulting in a travel 2.0 experience in which ‘user generated’ social network interaction online result in real visits made to real people in real neighbourhoods as a logical extension of that way of interacting. Obviously, before we get to breathless about this, most of you will appreciate that this is a variant on ‘visiting friends and relatives’ and it’s what people do when they have less cash. But, I can see that Web 2.0 technologies can make this a more easily facilitated process than might have occurred in previous years.

• There’s an increasingly complicated pictures of inter-regional travel and tourism. For example, a Scot working in the Oil industry in Saudi and part of the large expat community there should be considered not only as a Scot in terms of travel preferences but also as a potential traveller defined by where he currently works. So, to take our example further, his circumstances mean that a jaunt to Dubai might be more appealing than a jaunt to Ibiza or somewhere similar popular with British people.

Some elements of the report I disagree with or feel that they occupy a really niche market. For example, there is a section on philanthropic tourism whereby rich westerners have a feel-good break that ethically engages with the local community (a bit like Fairtrade travel). I don’t deny that such travel exists and that there is some customer demand for it (as opposed to it being part of the Corporate Social Responsibility PR agenda of the supplier) but wonder how large such a market will be over the next torrid couple of years and their lingering aftermath. I’m not too sure how charitable I might be feeling in 18 months time!

The press release for the WTM Global Trends Report can be accessed here.

Increased competition

I also attended a press conference yesterday for Croatian Tourism and, as with most countries, there is a real recognition of the benefits of tourism for the economy and the image of the country. But seeing Croatia’s efforts also made me realise the sheer intensity of competition in some regions and the need to define a really clear proposition for the customer.

Put simply Croatia is a great Mediterranean country with a great coast that wants to get more upmarket customers. Great ambitions but I suspect that it has France, Italy, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, the Balearics, Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and the rest of the 25 countries bordering the Med. as competition and all adopting similar strategies.

This doesn’t mean that Croatia shouldn’t try but rather that each of these areas needs to have a clear USP, brand or market position to get ahead. And while ‘quality tourism’ remains an attractive prospect, I often wonder whether ‘good value’ (i.e. cheaper) tourism isn’t still a viable aspiration. Your thoughts on this one gratefully received.

Stop me!

Finally, I suspect that many of Trackingtourism.com’s UK readers are attending WTM so do email me if you want to meet up on Tuesday 11th November.

Google’s business model is simple. It wants you to spend your money wisely on Google business products and, to help you achieve those ends, there are tools to make your spending decisions more informed.

Looked at from another angle, they offer a bunch of tools that you and I can use free of charge.

This post forms part of a series over the next few weeks that will show you how to make the most of tools like this - as well asking some more probing questions about how far they can really help you.

This post originated in a question I asked myself recently, “what exactly does the tool data in Google Trends and Google Insight show and what has this got to do with travel and tourism?”

At a top level, the answer is quite simple. Google Trends shows data relating to traffic to websites while Google Insight shows data related to search terms. However, what they have the potential to give you is considerable and so for this post, I’ll talk just about Google Trends, followed in the future by Google Insights and then finally a post dealing with some more ‘philosophical’ questions these tools have thrown up.

What is Google Trends showing and why is it useful?

OK, let’s start with Google Trends. If you click here, you’ll open up a new window with Google Trend data for visitscotland.com. At this point, you’ll see a graph showing daily unique visitors to the visitscotland.com site over a period of about 2 years. You’ll also see a bunch of data below it. Let’s look at those two elements in turn.

Before I get going though, I would like to stress that I’m using visitscotland.com here as an example only. The point of this is to look at data for your own site (assuming you have sufficient traffic) and to use the techniques contained in this post.

The graph shows a representation of the number of times visitscotland.com has been called up via Google. Note that this is not searches for visitscotland.com in a search box but rather the number of times someone has visited the site and Google has been in a position to capture that data (with some caveats).

Now, this graph can show a lot more but I want to mention the lower half of the screen before getting into that as it is where the data starts to get really interesting.

On the left, you get an indication of where the visitors to visitscotland.com and coming from. In other words, you can see by geography where the warmest prospects are.

In the middle, you can see which other sites were also visited alongside visitscotland.com. In our example, you can see sites ranked that you might expect to see - and depending on your perspective, this might be comforting or unsettling. For example, if you saw visitireland.com as the most visited other site, you would know that there was a real fight at this level to attract visitors who were torn between destinations.

And on the right hand side, you see the search terms that are most often associated with that site. Again, this might be revealing or comforting. For example, if you run a website for a DMO in a whisky distillery town and people find you only by the brandname of your whisky and not under something more generic like ‘whisky tourism scotland’, then this would be a sign that your site isn’t attracting as many visitors as it could.

But the fun really starts because you can start to compare sites.

