First let’s get the confession over with

Sorry readers, we’ve been bad, bad bloggers.  Santa is very disappointed in us.

If there is one rule to all this it is “post regularly”. We’ve often advised people asking us about blogging to find a post frequency that works for you and stick with it through thick and thin. And we followed our own advice for over 2 years and 140K words without so much as a waiver.

But things got complicated.

Online communication channels multiplied, devices multiplied, demands on our time multiplied as our business expanded.  Newsletters became blogs became Facebook became syndicated through the T List became YouTube became Twitter – hence the posting break since July.

Some catching of breath and evaluation of Tracking Tourism was required.  An updated online and social media strategy was required too.  And that is a whole other post…..

But a recent visit to EyeForTravel’s Travel Technology Summit at World Travel Market, London has helped rekindle my mojo.

More specifically, it was a privilege and a pleasure to join with others in the travel industry in tackling:

•  online booking process optimization

•  the mobile web

….and at last the combination of both!

Hooray, mobile and transactions in the same breath…

Yes indeed what excited me most was hearing major organisations like Lufthansa reporting that they are starting to see customers transacting in a pretty normal way on their mobile phones. Normal in the sense that it is not just for “last minute” flights, or business travel, but for price sensitive dates 6 months in advance.

I know I’ve said it before – ignore mobile at your peril. But there has been great excitement before about mobile that has supposedly failed to deliver on its promise. But I strongly believe we’re at a tipping point – certainly for travel and tourism. According to Nielsen, in the UK market the number of people browsing the web on mobile increased 32 per cent between Q2 and Q3 to 10.4 million, with over four million people downloading apps to their handset.

Crikey, even a phone Neanderthal like me has a shiny new wi-fi hopping, app downloading piece of super kit (sorry iPhone lovers, like the bulk of UK smartphone buyers in Q3, I stuck with Blackberry).

UK smartphone ownership jumped 10% between Q2 and Q3 of 2009 and 1 in 7 Britons now own a smartphone. Expect that growth to soar in the coming months, along with a corresponding growth in serious mobile web usage.

Interestingly, Eye For Travel Research report that while mobile browsing is experiencing rapid growth, travel services (apps) access is not growing at the same rate – which means prioritizing mobile site development and simplified “on the move” mobile site processes.

And I have to say, once you have a lovely wi-fi enabled smartphone in your hands it makes complete sense as a consumer that your phone is just another browser into the web. The screen is a bit smaller, your expectations initially somewhat lower perhaps, but ultimately it is just a dinkier version of my already dinky netbook – and it is location aware. It has rapidly become my expectation that I can engage with any business I like this way.

The Lufthansa example

Speaking at Eye For Travel, Stefanie Heucke, Mobile Services Manager at Lufthansa explained that it was this kind of customer demand that drove their investments in their mobile portal and mobile boarding pass technologies. As evolving technology was providing customers with the devices, so evolving customers demands and expectations grew that airlines would let them better use that technology to more easily meet their needs.

The mobile boarding passes that Lufthansa have introduced have been a huge hit and delivered costs savings – and they have had a viral marketing impact. People see other people using mobile boarding passes and they want to be able to access the technology themselves. They’re currently issuing 120,000 mobile boarding passes per month.

To put the importance in context, in this year alone Lufthansa have moved from an 80/20 web/mobile split of boarding pass traffic to a 60/40 web/mobile spilt– not far from the predicted 50/50 PC/mobile that we reported is predicted to occur by 2012 a while back!

Their mobile portal only contains content you may need to access whilst on the go, including a quick check-in process (the most used feature) and a 6 step mobile booking process that is leaner than on the main site. There are also demo processes you can use on your phone (highly used) so you can see if your phone can handle mobile boarding passes etc and you can lose your fear of using your phone to book and check in.

The results they are seeing is that people are booking travel and it is not just for tomorrow, they’re booking far in advance, but choosing to do so while they’re on the go. It was an unexpected finding for Lufthansa – and they suspect that because the travel industry has just assumed people don’t advance book on their phones, they haven’t made it possible to do so.

“apps were hip but it is mobile sites where the value lies”  Lufthansa

Once Lufthansa’s new portal made it easy to book fullstop, the result was significantly more ticket sales across the board. They doubled ticket sales in a one week by offering price selection for the first time – and discovered it isn’t just business travelers and frequent fliers booking on their mobile.

So many thanks Stefanie for demonstrating how demonstrable savings and revenue earnings are starting to come though the mobile channel.  For more of Lufthansa’s step by step mobile  recommendations, see Eye For Travel’s mobile report, which remains free (with registration) until Christmas 09.

Conversions, ROI, attributions, analytics to drive and save revenue – more music to my ears

The other Tracking Tourism mojo rekindling aspect of the event was the great big unabashed focus on ROI and attributing marketing results.

When I was originally invited to speak at the Travel Technology Summit at World Travel Market, I was really pleased to discover that not only did they have virtually an entire day dedicated to analytics and measurement but I was going to have the opportunity to get specific (along with colleagues from Expedia and Hertz) about the nitty gritty of using analytics to improve conversion in the booking process.  This is so critical because it is where analytics can have the most dramatic impact on the bottom line – by identifying where the opportunities to make more revenue or stop haemorrhaging sales lie.

My follow up post, next week, will dive into this.

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?