Tracking Tourism: The Tourism Research Blog Archive for the ‘Web measurement’ Category

How acting on web analytics can help improve your business performance

Doing business online means you are trying to satisfy people you can’t see.

Sometimes, you can’t even be sure they’re human. (Ah yes, there’s plenty of robots & spiders and crawlers out there busy clocking up calls to your web server).

But, there are some techniques you can use to really understand how people use your website - and project how that impacts your bottom line. Ask the right questions, track the right metrics and you can see what you’re doing right. And more importantly where your website is failing to deliver your business the value you demand.

Web analytics helps you to understand the online experience of visitors in order to improve it. Combine this with tactical user research and you can “see” your invisible customers for the first time.

It is my opinion that it is all very well to collect data, but there is zero business value in collection alone. Only when you do regular, systematic analysis of your data can you get even close to understanding what is going on.

But unless you have dedicated resources in your team that can be a pretty tall order when it comes to online data. There is so much information; it is often framed in technical terms and if you’re the DIY analytics guru on top of everything else you do it can be confusing and difficult.

So how do you get beyond top level glancing at analytics reports, towards useful analysis?

The good news is that there are some pretty accessible metrics you can use that will give you an element of understanding, without you needing to give up the day (and night) job to become a web analyst.

So this is an attempt to highlight three key things already in your web analytics data that can help you understand more about your online visitors.

Three web analytics metrics to get working for you

I am going to assume that not only do you have a tool in place to measure your website traffic, but that you have it correctly configured - including filtering/segmenting the traffic you generate yourself out of the equation! So lets skip on to doing something useful with your data.

1. Bounce rate

The bounce rate is one of the easiest metrics to locate, interpret and therefore action.

At its simplest, bounce rate is a big red flag for the proportion of people that arrive at your site or a specific page then turn straight back round and head off again.

For those of you that like precise definitions, the WAA define bounce rate as: Single page view visits divided by entry pages.

So, if bounce rate is being calculated for a specific page, then it is the number of times that page was a single page view visit, divided by the number of times that page was an entry. A site-wide bounce rate represents the percentage of total visits that were single page view visits.

Non-web analysts don’t need to worry too hard about this because most web analytics packages make the bounce rate very clear to you – both at a site wide level and at a more granular level.
Google Analytics, for example, give the bounce rate for specific pages, but also by traffic source, paid vs organic search, search keywords, geography or spoken language and much more.

So what is the bounce rate telling you? It is giving you a barometer of the “flee factor” - a comparative quality measure. You can measure the bounce rate of the whole site over time, or look comparatively at what pages, keywords, groups of people, marketing types etc cause more or less people to flee.

How can you use the bounce rate?

Well, it can help you stop wasting money on paid search on ineffective key phrases by identifying what proportion of the traffic you are paying for is hot footing straight back out of the site again.

You can identify bounce rate by geography/spoken languages, revealing how the site is performing relatively for different target markets.

In the example shown in the image the site wide bounce rate is lower for visitors from Spain and Germany than it is for visitors from the US.

Bounce rate can be used to identify which content stinks – or put more politely is failing to retain the visitors that arrive at it, highlighting priorities for optimisation. (Though keep in mind that some pages may deliver their purpose without the visitor needing to look at a second page - maps and driving directions are examples of this).

Read more about using the bounce rate as part of your web analytics activity at Occam’s Razor.

There is also a great post here at Micro Marketing where Charles Thrasher points out how “Search engines use bounce rate as one element in determining a keyword’s quality score and quality score impacts how much it will cost to position your ad on the search engine return page”.

2. Traffic source

Understanding where your traffic is coming from allows you to better understand how people use your website on several levels.

Your web analytics tool helps you do this by giving you information about the referrer url that generated the request for the page view.

So when the when the visitor arrives from outside the website, the referrer value is the way of determining where the visitor came from. The referrer URL may also be accompanied by additional important information - for example, a marketing campaign tag, the content that was viewed or the keyword that was searched.

Again, your web analytics tool makes this readily available for you, as long as you know where to look and why it matters.

And why does it matter? Well traffic source is giving you a number a clues about visitor intent and marketing performance.

Context and intent

Firstly, where people arrive from gives you a clue about the context and therefore the potential intent and stage of purchase cycle that your visitor is at.

Visitors arriving from the local DMO site, Tripadvisor or via meta search are all exhibiting different potential to convert than those arriving from Google Images or an industry news site featuring your press release.

People don’t all come to your site to buy – they may be researching, looking at pretty pictures, checking out the competition or looking for information for their school geography project.

Understanding the traffic source gives you a clue about this, highlights where to focus efforts and a more realistic view of your potential to convert.

Triggers, keywords and voice of the customer

Visitors referred to your site from search engines typically bring the search terms they used with them as a bonus gift. Your web analytics package kindly strips this out and presents you with the words & phrases that people use to successfully reach your site. This gives you lots of clues about intent and what the visitor to your site is trying to achieve.

You can look at the bounce rate, previously described, on these terms – as well as the conversion rate, which follows in order to judge how well you deliver to those stated visitor intents.

But you can also look at the vocabulary your potential customers use and try and spot the howling gaps. If you are not attracting people on the terms you believe you should then either people don’t use those terms when they search (this you can check) or your site is not well enough optimised for search engines to think you relevant for those terms (this you can fix).

Is your marketing working?

Thirdly, looking at traffic source can indicate the success of marketing campaign activities and highlight where there opportunities for you to further develop relationships or optimisation.

I’d ask these kind of questions:

Are you entirely dependent on one traffic source for the bulk of your visitors or do you have a healthy balance?

What is the bounce rate and/or conversion from different traffic sources? Are you paying for third party sites that don’t deliver business, or are you the happy recipient of lots of free traffic from sources that could be made to work even harder?

Is the SEO work you have paid for actually delivering business in the form of visitors from search engines that convert?

