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!

Anyone who has seen Ian speak will know that he does not speak from an ivory-tower but rather in a very accessible way on what could be a dense topic. And the book is little different – it’s aimed at business and planners within the travel and tourism sector definitely not a scholarly tome designed to gather dust.

Although Ian mentioned that Scenario Planning was a little like science fiction, I don’t think we should interpret this as meaning that what he does is a flight of fantasy. On the contrary, his work is backed up by a lot of empirical research and this one of the reasons why it is worth paying attention to him.

It’s important to note that at the outset that Ian’s work concentrates on the changing nature of the traveller. While this obviously has implication for how the supply side of the industry meets that demand, his work is not about the development of the supply side per se. Instead he looks the changing picture of demands, desires, constraints and impacts that the traveller and thereby the travel industry may face.

Ian’s work offers predictions through to 2030 but this interview concentrated more on the short term issues that we could be facing. For those of you wanting to find out what happens next, you’ll just have to buy the book.

So what is changing for the traveller and what are the implications?

While it is tricky to condense the whole conversation down into a couple of lines, I’ll start by trying to do just that.

• We are moving from a world of seemingly unlimited opportunity through to a world of constraints. These drivers are largely external leading to constraints that are economic, environmental, political and moral in nature.
• The growth of tourism will not stop – although it might be slower than it has been.
• The traveller will want more in less time or with less effort – this has implications for everything from the format of events through to booking processes and the nature of breaks.

Before this becomes a shopping list of changes, lets take those points and develop them more fully.

We are entering a world of constraints

It will have escape no-one’s notice that the economy is not as robust as it once was. And, although there is still resistance in some quarters about the degree to which climate change is attributable to human activity, governments are acting to lessen its impact whatever the cause. On the home front, we notice that our disposable income doesn’t goes as far as it did, say, 18 months ago. We notice that the cost of travel is rising, both at the immediate level of our cars and at a wider level.

When Ian described this as “leaving a world of low inflation – moving to an era of constraints”, it suggests that this is not just a short term blip on a historically inevitable rate of progress but rather a longer lasting change of pace.

“The consumer is being squeezed by rising prices and falling levels of disposal incomes, as a consequence out of home expenditure will fall. In the short term, rural Scotland will feel the pinch rather than Glasgow/ Edinburgh / Aberdeen. Leisure spending will fall but business tourism in cities will remain robust in the short term. The middle classes are the market that is going to be effected the most.”

We have been in situations like this before though, most notably in the oil shocks of the 1970s. In the case of the 1974 oil shocks, the economy rebounded swiftly but the problems of the79-83 took a lot longer to recover from.

It should be noted that the constraints are not just economic but political as well as governments make move to combat climate changes and other examples of environmental degradation.

On a positive note, Ian noted that we are more fuel efficient today than in the 1970s – our cars do more miles/kilometers to the gallon/litre for example. In the medium term, he sees coal and nuclear as the only realistic players in the energy market but acknowledges that the political and environmental issues surrounding this are immense and are constraints in themselves.

However, although ‘grid’ power could be delivered through coal/nuclear energy generation, the fact still remains that the vast majority of transport in the UK is oil based which will have an impact on people’s willingness to travel longer distances by car in a time of rising prices.

Some other examples of constraining factors include:

• Environmental constraints: Some destinations start to become too hot to visit on account of climate change – the eastern and southern Mediterranean countries particularly will be challenged under this scenario. In other areas, decisions will be made to limit the number of visitors on account of their impact on a sensitive region (I suspect that Antarctica cruises might be see this)
• Moral constraints: Ostentatious luxury will be frowned upon in some travel sectors – Ian noted that there was a trend for businesses to meet in ‘misery locations’ that sent a clear message that money was being spent on doing business, not having fun.
• Cost constraints: Airlines will protect revenue by reduce capacity. Effectively, this would mean that we could go back to 1990s style prices for some of the less profitable routes.

The growth of tourism will not stop – but it might slow down

Ian discussed two scenarios - one in which demand is not constrained and one in which it is. His estimate was that under the scenario where there is no limiting factor on growth, then we could be looking at around a 3.4% rise per year leading to 1.9 international arrivals by 2030. However, in world of constraints, that growth rate would slow to 1.2-1.5% per annum, resulting in 0.8 billion fewer arrivals by the same data.

How the constraining factors affect visitors

But how will the present situation affect the travel industry? Well, I’ll detail a few of Ian’s predictions below but I think they can be summarised as, ”travellers will want more from what they can get.” This shouldn’t be immediately interpreted to mean (for example) that travellers will want 2 meals for the price of 1 as standard but rather they will want to seek travel options that enable them to do more in the time they have available to them and this has implications for the process, products, promotional and logistical aspects of the delivery of travel.