Let’s demonstrate this by taking our example above and adding a few more sites - visitbritain.com and visitsweden.com. It should now look like this.

Let’s start with the graph. It shows that visitscotland.com attracts more visitors than visitbritain.com or visitsweden.com. It also shows that visitscotland has different peaks and troughs to the other sites at a global level (predominantly the effect of Hogmanay I would guess).

In the bottom half of the screen, you’ll see that you can segment this data by region and by website. You’ll notice that under the ‘ranked by’ tab, you’ll see how each geographic area performs for each of these sites. You’ll notice in our example how Scotland and Sweden are broadly similar in terms of interest in Germany. If, in the upper right of the screen, you use the drop-down box to change ‘all regions’ to ‘Germany’, you should see something like this.

So what’s this saying? It’s saying that, in this instance, people in Germany have show a greater propensity to visit the visitscotland.com site at a different time to the visitsweden site. That might be on account of a campaign by visitscotland in Germany…or it might just show a different ‘natural’ search pattern (and I’ll show you in a coming post how you can go about finding that out). If we assume on this occasion that German’s simply are more interested in visitscotland.com at the periods suggested, wouldn’t it make sense to have the website ready to react to this niche interest at the time? The data suggests that it might be wrong to assume that people think of destinations in a uniform way and that you need to be ready to respond to the customer when they actually come calling, not when you think they ought to be calling.

Conversely, if the spike was the result of an advertising campaign, this gives an indication of how long its effect lasted and how big it was in comparison to the spike caused by possible competitor marketing.

(I’ll hasten to add, I’m not passing judgment on visitscotland.com but just using them as an example - for all I know they might well be doing all this already!)

What I’ve described rather quickly in this post is one, powerful view that the travel and tourism industry can use to get a deeper understanding of how it sits in the online world. But, as is often the case, you need to look at other areas in order to build upper a more mature understanding and so this represents just one part of the picture. In the coming weeks, we’ll develop this theme further with more tips on these free tools.

See post 2 in this series - Warning bells you can’t afford to ignore: courtesy of Google Insights

Further reading:

Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Google Trends for Websites

Tough measures for tough times: thoughts from the Washington DC eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit

“We’ve got to do more with less.”  Jim Sterne’s eMetrics opener reflected the reality of the roller-coaster turmoil of the current economic environment.  The environment in which, amongst others things, next year’s marketing budgets are currently being planned.

Regardless of where an organisation sits on the budget spectrum, it is absolutely clear that every marketing Dollar, Pound, Euro is going to need to work significantly harder.  As marketers, analysts and business owners we are going to need to figure out how to use the tools and data we have more intelligently.

After all, we are the ones driving business value.  We have the information that allows the organisation to achieve more by spending less money.  (So make those other guys redundant first please).

To quote liberally from some of the great speakers from the last four days:

• “Analytics is about using web data to run your business … using online data to change how you do business offline.”  Jim Sterne

• “Marketing is a game of what little can we do to get the most response… Less is more”     Kim Johnston, Symantec Corporation

• “The problem is we’re married to the data…. we have to put it in their terms, we have to tie it to the money” Jim Sterne

Kim Johnston used a great metaphor.  Every marketing dollar is a bet. You have to decide where you’re placing that bet (greyhound or horse, Obama or McCain?)  What are the odds?  You don’t have to guess, you have data to guide you - web analytics data, previous campaign data etc etc.  Yes, you will want to test new things, but you’ll then have data to decide whether to do it again.  With that approach in mind, the mix of metrics you use drives the mix of your marketing, rather than simply looking backwards into history.

Um, the visitor still matters - more than ever

Sometimes at these industry events I want to shout out “what about the human beings actually using your site?!?”   In DC I didn’t need to.  Jim Sterne informed us:

“We need to be focussing on the buying process - we’re not!  We’re focussing on selling!”

In other words, the customer is saying so what?  It’s not about us and what we think is best, its about understanding the what the customers wants and needs and servicing those needs better.

Symantec Corporation has reversed their marketing analytics perspective to align not with the sales/marketing process, but with the buying process. They use a “give to get” approach to gather detailed preference and research/buying process information from customers and then apply that information to deliver content and product that meets those customer needs.

I presented a case study about how the user testing and online insight activity for one client allowed us to map in detail the visitors’ research to conversion process and their associated information and emotional needs.  It was completely different to how the organisation had assumed.  I urged attendees to “challenge and test your assumptions about who uses your site - and why.”

Speakers from Foresee, as well as several of the case study presenters, also raised the point that not only should we be driving optimisation for goal conversion results, we have to improve online customer experience.  And users will reward those improvements with … suprise, suprise… increased conversion.

And best graph of the show?

I loved this example that Jim Sterne showed (from graphjam)

Surely the world’s most accurate pie chart?