Drill down into your traffic source data and the answers to all these questions are there. Just how actionable is that?  And if you’re not sure what I mean by drill down – start experimenting by clicking on untried links within your web analytics tools and you’ll be amazed at what hidden depths there are in there. (Just pay attention to what you’re looking at, as you’ll likely be slicing and dicing parts of data, rather than viewing the full set).

Something to beware of with traffic source/referrer data. There are several situations where the referrer value is empty and so your web analytics package has nothing to report (people may arrive from email, bookmarks etc or their browser may block the passing of referrer information). These all get reported as “No Referrer” or “Direct Navigation” by your web analytics package - so don’t assume this description means only directly typed urls.

3. Goal conversion rate and cost

What proportion of people visiting your website do what you want them to?

Again many tools make this easy for you to discover – as long as you know what constitutes a success outcome for your site and have set up your analytics tool accordingly.

Spend a little time defining goals, placing a value on your conversions and tagging the e-commerce part of your site if you have one – then you will be able to measure conversion over time, according to different traffic sources, according to search keyword or paid search ads, according to entry pages and even different user segments.

Why does this matter? Well, it addresses the fundamentals of is the website delivering value to the business.

For example, are you paying more to acquire a visitor than they are actually worth – and if so, how long do you need to retain them in order to offset the cost of acquiring them? Could optimisation of the site or a campaign make a difference to the conversion rate that has a significant impact on revenues?

This is not just for the big spenders.

Imagine this perfectly realistic scenario. Your site is selling tickets for a visitor attraction. You run a small paid search campaign, bidding up to 50p per click for you preferred search terms.

At up to 50p a click, 100 clicks on your ppc ad will cost £50

Your bounce rate for one on these terms is 75%. So immediately, you are paying £50 for just 25 people to actually engage with your site (the other 75 turn straight back round again).

Just 2 of these remaining 25 people do what you want them to do - which in this case is buy a £20 attraction ticket.

So, out of an initial 100 people (for which you paid £50) – just 2 people did what you wanted.

Your ppc ad on this search term has a conversion rate of 2%. That’s pretty typical, not so bad, not so good. But is that enough to know?

No it isn’t!! – you want to be able to understand that you just paid £50 for 2 people that spent £40 in total, meaning you did not get a return on your initial investment.

A cost of £25 per conversion is way more tangible than 50p a click – it lets you make a practical decision. (Such as “quick stop that campaign while we figure out how to improve it, so it doesn’t lose us even more money”).

You may have multiple conversion goals on your site – even if you don’t sell online. (Newsletter sign up, contact forms, pdf downloads etc may all be conversion points you want to measure).

Whatever the size of your business or online activity, understand what your conversions are and how much they are potentially worth to you. They are a powerful yardstick for whether your website and marketing is delivering value and where you need to improve.

A little analysis can go a long way

So, ask the right questions, track the right metrics and you can see what you’re doing right and more importantly where your website is failing to deliver the value you demand.

A tip for useful analysis is to think trends, ratios, movements up and down – not absolute numbers. If you look at a few things properly, rather than try to measure everything, you’ll avoid your head exploding and get some actionable results as well. Fantastic!

Let me know if you agree with the value of these measures. If you have your own indispensable metrics that no travel and tourism website should be without – please do share them!

But burying your head in the sand is not an option either…

Yesterday I met with a tourism business that has been spending a considerable part of its precious marketing budget with a search engine optimisation consultant. Results had been slow, but their consultant had said it would take at least 6 months and they thought things might now be starting to pick up, just as predicted.

Still, they had asked if I would take a look at their web analytics data and see if I could shed some light on how their 6 month SEO investment was going and whether I had any tips based on that data for further improvements they could make.

What I found, to mutual distress, was yet another tourism business who had been ripped off - either through ignorance on the part of the consultant, or quite possibly through deliberate greed and laziness.

I do not profess to be an SEO expert (though happily I know a few). But I am a web analytics and customer insight professional. I can recognise how people arrive at a site and the behaviour they undertake when they get there. I can also recognise when marketing expenditure has had no discernible effect in relation to its conversion objectives.

So, with those provisos in mind, I thought I would share these tips with you.

1. The search charlatans are still out there

There is no “no work” option when it comes to SEO. It is your page content, architecture, headers, titles, linking, images, videos, key phrases, relevancy etc etc etc that a good SEO company will work on.

When people promise no effort, no site alteration results, be suspicious.

Here’s some alarm bell generators:

Keyword meta-tags - “armed only with some keywords in the meta tag, we will magically search optimise your site, propelling it to the top of the search engine rankings.”

If you’ve heard this one, you’re not alone, for this is the one I come across the most amongst small businesses and was the issue yesterday.

There is much debate about what (if any) value the keyword meta tag has. It has been declared completely dead by many in the SEO field, while others make perfectly valid demonstrations that it is still a factor for some search engines in some cases.The point is that is just one of hundreds of factors that may or may not influence rankings and never the only one.

If keyword tags are the only thing your SEO consultant is proposing, get more proposals or save your money and tinker yourself. This SEOmoz post gives you hints on choosing a good SEO vendor and this post by Eric Enge has tips on how to spot the bad ones.

Tricks and naughty stuff that will make search engines frown

Keywords stuffing, whited out text, junk links, cloaking, nonsense content that clearly isn’t written for people - this is the world of bad SEO and your business will most likely suffer as a result.

This article has Top 10 Google Dont’s - things you (or for that matter your paid supplier) should never do for search engine optimisation, while this post from the Tri-city commerce group Web Development blog is a good round up on Avoiding common SEO rip offs.

It may sound tedious, but I think the most useful thing you can do is try and educate yourself just a little on SEO (a resource list is at the end of the post). If people are trying to exploit your lack of awareness, a little bit of knowledge will help protect you from the bulk of the ignorant and ignoble!

2. You cannot ignore search engine optimisation

Just because “there be dragons”, that doesn’t mean hiding is an option that will help your long term business survival. As I mentioned in the last post, just 25% of traffic typically arrives at your website through the home page - the rest come deep in, via search. Google alone drives nearly 40% of all UK Internet traffic.