• Proximity of destination to home will rise in importance

In a post on peak oil tourism a while ago, I speculated on whether local destinations would again become popular. Ian answer suggested that local destinations would indeed become more important but probably not in the way that many of us might imagine it. 30 years ago, ‘local’ would have suggested ‘domestic’, it now suggests ‘regional’ and regional should be understood as being within a three hour travel zone. Therefore, from a UK perspective, Paris, Athens, Tunisia etc are local.

The driver behind this shift to local is that the traveller does not want to waste their precious break (or indeed their work time) travelling. If they can only afford to take 5 days break, they do not want to spend the equivalent of 2 days travelling.

This has a number of implications including:

• A rise in city breaks (but only if they offer good transport links)
• A fall in rural breaks in remote areas
• A fall in long-haul customers.

It should be noted that city status does not guarantee that an area remains attractive to potential travellers – the important thing will be its accessibility and it’s role as just one of many competing destinations. From a Scottish perspective, the ‘local’ nature of Edinburgh and Glasgow to London will be no guarantee of their status as major tourism centres when the London customer has a choice of the whole of Europe from their local airports and international rail terminals. It should also be noted that good transport links extends not only to the nearest airport to the destination but also the connection between the terminal and the end destination.

• There will be complex customer strategies of trading up and down

Although there will be a move in time of economic challenges for people to seek cheaper and better value accommodation, the picture isn’t a simple as everyone suddenly deciding that 5 star hotels are beyond their budget. Ian noted the tendency for some people to trade up – but only if they could trade up to their first choice of hotel (for example). And if this first choice were not available, then the visitor would trade down - meaning that the choice would be between Gleneagles or the local Travelodge.

This reminded me of a paragraph from a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal, discussing Walt Disney Co’s recent performance “[Chief Executive] Mr. Iger said one factor helping the company during the downturn - as opposed to previous economic slides like the one in the early 90’s - is that 75% of our hotel product is “moderately priced”or “value priced”. In 1991, over 55% of the rooms were considered “premium priced”. Our portfolio of rooms is more accessible.

The article also notes the impact of the weakness of the dollar leading to a) an influx of visitors from overseas and b) “US residents looking to avoid the high cost of travelling abroad are visiting the domestic parks instead.”

Ian said he thought that families especially were looking to trade down at the moment and that accommodation that was ‘difficult’ to book would suffer and this point is discussed more fully in the context of the next bullet point.

I found this observation about the how people trade down interesting because it obviously applies in some markets but not others. As we discovered recently, in some markets trading up is seen as a necessity as it is a hygiene/standards factor – people simply do not trust a three star in that area to be of comparative quality and so ensure that they are getting decent hotel by booking a five star.

Ian used a couple of examples to illustrate how activities re adapt themselves to a world where people are unwilling or unable to divert as much time to that activity that previously.

You see it in sporting events. In cricket the move toward the 20Twenty format (essentially a cricket match lasting about 3 hours instead of 3-5 days) reflects how people want the experience but want to be able to have it in a condensed form to fit in with their busy lifestyles.

Ian pointed to the importance of quicker booking and check-in processes as being something that issued from the same impulse – cutting down on the ‘hard’ parts of the travelling experience to maximise the pleasurable or profitable parts.

From a Scottish perspective, Ian thought that B&Bs will lose market share to budget accommodation due to their lack of ecommerce. “Only 4% of accommodation providers in Scotland operate a dynamic on line reservation system like Easyjet. Many SME’s still only have website that effectively says, “Please make a reservation and we will contact you the next day.” In today’s society the consumer won’t wait.”

Many SME’s still only have website that effectively says, “Please make a reservation and we will contact you the next day.” In today’s society the consumer won’t wait.

He also cited the City of York’s outside gallery as an example of allowing visitors access to culture ‘on the hoof.’

So who’s getting it right?

There will continue to be destinations that are approaching these challenges in the right way. Ian cited the following as examples of the right approach:

• Scotland: Scotland has invested in research and understanding its customers to an extent unrivalled by most other areas (and my own experience suggests that this is the case also).
• Vienna: Vienna (and Austria as a whole) also collects great visitor data and Vienna has a really strong emphasis on delivering quality to the MICE market.
• Las Vegas: Vegas is a hedonism hotspot and well positioned to exploit gambling opportunities coming from Asia

Additionally, some niche markets will continue to do well but other broader markets will struggle. This shouldn’t be understood as meaning just destinations but also visitor segments – for example, single people travelling in a group.

Ian’s message for operators and providers is simple. “Overall, this means that business needs to know the price elasticity of consumers - using a process of segmentation - some consumers will continue to pay a premium.” In other words, you need to know your customers inside out and really ‘up your game’ when it comes to customer intelligence as there will be people out there who will pay for good value. Obviously a lot of big players do this already but, from a personal perspective, I fear that there is a lot of the market who view the notion of understanding and identifying the tolerances and desires of distinct customer types as something akin to a science beyond their grasp and not worth attempting.

