Your time is limited.  Business stakes couldn’t be higher.   Marketing channels keep multiplying. And there is so much data “to help you” that sometimes it seems easier to do nothing at all. 

But what if I told you that with some shrewd use of web measurement and site optimisation, you could achieve the following:

• Plug revenue leaks
• Stop a haemorrhage of online customers
• Delight your bookers
• Make more money
• Achieve analytics nirvana

I kid you not – using analytics to optimise your online booking process can deliver you all this!  (Well, maybe not the last one).

Deep focus on the booking process (or other major conversion points) on your site, combined with systematic testing is amongst the most powerful analytics you can do.  It is a place where you are almost certain to see return on investment from an analysts time invested here – provided you take action based on what you find.

So if this is really true why isn’t everyone doing it?  Well, many companies are – and they’re doing it very well.  Expedia, Hertz, Travelocity to name just a few.  And if your competitors are obsessing about this and you’re not, they’re at a huge advantage.    But many companies are not – and if you’re one of them all is not lost.  This post tackles some basic principles – and if you’re looking for a way of embedding web analytics and optimisation into your business, then I hope this is especially relevant for you.

And fear not – if you are a one man marketing, management, customer-service,  analytics,  social media,  web-guru machine that has to do everything yourself – fear not, this is still for you.  Perhaps even more so, because this is one place where if you carefully focus even a small amount of effort, you will see impact on the bottom line.

Let’s get over the barriers first

This will only work if you focus your efforts on the stuff that matters.  Conversion, revenue, customer satisfaction and specific online visitor behaviours.

So page views, visits and God-forbid (may I never hear this word ever again) HITS?  No!   Or to channel my inner Amy Winehouse – No! No! NO!!

Don’t fixate on these – they are just units of counting.   They are metrics, ingredients if you like – they are not the answer in itself. There’s not necessarily even a positive linear relationship with these basic metrics.  More page views may simply mean more people are lost and having to reluctantly look at more content before they can resolve their issue.

Using your time effectively and impacting the bottom line means measuring what matters – the things that make you money, save you money – or improve customer satisfaction and thereby achieve both.  In my presentation at the Eye For Travel Technology Conference at World Travel Market I put it in these terms:

It’s clear, I think, that counting page views, time on site or unique visitors alone – in isolation from real business goals – cannot possibly deliver you gains, savings or love.  But conversion/booking process optimisation can.  So time to introduce the conversion funnel…

How to look at your conversion process

The conversion funnel looks at the flow of visitors through the various steps of your booking process. 

At its simplest, as shown in the graph, you are using the basic shape of the funnel to identify potential problem areas, so you can dive in to the data and explore further.

For the data to be meaningful, you need to focus on narrow, linear processes like payment processes and form submissions – the good news is there probably only a small handful of these on your site.

You can do this manually in Excel, but with varing degrees of set-up all the major web analytics packages automatically present your conversion funnel information in a clear visual way. In Google Analytics, for example, you have to first specify your conversion goals and set up the associated steps in your funnel process.

But once you’ve done that set up, you have the raw ingredients you need to start booking process optimisation.

In my view, here is where you find the quickest wins in booking and conversion process analysis:

I work through this process, in conjunction with the conversion funnel data, in order to first find the complete disasters (like failing transactions due to technical errors).  I then aim to find out where for some reason or another people are simply not behaving like we would want them to.  And finally I am identifying specific pages or parts of pages that have to be improved and that must be the focus of any testing and optimising efforts.  Remember that web analytics can only tell what is going on – it can’t tell you why.  You need voice of the customer data for that.

So, note number two – “help!”    I would be happy to wager you a fiver that the people in your organisation that speak to customers on the phone, be they call centre staff or receptionists, probably have a better grasp of what is wrong with your website than your IT staff do.  They hear it every day.  Optimisation starts when the dots between end users of the site, customer facing staff and IT are joined up – and communication flows between them.

It is not always so simple, of course, and there comes a time where if you don’t have your own analytics resources, you probably need to buy them in.  But there is so much you can achieve to start with by yourself, using analytics data to inform testing and optimisation.

When to stop looking and start acting

Of course, analysis without action is simply idle indulgence.  Once your data has given you a theory you have to test it by making changes – and then see if the data shows an improvement.  The more systematic your testing, the more confident you can be in your results.  There are plenty of tools to help you – we use Google Website Optimzer with our clients.

Measurement and testing have to go hand in hand – otherwise you may find your “improvements” make things worse.  Assumptions alone aren’t enough.  Both Expedia and Hertz, my co-presenters at the Eye For Travel conference, made similar – really vital – points about booking process optimisation.  They both found that it isn’t always about making the process shorter, or in less pages – sometimes, quite counter-intuitively, more steps or longer forms work better for the customer.