Jupiter Research and iProspect’s Blended search results study shows that appearing on page one of the search engine results is now more important than ever:

“The data indicates that more search engine users click the first page in 2008 (68%) as compared to than in 2006 (62%), 2004 (60%) and 2002 (48%). Inversely, fewer search engine users are willing to click results past the third page in 2008 (8%) as compared to 2006 (10%), 2004 (13%) and 2002 (19%).

So more than ever, it is vital for search marketers to ensure that their digital assets appear within the first three pages of search results, and especially on page one.”

I’m actually surprised their data finds that many people making it past page one. I saw usability expert Jakob Nielsen presenting a few week back and his eye tracking data was showing that only a tiny fraction of people even made it below the fold of the first page (people basically do not bother, or do know know how to scroll). He also found that if they don’t get the results they need on the first page above the fold (that could only be 3 organic results in a highly competitive paid earch environment) they simply refine their search and try again, rather than bother to scroll or go to page 2 or 3 of the results.

You are only going to appear on those search terms for which your page or site is the most relevant. How do you get onto that front page? Well you either pay your way there through paid search marketing, or you optimise your way there to pull in “free” traffic. Your budget will determine whether you outsource that optimisation process, or whether it is another of your critical DIY web tasks.

3. Universal and blended search is changing the playing field

Google has designed Universal Search to present search engine results in all forms of media including video, photos, PDF files, maps, and news items, all in one result page. “Blended search” is what they call Universal Search when it’s by anyone but Google.

I saw search guru Mike Grehan speaking at the London eMetrics Summit last week and he was talking about vertical creep - essentially how Google’s univeral search results are pushing the organic results down below the fold of page 1 (into nowheresville).

As you can see in the image below, on my laptop, if I search for Edinburgh hotels on Google, there is now only one old style organic result above the fold - the organic hotspot to be for tourism businesses now is beside the map that dominates the page (and the eyeballs)!

The impact is that there is even tighter competition for the organic search spots on page 1 and tools like videos, images and map placement have a roll in that.

Add if you’re not on the map you can add your business free over at the Google business center - its simple and worth the effort.

4. Relevance, relevance, relevance

Ultimately a search engine’s ongoing success is dependent on it delivering to its users the best, most relevant results for the terms they are searching on. The search engine is looking for pages that are relevant to the searcher.

If your pages are well tailored to your specific customers’ needs, using the vocabulary they use and answering the specific problems they are facing, better search results will be a side effect.

Optimising for your customers (ie real human beings) mustn’t be swept away in the quest for search rankings - because once you win a visitor from a search engine, you next need to ensure that person can do what they came for (and what your site exists for).

5. Paying for a click is not the same as paying for a customer

If you pay £1 per click for paid search advertising, and 99 out of 100 people immediately turn around and leave your site without doing anything else, you are paying £100 not £1 for a potential customer. If only 1 person in 1000 actually does want you want them to - say buy a ticket - then that customer is costing you £1000.

Whether you are working on paid search marketing or organic search engine optimisation, judge your success not in terms of how many people click into your site, but by how many people come and then do what you want them to.

It is a waste of money if you use paid search adverts to drive people to pages that are not relevant to their needs, because they will turn around and leave again. Likewise, with organic search, you can have highly attractive content that pulls many people into your site (a game or giveaway for example) - but if none of those people actually convert into doing what your site exists for, is that really a success?

Importance of measuring your website

There is no need to only take someone else’s word for what is working and what isn’t - the web analytics tools are there that will let you see end results in terms of uplifted sales (or other conversions) for yourself.

Some elements of search are shrouded in mystery (the mythical components of Google’s algorithm for one!) However, “is this working for my business?” does not need to be one of those mysteries. I will follow up with a specific post on how web analytics can help you understand how your web visitor’s search.

In the meantime, here are some resources to help:

• A detailed beginner’s guide to search engine optimisation from SEOmoz
• Wikipedia on the subject
• A Plea to Stop Treating SEO as an Afterthought
• Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine
• How Search Engines Work
• How Search Engines Rank Web Pages
• Why the Vast Majority of SEOs No Longer Target Individual Search Engines

I’ve presented two eMarketing workshops in as many days this week (do feel free to peruse the slides here) and a head spinning seven in the last four weeks.

In those sessions I have talked about Web 2.0, blogging, web measurement, Travel 2.0 (click for a definition), engaging in the conversation with your customer and that fact that there has been a monumental shift in how potential consumers seek, evaluate and trust information.

But from San Francisco to the Scottish Highlands, London to Swansea - as businesses absorb the implications of what this means, they generally express with some horror the exact same question. “Just how long does all this stuff take?”

And of course, it’s an absolutely killer question, right at the heart of how successfully Travel 2.0 techniques are adopted by businesses. “Just how do I blog, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tripadvisor etc etc and still run my business…. How do I commit enough time to make this work, but not so much time that every other aspect of my business stops?”

Like any other marketing or business function, you should invest time according to how important the results are likely to be to your business. The Travel 2.0 space is a perfect one in which to experiment and keep experimenting as you maximise results. Yes it is time consuming, but that isn’t reason enough to not get involved. The internet is now absolutely critical to travel - it is mainstream, not niche as these statistics show:

In terms of specific advice, I can only answer from my personal experience:

1) Narrow down the options:

Start with research (this post tells you how). You can’t be everywhere, nor do you need to be. Are there certain sites, communities, blogs or Flickr groups etc where your business, sector, interests or competitiors are already being actively discussed. Are there places where the key thinkers/players in your field are already meeting. Are there places you simply like to be?

You do not have to do this completely manually, as the above post shows, there are free technologies that will bring this information to you.

2) Understand your target market online:

Don’t assume that Travel 2.0 is only about young, trendy advance adopters of technology. Participation in social networking, for example, mirrors the age spread of the online population as a whole. Tripadvisor and to some extent Flickr are becoming a mainstream part of the travel selection process.