There will also be parts of the world that continue to be profitable. We suggested Canada would be a beneficiary of the fuel rise in a post a while ago and Ian added Aberdeen to this list on account of its status as the home of North Sea Oil.

So, what does this mean?

I think the thing that history tells us is that, although circumstances can look similar and indeed share similar traits, no period will be exactly like a previous period. So we will not be going forward to the past to 1974 or 1979 and here are a number of reason off the top of my head why this will be the case:

• Tourism and Travel have grown since the 1970s and so we live in under a completely different set of circumstances than those experienced at that time. Put simply, we are standing in a different place and that is not one characterized by 1970s travel levels and expectations.
• Technology plays a more integrated and personal role in the process of travel and tourism than it did in the 1970s and we can expect this to remain the case – the internet will not be ‘un-invented’ any more than commercial television was ‘un-invented’ in previous times of economic scarcity.
• The demographics are different – we are about to experience the mass retirement of the baby-boomer generation for example.
• Markets are more free now than in the 1970s

So the constraint of ‘only’ going to Milan for a break instead of a break to Vancouver will be the equivalent of someone in the 1950s only going to Blackpool instead of going to Paris

It is clear that some providers will need to fight harder for their customers. My take on it is that knowing your customer and the whole market in which you operate will be key to navigating these waters. Reading a book like Ian’s or blog like this are part of that process but understanding the customer and their trends needs to be ingrained within the tourism industry even at the smallest level. To navigate these water blind would be to immediately operate at a competitive disadvantage.

Website interfaces, marketing messages, service propositions - all things that impact the customer absolutely - typically get created from the inside out.  With rumbling guts leading the way.  But you, me, the boss, the consultant - we are not the customer.  The perspective that the customer brings - whether gathered through research in advance, testing during the process or feedback after the event - takes some of the randomness and risk out of second guessing.

How do you ensure the customer doesn’t get left out?

1. Don’t optimize for the hippo

Everyone has a hippo in their life - it may be the HIghest Paid Person’s Opinion, or a Highly Influential Person’s Personal Opinion.  The hippo knows just how a website should look, or just what makes a great advert and they are not about to keep that opinion to themselves.

In lieu of stronger evidence from the customer, the hippo holds great sway!

But, our roaring, mud loving, opinionated hippo friends are not the people the website, marketing campaign, or interior layouts are ultimately designed for - theirs isn’t the only significant opinion.

Which brings me to the second point.

2. If in doubt, ask… (the customer that is!)

Just how many hours of speculation, doubt and opining could be saved by talking to the customer?

User testing, for example, can stop dead a circular debate that has run through a company for months.  In the space of just a few hours the customers themselves reveal what is really in their mind.

Testing different content side by side and tracking the comparative results (right through to overall revenue) is another way of asking the customer “which of these works best for you”.  Tools such as Google’s free weboptimizer allow you to easily test any combination of web content to find out what leads to the most conversions.  The customer speaks with their attention and actions.

And of course, asking the customer can also mean good old research in the form of focus groups, site visits, follow homes, surveys, customer diaries, user testing and formal or informal interviews.

3. But, don’t start research sure of the answer - you’ll only prove your self right

Keep your mind open, listen and learn.  Biased research is no better than gut instinct.  I’ve written before about how easy it is to influence the results of your research.  For example by unwittingly encouraging people to tell you what you want to hear, or by being so sure of “the answer” that you hear it despite what your customers tell you.

Instead, see if you can prove yourself wrong.

4. Test, analyse and make decisions based on evidence

If you have the evidence, act on it - don’t let the customer in, then ignore what they tell you when it comes to decision making.

But sometimes, despite the fact that you’ve talked to the customer and gathered your facts, the hippo can come back for a final roar - still convinced that their personal opinion trumps the evidence.

Keep the hippo at bay with voice of the customer data (the customer in their own words really works here). And remind them of the financial costs of inaction or inappropriate action.  Better still, help the hippo realise it was all their idea in the first place and that they are one smart semi-aquatic mammal!

5. Out of sight, out of mind?

Highly successful businesses typically know that the customer is genuinely at the centre of their universe. And many go to great lengths to keep the customer presence there in the decision making process.  I saw a presentation by eBay recently, where they talked  about how people throughout the organisation participate in follow homes, to observe customers using the site in their own context.

Microsoft have done a lot of persona work and have created life size representations of key customer personas who are taken along to meetings. At the other end of the scale I have seen tourism businesses whose offices are full of cards and notes from previous visitors from all over the world - also a visual representation, if they choose to use it, of the customers’ role in key decisions.