Ultimately, using the data web and customer data available to watch, listen, learn then improve your site for the visitor is in my opinion one of the surest ways to improve the bottom line results from your web channel.

I will be presenting on this subject at Canada eConnect in January, so I’d love to hear your triumphs, quick wins or the barriers you face in booking process optimisation so I can tackle them head on at the event!

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 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?

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”.

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

“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?

As a researcher I shouldn’t deal in anecdote but, ignoring that cardinal rule, recent conversations suggest to me that tourism organizations and business are becoming more aware of the potential of people to access their internet sites by phone. However, while they know that this is a forthcoming issue, they remain unconvinced that this is something that they need to worry about just yet.

So, the purpose of this post is to give a primer into how you can tell if people are already accessing your site by mobile devises as well as some of the important issues about how this could develop and what the development of this method of customer’s accessing your site.

Before, I do so, I would like to thank the good folks at the Web Analytics Association for their recent seminar, “Measuring Web 2.0 Technologies Part 2” on which this post is largely based. That seminar is only available for WAA members to access but, if you are not yet a member and you have a serious interest in web analytics, do check the site out anyway.

Anyhow, I thought I would initially structure this post as a question and answer session before moving on to the issue more generally. I suspect that there are a lot of people that need to cover the basics before we look at some of the wider issues.

• Are people already visiting my site by mobile device?

The answer to that is, probably, yes.

• How can I tell?

The way to tell is the way that tell whether anyone has accessed your site: go and look at your web stats.

Specifically, you need to look through your web stats data to see if specific operating systems have been used to access your site.

Now, I am making the assumption here that you have something like Google Analytics or equivalent on your site (if you are the kind of business looking at raw log file data, then this article is probably too advanced or too basic for your needs!). If you are using Google Analytics, choose ‘Visitors/Operating Systems’ and you will get data on how people are accessing your site. The first three entries will probably be Windows, Mac and then Linux but if you go through the whole list, you might find some odd entries and some these will be people accessing your site on mobile devices.

I’ve ringed the entries on the image on the right (click on the image to enlarge) that are evidence (in this single example) of mobile device being used to access a single site.

• Wait a minute, why do you say ‘mobile device’ and not just ‘mobile phone’?

Well, look at the last entry on that list – it’s for a Playstation portable so it’s not just phones we are talking about here.

• How reliable is this information for showing my all the people who came to the site via mobile device?

At present, products like Google Analytics will not pick up visits from most common types of phones. It only really picks up people using ’smartphones.’

• What’s the difference between a smart phone and a normal mobile phone and why does this matter?

A smart phone is the kind of mobile with more advanced capabilities, like Blackberries or iPhones (see here for more details). I don’t have figures but they’re probably the minority of phones used just now but represent what we’ll all be using (in some modified form) soon enough. The reason it matters is that the evidence for website usage you will see will probably be for these sorts of phones.

For the moderately techie among you, this can be explained by the fact that smartphones are often javascript enabled whereas other phones are not and web analytics products like Google Analytics need javascript to be working on your system for their page tags to work.

• Can I track the same customer as they visit my site by phone and web?

Not really. Most solutions will see these as two separate visits and not realize that those two visits are made by the same person. You could get round this by getting people to log on each time they visited but, unless you have a compelling reason to do this, I think it might just be elevating the collection of stats over the user experience.

• OK, so I might have visitors coming to my site by mobile phone – so what?

Put simply, people will use your site differently through a mobile device than through a desk computer. This means that, in order to deliver what they want when they come to your site, you need to be aware of how they are acting in this different environment. For example, page can take longer to download, screens are smaller and some of the programs you take for granted on you computer might not be available on your phone.

So, if you want a site optimised for mobiles the first recommendations would be to look through your stats to see how mobile users are using your site. From this, most other decisions will flow in terms of content. The advice from industry leaders in the WAA seminar was simple enough: Once you see evidence of web usage by mobiles on your site, dig deeper and see what they are doing.

Are mobile users looking for specific content? Certain information may be particularly associated with phone usage – maps, directions, booking references for example – but look at your own web analytics data back up those assumptions. People may be using your site differently by phone. You can also factor in how long are they on the site (bearing in mind a long time does not always indicate a successful experience, but often a frustrating visit).

Some other suggestions I would have include:

• ditch any large graphic files;
• ditch the background music on the entry page (actually, just do this anyway);
• make it easy for the customer to get to where they want to go to – on a mobile, time is money and I don’t want to waste either;
• the mobile experience is more often about ‘just in time’ information rather than gathering a body of research – deliver accordingly;
• is what you are delivering commensurate with the mobile devices capabilities? For example, if you were delivering music samples via your site, you would need to know how big these could be.
• And developing that example: many mobiles do have MP3 players built in as well as cameras – can you take advantage of this somehow?