However, different sites, tools and communities do attract different profiles of people. Just as its worth paying attention to whether other people in your field are spending their time online, its also worth thinking carefully about where your potential customers are too. Hitwise, comScore and Alexa are provide some free information that help answer this.

3) Know why you’re there:

Are you there in order to create awareness of your business, demonstrate your expertise, deliver better customer service, spot opportunities and threats, learn from your peers, network, spy on the competition?

Understand the point of why you’re investing your time and just how important that is to the business. If you are driving new business and delivering better customer service, you may even be able to see quite quickly that this is so important an activity and delivery such results that you should shift resources (say a marketing assistant) away from off-line activity and into the Travel 2.0 space.

I am increasing coming across young marketing assistants for whom blogging, being active in MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr etc is a large part of their job. (Travel, public sector and charities are sectors where I have seen examples of this).

4) Assign a cash value to your time:

Engaging with the Travel 2.0 consumer is far higher in time costs than actual marketing spend. Whereas it easy to understand that a marketing campaign that cost £10,000 and drove £1,000 of business was not successful, you can’t make that correlation for time spent on MySpace until you understand the cost of what you invested.

I know, for example, how much running this blog costs me as a cash equivalent to my time - I also know that it represents a worthwhile use of my time (because I join up the dots and where possible track where new opportunities originated from).

5) Review regularly what is and isn’t working:

Web 2.0. Travel 2.0, social media - call it what you will, remains incredibly faddy at an individual site/community level. Facebook saw its first dip in traffic earlier this year and us travel bloggers, who move from community to community in pursuit of the best place to really interact with each other, are examples of how fickle visitors to individual communities can be.

There is no single best place to spend your energies - it should and probably will be a least a few sites/activities at any one time. But finding the optimum combination for you will be an ongoing experiment and will change regularly. Review frequently (using web analytics, research or good old fashioned talking to your customers and peers) and adapt!

This is my strategy and it perhaps sounds excessively calculated. In fact, I enjoy investing my time and energy in the communities I participate in. I find it personally rewarding as well as good for business and I have made many friends and travelled to wonderful places (for real, not just virtually).

The reason I need a strategy to manage my Web 2.0 efforts is simply because the opportunities are endless whereas time and energy are not.

Calling those juggling champions

I know for a fact that there are a number of people out there who successfully juggle running travel and tourism businesses with maintaining blogs, leading great industry discussions online, while answering the needs of their own and a broader swathe of potential customers in a range of communities. Guido, the Happy Hotelier is one, Rene at Greater Speyside another, so is Claude Bernard and Don at Get a Room.

There are more of you than I can mention and most of the blogs I link to on the right of this page provide examples of fantastic time and Travel 2.0 gymnastics.

Perhaps you will share with us how you do it?

How one online company found that small numbers of customer problems were often the tips of large icebergs…and turned this insight around to improve conversions and sales

I thought I would share with you one insight from the eMetrics Summit about how one travel sector company used feedback mechanisms to identify seemingly small problems…and then discovered that these were not isolated incidents but issues affecting appreciable numbers of customers each day, resulting in avoidable loses.

The company is a major Online Travel Agent dealing with a huge number of global transactions and queries each day. Their site has tools that capture (anonymously) all consumer sessions on the site so, if there is a problem, they can work to find out exactly what was going wrong in that specific instance.

In practice they have two big ways of capturing customer interaction data on site. The first is by offering the customer the ability to pass comment throughout the booking process. Therefore, if my valid UK address was not being accepted at the booking page, then I could leave a note to the site owners to do something about this.

The second way of capturing data is by effectively recording each user session for playback. The point of this is to see how the customer actually got to the position they did - something that becomes vital in those situations when the site really shouldn’t act in that way and an action seems to be failing for no apparent reason.

With this dual approach, when an issue was identified the OTA was able to define some parameters that allowed them to use all the data of previously recorded sessions to see whether other customers had also experienced similar problems but had not complained about it. Rather they had simply walked away from the site and possibly taken their business elsewhere.

What they discovered was that, in some cases, one or two people complaining were often the tip of the iceberg and that one small issue was in fact potentially affecting literally hundreds of customers. The company declined to offer figures but it is easy to imagine that if the average transaction was, say, a couple of hundred dollars, then this apparently insignificant issues would soon add up to serious money over the year.

By using the same analysis techniques that led them to discover the size of the problem, the company was able to monitor whether the problem was still occurring after a fix or whether its incidence had dropped to zero or acceptable levels.

So what?

We can’t all afford the kind of systems that this company was using but the business approach they took is available to everyone and I would summarize the insights as follows:

• Always take customer comments seriously and probably indicative of a larger silent body of suffering customers
• Have systems that allow these comments to be captured
• See if you can work out how many other customers this might be affecting
• Have a system that allows you to work out what the impact is on your bottom line - this will either help you to prioritize next steps or present a convincing case to your boss if larger steps need to be taken
• Use your Research RADAR to ensure that the problem has been solved – if you are still seeing it occurring, then it hasn’t been fixed. If you don’t look to see whether it is still occurring, then you won’t know whether it has been fixed or not.

As an aside, the company this post is about stated that anything written about them had to be passed through their PR department. I think this approach is a little heavy handed and not one I’m happy to participate in. I also sensed that their heavy handedness might continue had I gone down the compliant route and, frankly, that’s not what this blog is about. Which is a pity because I think they have a great story to tell but I’m afraid they will remain anonymous is in this instance.

Thoughts from the San Francisco eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit

With my jet lag subsiding a little and my brain still buzzing with ideas overload, I thought I’d share with you some of the insights that I took out of last week’s eMetrics Summit, the world’s foremost gathering of people working in online measurement and optimisation.

This was the year that qualitative research came to the San Francisco conference - a clear signal that businesses are beginning to try and understand the hearts and minds of their customers as they optimize their online channel, as well as their click tracks.