So, you are not the customer and neither is the hippo - make sure you don’t simply second guess what your real highly influential opinion holders think!

No longer can the Internet be viewed just as an add-on to marketing efforts - it is now an integral, critical part of travel distribution.

That was the view expressed by Diane Clarkson, Travel Industry Analysts at Jupiter Research and Bill Tancer, god of all things data at Hitwise, in this evening’s excellent webinar: Travel 2.0 Today, The Economy and the Evolving Travel Landscape.

More critically, Hitwise have found (through their clickstream analysis of internet users as they move from site to site) that traffic to the travel category of websites is actually increasing as people tighten their belts.

There has been no drop in travel website visits as fuel prices increase. People are instead researching their travel decisions more intensively online and are shifting to the online channel as they become more price sensitive.

Internet and online travel becomes more important in tough economic times.
Bill Tancer, Hitwise

Jupiter Research’s data backs this up. Their US Online Travel Consumer Survey from May ‘08 suggest that the next 12 months could see a sharp decline in travel frequency - with 39% of occasional leisure travellers and 43% of occaisional business travellers suggesting that they are planing fewer trips in the coming year. But the impact, Diane explains, is that “the Internet will increasingly become a tool as people research more intensely”.

The business implications of that are immense - while you may have cruised by on a sub-par website in good times, as things toughen up in the sector, people are looking at more websites and so it is critical you can attract and retain visitors on yours.

Bill and Diane’s webinar covered three key topics:

• The impact on travel of the economic downturn
• The impact of user generated content on travel brands and travel consumers
• The potential for travel and social network sites.

They kindly gave permission for their content to be blogged openly, which is much appreciated as it is not always the case with such industry analyst briefings. When the webinar is available online, I will add the link as its really worth a listen. In the meantime here are a few of the conclusions from their respective research efforts that really tingled some brain cells for me:

1. User generated content is used by 40% of online travel researchers

Yup, 40%. Not hardly anyone, or a bunch of geeks, or a few back packing students - but 4 out of 10 of the people researching travel. Jupiter’s US Online Travel Consumer Survey from May ‘08 found that for this 40% using user generated content, ratings were the most popular (used by 58%), followed by reviews and recommendations (49%). Next came user generated photo content (18%) and friend’s social networking websites (18%). Other travellers blogs we consulted by 12% and user generated video by 5%.

The impacts of this? Diane cited the importance of using this content regularly and systematically as a source of competitor intelligence. And as the next point will illustrate, she also highlighted the importance for the contribution of travellers to be included as part of brand strategy. Why? Because user generated content is highly trusted.

2. User generated content is nearly twice as influential as brand to accommodation researchers

User generated content is far more influential than brand or the recommendations of friends and family

After price and location, for those using ugc, reviews/ratings from other travellers was the major influence in the decision making process. 36% named it as an influential factor in their decision, compared to 21% citing brand/reputation and 14% citing that old chestnut of family/friend recommendation. (Source Jupiter as above).

Hitwise’s clickstream data shows that visits to travel user generated content have increased 40% in the year since June 2007. They also reveal (perhaps no surprises) that it is TripAdivsor that is the heavyweight, accounting for more than 75% of the Travel UGC and 2.0 market share. (IgoUgo pales into second at 9.5% and WAYN at 8.4%). Bill made the point that while standalone Travel UGC accounts for only a small fraction of travel visits online (2%), its reach and impact is in fact much wider as people engage in user generated content on traditional travel websites.

3.The Travel 2.0 heavyweights are in the mainstream research to purchase mix

With a graph to die for, Bill combined the flow of clicks from travel site to travel site, with market share of those sites. From this network map, he isolated those sites that are driving traffic to the big OTAs such as Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity.

And a few Travel 2.0 players are having a big impact - TripAdvisor and the metasearch site Kayak and Sidestep. Metasearch, sites that search for price across muliple agency and supplier sites, before sending the search off to another site to book, are faring particularly well in these price sensitive times. Two years ago they were only used by the highly tech savvy, whereas now they are entering the mainstream as people research more intensively for the best prices.

However, what Bill’s uber-graph also shows is that outside these heavyweights, the smaller Travel 2.0 sites (from WAYN to WikiTravel) are very insular, with little cross flow of traffic and are currently outside the mainstream travel research traffic flow.

4. The social networking sites are not impacting as a travel planning resource yet

Jupiter (same source as above) found that only 8% of those online travellers who are using social networking sites do so for travel planning. 56% do not use social networks in any capacity whatsoever that relates to travel. The most common travel related uses come in the form of communication, with 23% looking at friends travel photos or videos, 22% keeping in touch while away and 19% posting photos.