To round up, I can almost guarantee that the visitors to your website are using a broader range of devices than simply PCs and laptops. They may currently only be a small group – but they may represent a very valuable one. Its worth starting to look for them in your data so you can plan accordingly.

Further reading:Sunday Night Thinking on Mobile Analytics…

My post last week was a bit of a moan – probably something to do with winter returning to Scotland and the general state of the world.  So, I thought I would balance out some of the negativity with some posts on people that are really getting things right.

Firstly, I would like to point you to William Bakker, director of eBusiness at Tourism British Columbia. As an area marketing agency, I think Tourism BC has one of the most sophisticated and advanced operations I have seen and the following paragraphs encapsulate one of the reasons why:

“We have conducted focus groups, phone interviews, card sorts and/usability tests to find the best way to organize the content on each website. We start with research about how our target audience in a particular market approach their trip planning; their mental model. We adjust our taxonomy where needed. For example, in North America a farm accommodation is called a ‘guest ranch‘. In the UK it’s called a ‘cowboy ranch‘ and in Australia a farmstay.”

What can I say apart from, ‘Wow!’  Although this approach might seem sophisticated to some, I recognise it as actually very simple at heart.  It’s the approach that says you should remember that your customers are human and need to be researched as such to get the full picture.

I particularly liked William’s comment about language.  This is something I think might be overlooked by a number of businesses and organisations but is vital if you want people to recognise what it is you are offering.  In some instances, you might get a clue to this if you are able to analyse searches made from within a site that have ‘odd’ terms but I think that the larger issue of language and its use is probably best started with real live people in focus groups.

Its an approach we always take in our tourism research projects as well – we recognise the immense value of quantitative data (whether that’s web analytics or traditional surveys) but feel that the best value is derived when you go that one stage further to probe the human element and combine it with the quant. I think this usually leads to a far more sustainable outcome.

You can read more at William’s blog here.

Another post that caught my eye was from the Karin Schmollgruber’s interview with Angela Zechmann(Director of E-Marketing and Internet for Salzburg Area Tourism) at the blog Fastenyourseatbelts.com. The interview is about about the Salzburg Area Tourism’s efforts to attract a younger audience to the area the site www.onebigpark.at and, in some ways, continues the theme from British Columbia that you need to understand that different audiences need information in a language specific to them.

But the other thing that made me sit up was that I was reminded of a conversation related to me a while ago about Austrian tourism to the effect that their ongoing research revealed that the country was having difficulty attracting young people.  I am not privy to the data for Salzburg so will assume that their research also suggests that, for mainland Europeans, Salzburg means Mozart and pretty mountains and, for people from the UK and the US, the Sound of Music – none of which suggests to me a largely younger profile of visitor (Angela, Karin – let me know if I am way off the mark here!).

And it’s not only a case of identifying an issue but doing something tactical about it with a considered Web 2.0 to help fulfil a strategy to encourage younger people back.  In other words, it’s a piece of joined up thinking and a good example of the intelligent application of 2.0.

The original is in German here and one of those rather odd internet translations for you non-German speakers can be found here.

My eye was also caught by this post at Phil Caine’s Tourism Tide on the potential conflict between Yield Management and Price Transparency.

To some of you, this might sound at best an arcane venture into a world far beyond your business.  I would disagree as it concerns something fundamental to all business – trust and transparency.  So, for example, reviews on tripadvisor at the moment just have people discussing the condition of an establishment.  What if those reviewers ever started comparing prices with one another?

Well, there are already moves that way in the accommodation sector with the likes of Farecast. This added-value price comparison site is essentially doing for the accommodation sector what price comparison sites have been doing for the transportation sector for a while.

For many establishments thismight not seem an  issue but, from experience, I know that accommodation prices can fluctuate at certain parts of the market and for much the same reasons as at the top end of the industry – such as sellers want to make a buck without having to pay an intermediary.

To that end of the tourism sector that thinks this is some far-off fad, let me say that this will happen whether you like it or not.  It doesn’t matter that you think of intercontinental air jouney is a big ticket item and your accommodation offering as small ticket item – customers will apply the same standards of transparency of value to both. Looking beyond the lowest common denominator horizon will help you prepare for changes like this.

Finally, I think the Canada-e-Connect Tourism Strategy Conference 2009 might just be the place if you are looking for intelligent debate and insight into how best to harness the new opportunities.  I don’t think the program is finalised yet but, judging on the people behind it, it won’t be looking at ‘lowest common denominator’ stuff but instead offering something for those with more vision.