For me, this was an exciting and overdue development, as I think it signals that the online sector is maturing to the point that it is starting to look at 360 degree view of the customer experience - and the business implications of this.

Tom Davenport, the conference’s first keynote speaker and author of “Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning” , demonstrated how the highest performing enterprises are building their competitive strategies around data-driven insights. He cited the travel and leisure examples of Marriott and Harrah’s Casinos who are using analytics, data modelling and deep research to identify their most profitable customers, build innovative pricing models, manage customer experience and identify the true drivers of financial performance.

And as conference chair Jim Sterne explained in his wrap up, we’re passing the point of having to persuade the leading businesses why to measure their effectiveness online, because these firms are now using analytics more smartly than ever before and are “looking over the horizon at real competitive advantage”.

My top three picks

My top three practical insights from eMetrics were all qualitative in flavour and all different, but obtainable, examples of how so companies are tackling those fuzzy questions of “Why?” and “How do people think/feel..?”

1. Jakob Nielsen, paying attention to user behaviour in the moment

It was terrific to finally see usability guru Jakob Nielsen speak. I’m a great fan of his articles (you can read more at useit.com) and he inspired the user research approach we use in Highland Business Research (as described in this earlier Tracking Tourism post).

In his presentation Jakob made great use of video of accompanied surfs/user testing interviews to demonstrate the frustration and confusion people encounter as they negotiate their way through websites. He highlighted the importance when conducting user research of paying more attention to what visitors are doing, than what they’re saying - as users missed error messages, failed to find key information and physically recoiled from unexpected music and unskippable videos.

He made the observation that people may think they’ve successfully completed their task, even when they’ve failed (for example, by paying the wrong bill, failing to complete a transaction, missing an error message) - which is why seeing people’s behaviour in the moment has more practical value than self-reported data.

Another critical point from his presentation was the important of starting your visitor insight/user testing process with no preconceptions about the nature of the problems - because “the thing where people think the problem is, is often not where it is at all”. Instead of diving into what you think the problem is, simply get users to undertake the top five tasks on your site.

Just how relevant is this to travel and tourism businesses? Personally, if I could only do one type of online research with clients websites, I’d choose these accompanied surfs that Jakob demonstrated in his videos. The following quote is an excerpt from a research session in which a user booked a flight using his preferred airline, then some competitor sites - I hope you see what I mean:

“Southwest airlines? Best website ever. Other airlines just don’t get it…I quit taking other flights from other airlines because these guys get it right.
[Goes to another airline site]
Do I want to choose on price, flexible dates, schedule? They can just $*!*? off with that… They want to know where San Diego is? That’s just $*!*?… There are too many choices, I haven’t used this airlines site in years but it is still remarkably poor - who has the time for that? I won’t fly this airline, its web site is junk!”

Jakob’s presentation was packed with clear evidence that people aren’t going to work round a bad website, they’re simply going to take their business elsewhere!

2. Ebay, making themselves at home in your home

Elissa Darnell, Director of User Experience Research at ebay, did a great presentation on how they use a blend of offline and online research techniques to go back to the basics of who the user is, what they do and how ebay can deliver them the best possible experience.

Elissa talked in depth about a number of the techniques they use to get closer to customers and optimize their site experience accordingly, but I’ll just highlight two:

Follow homes - just like some offline firms have done for years, ebay are following their customers into their homes to observe them using the site in their normal way and in their normal environment (with all the distractions that come with that). Using a video camera and taking notes, they gain valuable directional, qualitative information that they can combine with their number based information sources.

Its not just the research team that take part, staff from right across the company - from CFO & CEO to developers and service reps - are taken into their customer’s own context, to learn for themselves that critical lesson of “we are not our customer.” The insights they glean from this regular follow home process means they learn things about their user’s needs and behaviours that they would not otherwise even think to ask about. They also gain direction on where they made need to focus further testing and development.

Cheap paper based user testing - before pages are even developed, ebay conduct quick and dirty user testing based on rough paper mock-ups of what the page might be like. The tester is asked to use their finger as the mouse and indicate where they might go on the page and what information they might expect to find as a result.

They can quickly go through rapid generations of the paper tests, quickly and cheaply, before ever spending money on software engineering. Jakob Nielson described the cost savings of this approach as being around 100 times cheaper than testing actual pages. So clearly ebay are using tactical pre-development testing make sure they get maximum user focus for their money.

3. Pay Pal, quantifying the qualitative

Pay Pal, the online payments provider, receives thousands of open comments each week from its user feedback pages. More than one person can manually react to and keep in their head at any time.

So their challenge (one I think many tourism businesses can relate to) is how do you quantify and semi-automate the process of analysing these open comments, so that you wring maximum value out of the feedback?

Step one, is they have applied a Google search engine tool to the data and made it available to internal staff to search through as they wish. This means that managers can at least get an overview of what is being said about specific interests (and in what volume) on a regular basis. The advantage is no training burden and no resourcing of the data analysis.

Step two, they have also semi-automated the process of categorising their comments, by bundling like comment types (through an in-house natural n-gram language statistical process). Once bundled into like themes (without needing to pre-develop a naming structure) they can get the comments out to all the right people to read, on a two weekly basis.

Step 3, now they are working out a system that automatically triggers alerts as new bundles of comment types emerge, or certain types of comments exceed their acceptable threshold.

It may sound complicated, but essentially with the help of a good statistician, they have built a simple system in-house that achieves most of their needs, but avoids using a highly expensive Meaning Based Computing system like Autonomy.

And finally…

As a final conference highlight (at least from my perspective!) - both Stephen & I were pleased to present at eMetrics this year (a kind of Highland Business Research double bill).

I was also honoured to be elected to join Web Analytics Association board of directors. So thank you very much to those WAA members that voted for me and I look forward to helping drive the organisation forward for the benefit of members and the web analytics industry worldwide.