Diane contrasted the high level of trust that people have in stranger generated reviews, which comes from critical mass. People can sift many reviews looking for patterns and things that resonate with them. In contrast, social networks have much lower critical mass.

Hitwise’s data has not seen significant increases in traffic being referred to travel sites from social network sites - Bill suggested that where it is appearing, it is potentially being caused by people that use their social networking site as their homepage.

And different segments and demographic profiles of travel researchers behave in different ways. The 55+ age group are more likely to use newspapers and magazines to find a new travel site that they haven;t used before, whereas younger users are more likely to use meta search. Website visitors, like travellers, can never be thought of as a single homogeneous mass.

So, thanks again to Hitwise and Jupiter Research for a great webinar and for allowing us bloggers to share their findings with the wider industry. I hope I’ve communicated some of the potential power of their data with this short round up.

The bottom line, in my experience, is that people are prejudiced and you need to be aware of this when marketing your destination.

When I say prejudiced, it should be understood that I don’t mean bigoted or chauvinistic (although there is a part of the market that is). What I mean instead is that we all have preconceived ideas about destinations that mean we unconsciously use these prejudices as filters in our decision processes.

But how do you discover what people’s prejudices are and, more importantly, how can you change them?

Well, the answer is, in the first place, to really get under your potential customer’s skin. And I don’t just mean doing a quick survey but really getting into their way of thinking because a glibly expressed prejudice (”I don’t fancy a holiday in Germany” for example) can actually be just the visible expression of a complex set of ideas.

We’ve just finished an evaluation of a UK wide marketing campaign for an overseas destination and its reminded us of how powerful qualitative research is at revealing the kinds of small preconceptions we all carry that act as barriers in our decision to choose one destination over another.

I’m not going to name the destination and I’m not going to discuss specific results - the clients paid me to deliver the work to them and not broadcast it openly on the internet, so you’ll have to bear with me on that one! But I can use heavily disguised fictitious examples of the kinds of the insights we received to illustrate the points.

Before I do, I do appreciate that a lot of people remain wary of qualitative research – the term ‘focus group’ especially seems to provoke some pretty sceptical reactions. It seems to have connotations of flimsy insight, people telling you want you want to hear, management fads and slightly distasteful associations with unprincipled political processes.

Handled badly this is indeed what you will get for your money. Handled well, however, and you start to gain a richness beyond bare numbers.

So, lets look at some of those disguised examples:

“I like the marketing campaign image of the jet skiing – I just thought the area was rainy and grey but the blue sea makes me realise that it could be a warm beach destination as well!” 

Note that the original intention of the image being discussed in the example above was to convey a more active and sporty image for the destination, not one that was suggestive of the climate. However, it revealed that other people in the target group had the idea that the destination was cold and grey – this was their prejudiced view of the destination.

Now, before we go further, perhaps a little more about prejudice. As I suggested above, prejudice is one very human way of making decisions quickly. I’m not saying that the decision is rational (a suspicion of someone based on skin colour is clearly irrational in a modern person for example) but just because it is an ‘unthinking’ response, it doesn’t mean that it is an irrelevant response. Lets go back to the example above to illustrate that point further.

People who go on holiday with young children know that climate plays a much more important role in the experience than it might for a childless couple. If a destination is too hot, your children need to be protected. If it’s too wet, they need to be entertained. And you can’t just go to the pub/museum/cinema/shops with them – they need appropriate attention for young children. So, reassurance that a destination has a good climate is ticking an unconscious box in the minds of parents, despite the fact that the message contained in the original image was aimed at someone different (hedonistic 20-30 year olds for example).

In our example, the parents’ prejudice expressed as ‘cold and grey’ was a mask for a more complex and rational set of deliberations they employ when making a decision about the right destination to take children to.

“It’s great to experience local culture but a good hotel offers a sense of real sanctuary from all that – there comes a point when you want to shut the door and relax and know you will be safe and unhassled”

Now, a statement expressed in terms like this is probably not one that would not be made in every part of the world, although a variation of it might well be universal. The underlying desire is for security and a sense of ‘circling the wagons’ in order to catch your breath at the end of the day. But would you necessarily express it like that if you were holidaying , say, in North West Scotland? My guess is that it more likely to be something said by someone who expects to experience a vibrant but slightly chaotic culture destination. There are positives in this person’s statement (they think they can interact safely with the local culture) but it should also be recognised that they think there is a slightly wilder element and so need reassurance that they can (literally) shut the door on all that.

So what?

The examples above both demonstrate that certain market segments have preconceived ideas about an area that mean that they quickly discard some options without serious consideration. Understanding the reasons behind these notions means that you can start to answer them head on. In the examples I used above, the person speaking needed reassurance that their discomfort and bother would be minimised, and even though they received this tangentially, the destination’s marketing did tackle their concerns.