Industry interview with Tina Fitch of EzRez

As we recently explored in this Travel 2.0 post, many of the recent online innovations driving Travel 2.0 have been demand led and consumer facing. The “killer-app” for the supply side, the thing that will improve the lives, productivity and profitability of travel and tourism businesses has seemed more elusive.

But as I have stated before that I see massive opportunity on the supply side of Travel 2.0 in delivering:

1) Joined up visitor data at a destination level (who is visiting, where do they go, what do they do, how does the whole consumption process look across a destination)

2) Cross sector/cross destination reservation analytics (ie supercharged benchmarking, predictive analytics and responsive pricing based on what is happening in the whole market, not just at the door of one attraction, hotel or destination).

Given that I’m currently in Silicon Valley, I’ve been catching up with leading travel technologists who are working to drive supply side value from Travel 2.0 technologies in these specific areas.

It was a great pleasure to catch up with Tina Fitch co-founder and CEO of EzRez Software to kick around some ideas and enjoy some fine San Francisco cuisine.

Tina leads a company which venture capitalists claim “is disrupting the online travel market through its next generation, web-based solution.”

EzRez is in essence providing a travel market place, supplying transactional services to a network of tourism businesses, along with deep analytics across that network that allow clients to get an end to end view of a visitor’s transactional behaviour.

Its software solutions include a plug-and-play solution that enables a company to sell travel components online, plus they bring inventory providers and distributors together through a system that syncs with the existing infrastructures of both parties. They have also developed a powerful set of analysis tools that allow businesses to drive deeper understanding and metrics from their loyalty points and transactional/merchandising data - and these tools integrate with web analytics products such and Omniture and Google Analytics.

Tina and her team of developers, business data analysts and travel specialists see the value of what they can offer in terms of the power of viewing a visitors booking behaviour not simply in isolation, but across the multiple travel experience touchpoints - from booking flights and travel packages, to car hire and attractions.

Because regardless of what a visitor may say about their intent, travel plans or intended purchases or expenditure (if you can even get that information) - nothing gives a clearer picture of visitor activity than the associated purchase trail.

She has the tools, she has the transactional information - now as EzRez grows, particularly fuelled by success in the Latin American and Asian markets, Tina is demonstrating to the industry in true Travel 2.0 terms that joining up their visitor data will reap rewards for everyone.

Tina took the time to demonstrate why this is so important and what the challenges of joined up data have traditionally been for the travel industry:

Vicky: Do you think that so far the travel sector has been slow to embrace web analytics and online business intelligence, compared to say the e-commerce sectors?

Tina: We do feel it has been slow – but not for lack of interest or desire from the travel community, but due to the fragmentation and complexity of the systems that power travel.

We have observed companies who embrace the concept of web and transaction analytics, but have a difficult time weaving the two together. It involves the challenge of tying something like Omniture or Google Analytics to their reservation system, and potentially their CRM program. Many of these tools can play well together, but need technical expertise and analysis of each system to have them really hum.

Many technologies in travel developed originally as silos – some are large, like Sabre, some are extremely narrow, like a car hire company’s proprietary database – but regardless of size, they are limited by lack of a common interface, tracking tools, and definitions across the industry.

In any event, our experience in the market place is that nearly everyone is looking for an analytics solution to help drive their business forward. Understanding of not only one’s own business, but the local market, competitive set and overall network performance is critical to the success of any analytics program. Most importantly, data must lead to actionable steps to capitalize on the insight gained.

Vicky: Given that travel is a sector where many different businesses interact to deliver the visitor their end to end experience, do you think the industry has to start looking beyond its own “data island” in order to best understand visitor behaviour and boost ROI?

Tina: Travel companies are frustrated by lack of context to the data that they can collect on their own site – even if a company understands what their own conversion rates are, or what types of customer profiles are purchasing which destinations or inventory types, it can not see how that positions them in relation to the rest of their industry segment, geography or even online travel overall.

Travel companies can also have a difficult time understanding how their own customer interacts with other systems, products and services outside of their silo. This is because there are few common platforms that give visibility to performance across different verticals, different locations and product types.

Why is this important? Without measurement, there is no management of your business – and without context to more global measures of success, you are isolating yourself to limited benchmarks for performance.

Without understanding how your customer shops and books travel wherever they are, you can’t determine ways to get broader share of wallet from the customers who already shop with you. Industry-wide, or more granular sub-set analytics, will give you a lot more information that can feed into your pricing, merchandising, and marketing strategies.

While privacy will always be a consumer concern, those same consumers have come to expect that a system is intelligent enough to factor in their location, basic preferences and previous habits – even on a generic level – to deliver the most relevant results.

Vicky: Could you tell us a little about how EzRez has developed this cross-network approach?

Tina: We work with a whole range of companies - such as legacy airlines, global financial institutions and hotel chains as well as boutique resort operators, regional wholesalers and niche travel sites.

Our position as the booking, rules and transactional engine across these different verticals, markets and inventory sources allows our clients to leverage greater visibility across their own activity, but also allows them to understand how they are performing against the network as a whole.

This gives EzRez customers a new level of network transparency that enables them to see consumer and agent shopping and buying dynamics and trends more quickly. This, in turn, gives them the chance to have the right product in the right place at the right time – and at the right price. This can drive real revenue growth and customer satisfaction.

Vicky: Is EzRez only relevant to the global players or are you also targeting the smaller businesses that represent the bulk of the industry in terms of providers?

Tina: We tend to focus on companies that have an existing, captive audience since they can best leverage the range of tools and products that we offer. Large companies absolutely need business intelligence tools to learn how they can move the needle on their revenues.

However, smaller companies gain by understanding untapped potential in the market, and using data to make strategic and metrics-driven decisions on where to focus their emerging business. So, we are also relevant to local players trying to capitalize on market conditions while learning from similar companies in other markets.

Vicky: How do you think travel and tourism businesses can stop using data to “look back” and start using it to make forward looking tactical and strategic decisions?