The point is, however, that you won’t know what really makes your customer’s tick unless you listen to them. And it’s not just about listening – it’s also about hearing what isn’t being said and what is being said, but in a disguised way.

Quick! Call the police!

There’s probably another blog post altogether in this observation but I’ve often been struck at how the techniques used by the police in interviews and techniques used in a focus group are similar. I’ll stress that I’ve never been interviewed myself by the police but policemen I know have described their interview methods to me and there are a lot of similarities – you’re both interested in peeling away the outer layer of stories to see if there is anything more underneath.

So, if any of you know policemen or women, ask them about ‘softly softly’ interview techniques – they might just come in useful when listening to your customers!

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

]]> http://blog.highlandbusinessresearch.com/2008/06/05/dont-be-ripped-off-by-the-search-scoundrels/feed/ http://blog.highlandbusinessresearch.com/2008/05/31/10-internet-statistics-you-need-to-know/ http://blog.highlandbusinessresearch.com/2008/05/31/10-internet-statistics-you-need-to-know/#comments Sat, 31 May 2008 22:31:40 +0000 Vicky http://blog.highlandbusinessresearch.com/?p=117 Absolutely mainstream and absolutely heating up

In case anyone was doubting that the Internet is absolutely mainstream and absolutely critical to travel and tourism, here is my spring pick of statistics that I think deserve some serious attention:

1. Average UK Internet users now spend 164 minutes online each day, compared to 148 minutes spent watching TV. The research by TNS (on behalf of Google) demonstrates how profoundly consumer behaviour is changing online. The Internet is still regarded as some tourism businesses as a niche, somehow still less significant that other channels. The reality is that the Internet is absolutely mainstream and is challenging and surpassing more traditional media types.

2. Jakob Nielsen points out that only 25% of people travel through a site via a homepage - the rest use search and arrive deep in the site. This BBC article tells you more.

What is the implication of this? Well, many people imagine all their visitors arrive through the site’s front door and they design their site accordingly. Time and effort goes on improving the home page, while deeper pages are ignored.

How does your site fare in terms of navigation, clarity and usability for the 75% of people who enter down the chimney and through the windows of the site, rather than though the front door?

3. Google properties now drive 36% of all UK Internet traffic (source Hitwise).

What does this mean to you? Use your web analytics data to understand your share of traffic from Google. If it dramatically exceeds the 40% mark, you may need to look at building other sources of traffic and improving repeat visits to your site. If Google accounts for only a small proportion of your traffic, there may be a need to look at your organic search engine optimisation strategy.

4. comScore reports that in March, 221.2 million Europeans conducted 24.6 billion searches, averaging 111 searches per searcher. Searchers in Finland exhibited the heaviest search activity with 143 searchers per searcher, followed by Portugal (128 searches per searcher) and the U.K. (124 searches per searcher).

Search is critical to your business success online. But for the travel sector, search optimisation and visibility doesn’t stop at your own country activity (such as google.co.uk), as the next statistic shows.

5. comScore also showed that Google Sites account for more than 19 billion European searches conducted in March, representing 79 percent of the European search market.

“With nearly 80 percent of all searches conducted in March, Google is far and away the leading search property in Europe,” said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore. “However, we are seeing key local players show leadership in Eastern Europe where English is spoken less than in Western markets. With Russia’s online population now the fastest growing in Europe, it is likely that some of these local search engines will continue to gain traction and market share.”

6. 73.7 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in March 2008. comScore report that users viewed 11.5 billion online videos during the month, representing a 13-percent gain versus February and a 64-percent gain versus March 2007. Nearly 139 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 83 videos per viewer in March.

Video is being found to drive travel and tourism conversion rates and consumers are both familiar with using it and increasingly search out accommodation, destination and activity related video as part of their travel research process. They are also uploading their own video reminiscences, which fuel future travellers’ decisions.

7. It’s not just the US that is seeing the impact of video. Hitwise reports that UK traffic to online video increased by 178 per cent between February 2007 and 2008, now accounting for one in every 45 Internet visits.

8. Competition is hotting up and so is online spend. Advertising spending online looks set to overtake spending on TV by the end of 2009 - the implication being that prices will rise as more advertisers chase the same inventory.

9. In 2008 12% (7.4million) of all mobile phone users in the UK are using mobile Internet services (source Continetal Research, on e-consultancy). Forrester Research project this will rise to 38% of mobile phone users in Western Europe by 2013.

This mobile phone based Internet activity often utilises ‘dead time’ while travelling and is associated with ‘task based’ activity such as checking train times, restaurant directions etc. Right now, those handful of sites doing mobile well are in a prime position to see the benefits in their bottom line.