Tina: This is the really exciting part about network analytics - when you can apply historical and current activity to predict or influence future behavior.

Imagine if you, as a travel company, knew that even though many competitors traditionally offer packages from London to Istanbul in the month of March, you have started seeing increasing patterns of search and booking activity from that origin market into Dubrovnik? What if you could further target the opportunity by understanding what the average spend is in that destination, what rating level is most popular for hotels, and then offer an automated merchandising tool to not only preference that offering to people who come to your site, but also send that package proactively to an audience from that origination point?

What if you are an airline, and you have a system that logs click-through and purchase behaviour on specific hotels in your hotel engine based on city pairs searched, or even which day of week or fare class air bookings are made. You could take that intelligence and offer a cross-sell tool in your air booking path that immediately offers up the most popular hotels for that user profile automatically and capture higher conversion and share of wallet from the same consumer.

This type of application of business intelligence not only drives more revenue to the companies who leverage it, it engenders more loyalty by way of convenience to the consumers who shop with them.

This type of business intelligence is actually already possible to obtain if you are on a platform like EzRez, and we are seeing more and more companies participate and benefit from that type of tribal knowledge.

To conclude

Predictive analytics used to be the holy grail for sectors like online retail and financial services. But tools evolved that started to allow online sellers to show first adverts then actual product offers/combinations based on likely best performance, all driven by the analytics data. Companies like Amazon have massively increased upsell by investment in their recommendation engines - essentially by pioneering predictive analytics.

What is exciting, in my view, is to see this emerging in travel in the way that EzRez are driving it - which is across a network of travel and tourism businesses operating in different touch points of the same visitors experience. Analytics is therefore not occurring in isolation (never ideal for an industry where the purchase and consumption process is as fragmented and complex as travel).

As Tina describes it, network analytics means participation in and benefit from a type of tribal knowledge. Sounds a lot like supply side Travel 2.0 to me!

Ditch default - it’s all in the set-up baby!

The majority of the tourism businesses that I speak to who are measuring their online activity use Google Analytics to track their websites. But I also find that the businesses using this free tool are often missing out on the best functionality by sticking with its default set-up.

I completely understand why. The set up section of any tool is rarely sexy and the terminology can be off-putting. If it seems to function pretty well with out clicking on those set up links, so why risk making it go wrong?

But if you’re using Google Analytics and haven’t yet customised the set up your goals, filters and multiple profiles - you’re operating on just a fraction of the power available to you. Not only that, but you’re not getting the clearest view of what is really happening on your website.

So - here are five GA set-up tricks which if implemented today, will have you operating on super analytics speed for tomorrow morning!

1) Set up your goals

Google Analytics lets you track in depth up to 4 success outcomes for your site - I strongly suggest you take advantage of this.

Why? Because ultimately, 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!).

What might your goals be? Well think about why your site exists - what do you want people to do when they’re there? Those are your goals. They may be sales, form completion/enquiries, newsletter sign-ups, downloads or views of specific content pages. By telling Google Analytics what you’re trying to do, from tomorrow morning onwards you can start to track how well you’re actually achieving it.

For example, newsletter sign up is an objective on my main website, so I have used the newsletter confirmation page as one of my Google Analytics goal. I have inputted the thankyou page that is shown to people who complete a newsletter sign-up. Now I can track not only how many times that goal is achieved, but can also look at the steps people took to achieve the goal, what proportion of visitors actually converted, which segments of visitors converted (based on language or geography) and the cash value of those sign ups to the business.

GA gives you the option of assigning a monetary value to your goals and I would recommend doing this wherever possible.

You may know your average order value from a web form enquiry, but other cash values can be fairly arbitrary. But its still worth doing - you may decide that the value of a downloaded brochure is £10, compared to the cost of posting a printed one, or that a newsletter sign-up is worth £50. By including cash values to goals, you can really start to see in revenue terms how well (or otherwise) your website is working for the business, even if you do not transact online.

More on setting up goals from Justin Cutroni and in this 7 min video from WebShare

I should point out that e-commerce tracking is covered later in this post, in point 5

2) Set up on-site search

If you’re using search on your site, I beg you to take 2 minutes of your life to switch the track search function on - you’ll find this feature invaluable.

Switch this on from the home page by going into profile setting and editing your main profile information. Add in your site’s search parameter (in my case its simply s, as shown here after the ?: highlandbusinessresearch.com/?s=test) and you’re ready to go!

This excellent post from Justin Cutroni at the EpikOne blog tells you all you need to know on setting up search in GA, including how to identify your search parameters.  (By the way, I’d also highly recommend his Google Analytics eBook, particularly to experienced users).

What will you be able to measure once search tracking is activated?  Ultimately, the voice of your customer, because internal search is how users talk to you.

Tracking internal search helps you understand the purpose of visit and the main pain points. You can also see what ratio of searches have to be refined in order to produce results, how many searches lead to site abandonment and of course what specific words are used.

3) Creating multiple profiles of the same site

The tracking data for your site is stored in a profile. Google Analytics allows you to have multiple profile views of the same site.

Why on earth would you want more than one? Well GA analytics lets you slice and dice your data in all sorts of ways by a process of filtering - basically a set of rules to include and exclude things. Using different profiles lets you set different rules to see different things.

Some of the profile views I use are as follows:

1) Main view - the website, excluding any traffic generated by me, my company and my web company

2) The website with no filters at all - (it lets me see if changes I have made are tracking OK)

3) A view that includes UK visitors only

4) A view that excludes UK visitors, so is international traffic only

I use some additional ones, too, but some of these are pretty geeky. The key reason I use these different profiles is to allow me to take segmented views of what is happening the the site. This gives me clearer understanding and therefore better strategy.

The key thing to making these profiles works is using filters, as covered in the next point.

4) Filters are your friends

You can get really smart with GA filters and do all sorts of customisation, but to stop your heads exploding I will try and keep it simple here.