10. As so many of these points suggest, the Internet is now absolutely mainstream for travel.

PhoCusWright’s latest Consumer Travel Trends Survey, due June 2008, reports that requent travellers and seasoned online buyers continue to dominate, but now the former “diehard” offline users have begun to use the Internet as their usual method for travel shopping and purchasing. PhoCusWright point out that as novice users, this majority of late adopters possesses different travel and purchase behaviours, have varying levels of online skills, requires different messaging and is demographically unique.

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?

Apologies for the delay in the latest update to this blog. I went straight from San Francisco eMetrics Summit, to London eMetrics, giving a WAA web analytics workshop en route and launching an online eMarketing course in the same week. As a result, I’ve returned to the kind of information overload many of you are familiar with and the question behind this post feels pretty relevant to me just now!

Nugget image by my_amii on Fickr

So, how is it that you can get past collecting ever bigger mountains of information and get to the point that you draw significant and actionable nuggets from the information?

1. Spend more time understanding the data than collecting it

This first tip is easier said than done, but is critical to getting past data and towards decisions. Collecting data isn’t enough and it doesn’t analyse itself (even if you have great software, it still doesn’t interpret itself). In order to have a chance of drawing meaningful actions from all the information you have, time and human brain power needs to be committed to working with the data.

Insight from data analysis typically comes from looking at things that have changed over time in the information and drilling down to find out why. It also comes from looking at segments or sub groups within the data. It is rare that you’ll get insight from your information without really diving in deep - a cursory glance doesn’t tell you what is going on below the surface.

Finally, when working with the data, you can’t assume your first theories are right. Insight often comes when you pose a question of the information and the data disproves your theory completely! But you can’t get to this point until more time is spent on understanding information than collecting it.

2. Hunt the nugget

Thanks to the customer insight team at the New York Times for opening my eyes to the power of the nugget! Nuggets are those tasty morsels of information that leave you pleasantly fulfilled, without giving you indigestion. When it comes to analysis and reporting of your business information, it is better to have 5 tasty nuggets than 100 irrelevant facts.

How do you spot your nuggets? Well, for a start they always pass the “So what?” test. They’re relevant, actionable and digestible. We don’t want wobbly jelly nuggets, that can’t cope with being prodded, we want good firm nuggets that stand up to scrutiny.

The fact that customers whose package includes car hire are twice as likely to repeat book and recommend a friend compared to other customers is a great nugget. Sure, it opens other questions (why? what are we doing right? how do we capitalise on this?) but its going to drive action and potential revenue in the process.

3. Think context and ability to act

Nuggets and insights flow most readily when data is viewed through context coloured spectacles. Context is typically threefold:

1) The customer, their behaviour, needs and intents
2) The market, competitors and external factors beyond the control of the business
3) The business, its sphere of influence, challenges, immediate and long term objectives

With these things constantly in mind, you can ask the right questions of the information you have, so that the answers you find are relevant, rather than simply interesting. By also factoring in the organisation’s ability to act on what you find, you start to shape some prioritisation into your analysis.

4. Join up teams and data sources to break down information silos

Whether you have a substantial team of researchers, web analysts and business intelligence people, or have no people whatsoever and a whole mountain of information in shoe boxes - insight comes from joined up thinking.

At London eMetrics last week, I saw examples of more firms that are moving their all their research and analysis people into “customer insight” teams, rather than isolated units - a move which has to help create a joined up view of business information.

But even if you are doing all this your self, a joined up approach can simply mean picking the right data for the job, but in manageable portions. (Successfully tackling a small question, is better than trying to address everything at once and failing). You won’t understand why a visitor did something by looking at your web analytics data, nor will you understand precisely what they did by asking them. The big, valuable picture comes when you pool your data sources and apply appropriate, context rich questions.

5. More tools are not the answer

Whether you’re using Google Analytics or Omniture, SPSS or Excel, ComScore or Hitwise - you’re using a tool to help you get towards the answers in your information. The tool, however marvellous or expensive, is not the answer in itself. (If you don’t believe me, try drilling a hole in the wall without actually plugging the drill in and using it). The answer only comes when you apply point one and spend more time on trying to understand the data, than in simply collecting it.

You’ll get more nuggets and actionable insights from a basic tool like Excel used well, than you will ever get from a top of the range tool like Omniture if it is barely used at all.

So, when your information isn’t producing anything you can work with, don’t be tempted to go buy another piece of software to try and conjure up an instant answer - it won’t happen. Instead invest some time (buy it in if you don’t have the expertise) and dive a little deeper into what you already have.

To conclude - my advice is to not just collect information within your business, but to get stuck in and poke your data with a great big stick. Look for the stuff that really stands up to being prodded and you’ll find those 3 - 5 tasty nuggets of relevant insight that you can actually use to make decisions.

It is my humble opinion that lots of research effort and money is wasted on tackling the wrong questions. Questions that don’t stand up to the so what? test and so do not ultimately help make money, save money or improve customer experience.

I reckon there are some “big questions” at the heart of businesses and organisations in the travel and tourism sector. And while these big questions are mind-blowingly scary, because they can’t be glibly answered with a quick survey or a few days work, I think it is essential to keep them in mind for every single research and analytics activity you undertake. This is because they form the big picture - the context, the so what? - that all smaller activity must be calibrated towards.

Without reference back to the big questions, ad hoc research and analysis activity can easily lose its way or fail to be translated into any form of meaningful action. It becomes focused on the interesting or on the production of information - not on tactics and strategy.

So here’s my big three. (You may disagree and it’d be good to explore your thoughts and suggestions!)

1. How do we attract and convert customers in the face of intense global competition?

2. What must we [and all our delivery partners in the end to end process] do to ensure customers will come back/recommend to others?

3. How do we deliver a optimum customer experience from a profitable, sustainable business base?

You may have noticed I’ve covered the business, the customer, the market, but not explicitly product. Partly, this is because I see product as being closely bound up in question 1 and 3. Mostly, though, I think that in a Travel 2.0 environment, the toughest questions revolve around the customer’s experience and demand.

“The 20th century was about sorting out supply…The 21st is going to be about sorting out demand.” The Internet makes everything available, but mere availability is meaningless if the products remain unknown to potential buyers. Wired Magazine

At this point, you may be exclaiming “Enough with the deep stuff Vicky, I just want to know if my customer had a good time. I’m not trying to solve universal questions right now” To which I must irritate you further. Because as I see it, the “how was your experience” type question is asked in order to tactically address question 2 and 3. If it is being asked in isolation, all small picture and no big picture, what do you do with the answers? Benchmarking and nice graphs don’t improve customer experience or the bottom line. It’s the actions - however small - that make the difference.

So, where does research fit in to tackling these questions?

Well, given I’m feeling philosophical, I would suggest it takes a shift in mindset in order to enable these big questions to be properly tackled by research. A shift away from the idea that research is somehow something you do a bit of once in a while when you need it. A shift towards a culture of business intelligence and analytics that works with all the data it has (even if it is in a show box) in order to tackle and act on the big questions.

Allan Leighton, Chairman of the Royal Mail declared at the recent Market Research Society conference:

“I believe every organisation should have radar - to listen to your people, listen to your customers all the time. It shouldn’t be called research it should be called radar. You cannot be selective when you have it. You have to have it all the time.”

I quote it because I couldn’t agree more. And I don’t think that only global corporations and national destinations that have a hope of attaining this - I do genuinely believe that a very small business with the right mindset can also be intelligence driven.

Making radar work for you

So what does the shift from research to radar involve?

1) Always on

You can’t just do a bit of radar when you think you might need it. Radar is always on, always monitoring the information stream in anticipation of the unexpected. In research terms, that means listening to customers, staff and other data on an ongoing, not an ad-hoc basis.

2) All around

Radar takes a 360 degree view of information, it doesn’t focus on one source at the cost of all others. Switchboard activity, website activity, conversations with customers, regular staff surveys, news reports, transactional information, emails are all data sources. Listen in, by keeping on top of it and finding a standard way of recording and reporting on key information.

3) Alarms and flashing lights

Radar can only alert. Make those alerts easy to spot, as opposed to hidden deep in 100 page reports. Make the bells ring loud and the lights flash bright through the way reporting information is presented and distributed. If the boss wants a 50 word summary in a text message, that’s great. Because the point of alarms and flashing lights is for the leadership to see the problem and act.

4) Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

But is there even a problem? What is going on? Why? Often the picture isn’t really clear and your radar triggers more questions than answers. But staff on the ground know more than is often allowed for - talking to them can give insight to what is going on. You may also need to know more about what customers think and what their reasons are for this.Depending on the size of your organisation, this may be the point that you need outside expertise - or at least to make some bright internal spark available to ask great questions and crunch the answers.

5) Looks forward more often than you look back

Ait Traffic Control doesn’t use radar to see how safely planes landed yesterday, they use it to make critical, tactical decisions in the present and immediate future. The focus more on what is going on now and what might be in the way - not solely on what happened in the past.

Beware, brains in action

So, how do we get business, retain business, oh and make some money/fulfil our stated mission too?

I think these “big questions” are at the heart of businesses and organisations in the travel and tourism sector. And the point is, they can’t be answered by a quick bit of research or a new fangled tool. Instead, every piece of data/research/analysis that flows through the organisation should serve towards these critical questions.

I won’t pretend it is easy - but it is being done. And it’s being done by businesses in this sector, giving them distinct competitive advantage over those who’re wasting their time and effort tackling the wrong questions.

So, a final question to you - am I on the right track, or hopelessly deluded?