And at their simplest filters work like gates. They either allow you to specify which bits of website data can pass through into your reporting (includes) or which bits of data must be excluded.

GA has some predefined filters, such as exclude all traffic from a domain or IP address, plus the facility to let you customise your own filters (for example based on location or browser language).

If you do nothing else with filters, at least exclude your internal traffic from your main view of the site. That is you, your call centre, your web developers etc.

Traffic from you and your staff does not represent a genuine opportunity to do business, so including these page views just depresses your conversion rates from the site.

Your own behaviour also distorts the picture of how the site is being used, as insiders will use a site very differently to potential customers.

You can filter out internal traffic by excluding specific IP addresses or addresses - Google Analytics explains how. And (of course) Justin Cutroni also has some great tips for how you can exclude a single computer - especially handy if you have a dynamic IP address.

5) If you’re selling anything at all, switch the e-commerce tracking on

Lastly - if you’re selling online, start tracking those sales in detail by implementing the e-commerce tracking feature. Installed correctly, this embeds transaction receipt data into your reporting and again, installed correctly you can usually track transactions even if you use a third party shopping cart facility.

Strictly I shouldn’t include this in this list as you’re unlikely to get this done by tomorrow morning (it enquires code addition/modification on your site) - but if you’re transacting online, it is just too important a set-up procedure to leave out.

A rather dry overview of instructions can be found in Google Analytics help and if you’re struggling, the Google Analytics eBook mentioned earlier will prove its worth.

So who wants a default view with this tasty stuff on offer?

I hope I’ve inspired you to ditch the default set-up. With the exception of the e-commerce feature which will need additional tagging on your site, everything else can be done right now from your desk and be live and kicking by the morning.

Finally, its worth remembering that these are all changes that will take place from this point forward - changes made to Google Analytics do not alter the historical data.

Let me know how it goes!

Before you start measuring your website you are in blissful ignorance.

You probably have the assumption that people come to your website through the front door of your homepage and that they look at things in an ordered manner that somehow relates to your navigation structure. They find the things they are looking for before doing exactly what they’re supposed to do (like book or enquire). Finally they leave fully satisfied, bookmarking you as they go for an easy return.

Once you start measuring your site - whether by web analytics, surveys, user testing or a combined approach - that happy illusion is shattered forever.

Chaos seems to rule. People enter the site all over the place, then leave in droves without seeming to do anything much at all. The deeper you look at the data, the more fleeting and varied that visitor activity seems to be.

Web analytics and user testing provide more information than you know what to do with, yet exactly the right bit still seems to be missing.

So how do you make sense of how people use your site - and what can you do about it?

First, forget everything you know about your site…

The navigation and linking structure, the fact that everything is explained on the homepage, those driving directions clearly given in the 34th paragraph. Your visitor knows none of this.

Things may make sense from the homepage but is perfectly possible that only a low proportion of visitors see the homepage anyway. (Believe me, I’ve seen businesses spending 80% of their effort optimising a page less than 25% of people even see. Meanwhile, visitors arrive from search engines into long forgotten, dusty corners of the site).

A first time visitor typically starts lost and often the experience just goes downhill from there.

So, when survey respondents tell you “I couldn’t find the…” they’re not lying, even if you know exactly where it is. Things are much less obvious when viewed for the first time and its critical to remember that when trying to make sense of how visitors behave. If you’re struggling, why not try some DIY user testing?

Second, know thyself…

Why do you exist? What is the website for and how does it relate to what your business is for?

This isn’t philosophising for the sake of it - when people use websites they are looking to solve problems and achieve goals.

What problems does your site exist to solve?

Think hard about what your different segments of visitor are trying to achieve when they come to your site. Given every visit starts with a problem or a goal, how good is your site at helping visitors achieve theirs? Understanding this context will be invaluable in making sense of how visitors use (or fail to use) your website.

Third, tame your tools…

Taming your tools means identifying your key questions and using your tools (from web analytics to surveys) to answer those questions. What tends to happen is that people let the tools lead them - so they find themselves measuring what the tools hand them (page views, visits etc) rather than what they really need to know.

Start with what you really want to know - think about your question different ways and break it down into smaller parts if you need to. Then look at the tools and data that you already have that may help you to answer those questions. That way, you don’t need to worry about all the information you have, you can just selective measure what really matters to you.

You can pick a few Key Performance Indicators and stick with them. Trends over time are far more important than absolute numbers and will start to give you insight into what is really going on.

But it is important to also tame your tools by understanding their potential and familiarising yourself with how they work. Making sense of how visitors behave doesn’t happen at the top level of information, it involves drilling down beyond the superficial -getting beyond page views, unique visitors and 1 to 5 satisfaction ratings.

If you only look at the front page of your Omniture or Google Analytics, or don’t filter or segment your SurveyMonkey data into subsections of responses - you’ll only being seeing a very superficial view of your visitors.

Four, do something, do anything…

The difference between good websites and bad ones is that someone is generally spending time and effort to continually improve good websites, whereas bad ones are left to stay bad, until some giant overhaul in the far away distance.

An ongoing series of small tweaks and fixes (measured of course, so you know their impact) has a bigger impact on revenues and visitor experience, than a once a decade overhaul!

Now some stuff to help you:

• Jakob Nielsen on 10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities and the Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design

• For those of you who don’t glaze over and twitch when I sat web analytics, check out Context is King Baby: Go Get Your Own at Avinash’s blog
• Getting your Google Analytics right at the outset, from the official Google Analytics blog: How you start is as important as how you finish
• And from Steve at Blackbeats blog: Why KPIs can not come from the bottom up. Management should always participate to the KPI creation and Drilling down into Analytics data
• Making sense of other travel websites’ visitors, courtesy of the compete blog
• Last but definitely not least, Matt Belkin at Omniture has a couple of great posts about knowing thyself and tying your analytics to that. See Don’t Do This! 7 Pitfalls When Deploying Analytics Part 1 and Part 2