Tracking Tourism: The Tourism Research Blog Travel industry thinking from Stephen Budd and Vicky Brock at Highland Business Research

Getting better insight into your online marketing campaigns and why this matters

OK, I’m guessing that many of you already know which websites send you what kind of traffic.  I don’t just mean whether search engines send 60% of your traffic but also what other sites are sending you that other 40% of visits.   Such as press mentions, local directories, online articles, blogs that mention you etc.

But if this is all you know, then you could still work your data a lot harder - with the ultimate goal of less spend, more results.  With a little bit of web analytics customisation to your campaign activity, you could be able to answer questions like:

• Which paid button on XYZ page gets me more traffic - the one in the section about golf or the one in the section about fishing?
• Do either of these buttons lead to more people booking than the free text link also on that site or the direct email I sent to my newsletter subscribers?
• Is the banner ad I ran on the front page of a directory three months ago more successful than the one I am running there at the moment?
• I’ve been pushing a special offer to my email list and online - what’s the value of each approach?

What we are doing here is moving from just tracking generic sites and marketing efforts as a whole, to tracking specific Campaigns.  To do this you need Goals.  And for a travel and tourism company wanting to maximise their return on investment in today’s climate, this is a vital step forward.

So,  if you cannot yet answer questions like those above about your site, then you need to look at some form of campaign returns analysis.   This involves campaign link tracking, setting specific goals within your web analytics tool and pulling results together in a way that factors in cost.  This is something you can do easily through most web analytics packages and a simple Excel spreadsheet.

Tracking Campaigns - an example.

Imagine that you run a hotel in Scotland and you decided to place an advert with a link on the front page of a  site like http://www.extramilescotland.co.uk/ to link to a great deal you have for golfers. In addition you also want an advert on the same page linking to a great deal for anglers. Just looking at your traffic sources in your Google Analytics data will not let you tell these adverts apart.   One of them may have worked, one may be a complete waste of money.

And, at the same time, you decide to email your past fishing customers telling them about a deal with a link to your site and you do the same for the golf customers.   It is starting to get really difficult to isolate precisely which of your activities are moving the needle.

BUT - there is a way round this.  Just a little tweaking of the names you give those links, you can tell all your ads apart without needing to do anything to your website.

Not only that, once you tweaked that URL, you would start to get really detailed marketing effectiveness information that would tell you a lot more than just where the visitor came from.  This is the wonderful world of campaign tagging (OK, not really that exciting - but so very useful!)  The “how to do this” is spelled out further down the post.

By identifying how people responded to different promotions, you can start to take control of what’s working for you.

But you need to take just a few more steps to start to make this really really powerful stuff.  You need to define what success is for you. You need to define what you want you visitors to do.  You need to define your Goals.

Campaigns + Goals = now analytics gets actionable

As Vicky argued in a previous post,

“online success is not about how many people come to your site in total, its about those people that come to your site and then do what you want them to do (or not!).”

In other words, you need goals.

Let’s revisit that example above and, had we tracked each different campaign correctly, we might get some figures like those shown in the table below:

The table above shows us

• The number of visitors to the site each type of campaign attracted,
• How many completed goals can be attributed to those visitors attracted by the particular campaign,
• What percentage of visitors per campaign achieved the goal.

If you did not have a goal defined, then you would simply know that more people came to your site but you would have little understanding of how they behaved.  It would be a bit like advertising a shop opening but not bothering to record what your customers bought - or if indeed they even bought anything at all.

Put simply, Goals allow you to assess how successful you are at getting your customers to do something you want them to do.  And some campaigns will be more successful at getting them to do that special something than others.  In the example above, we can see that the ‘golf email’ link was the campaign that was the most successful in getting customers to do what you wanted them to do.

A goal can be anything from a sale through to anything other tangible action you want a visitor to do on your site - for example, a brochure download or visiting the directions page.

But if you do sell (or make reservations) through your site, then we can take the final steps and start to measure very exactly what these different campaigns did for your bottom line.  If we assume that your site is ecommerce enabled, then the table above could start to look something like this:

And what could we conclude from these (fictitious) figures?

• A lower percentage of ‘fishing banner’ visitors’ complete their goal (’make a sale’ in this example) than ‘golf banner’ visitors - but the ‘fishing banner’ visitors spend more when they do get to the site.  The activity cost more than the email activity, but it paid for itself.
• The emails in both cases got more people to convert than the banner ads for the same interest area - but the revenue from them was much lower (perhaps the emails drove more last minute cheap deals than the high margin banner ads).
• Despite the lower revenue generated by the fishing email, it represents a superior return on marketing investment to the fishing banner ad because of its low cost.  It was a quick win and by no means a worthless activity!
• But look at the golf banner - in this instance our marketer spent £500 yet only acquired revenues of £300.  The activity had a negative return and doesn’t justify being continued.

Note that not all analytics packages will automatically calculate a Return on Investment or a Cost of Activity figure for you (Google Analytics does for adWords but not for customized links). Even if your package  doesn’t, it’s pretty easy to work this out from your data.  You simply need to paste it into a an Excel spreadsheet, and if you’re interested, the ROI formula we’re using here is:

(Revenue from marketing activity - Cost of marketing activity) / Cost of marketing activity.

So what?

When you only have a finite online marketing budget, you need to know whether you are spending it wisely.  Thinking in terms of campaigns,  goals and campaign returns allows you to work out exactly what is and what isn’t working for you.  It identifies whether marketing in Directory A is better than Directory B.  It enables you to work out whether emailed customers (for example) are more likely to buy or complete a goal with you than visitors coming via other sources.

This is giving you near-real time information about how successful your marketing is.

The technical bit - how it’s done

Although I am aware that there are a wealth of analytics products out there, Google Analytics is the most commonly used at the moment and so this section uses this tool as the building block.  The process would be broadly similar in other packages.

Campaign tracking: Campaign tracking looks daunting to begin with but essentially it means adding a bit of code to the URL you to direct people to your site from your banner ad, text link or whatever. For Google Analytic users, there’s a useful tool here to help you out.

Setting up Goals: I can do no better than to echo Vicky’s earlier post by recommending Justin Cutroni’s article here and  his video here.

Integrating adWords and ecommerce: try Google’s intro here.

Still confused?  Well…you can always hire us to sort out the issue!

Filed by Stephen (17/06/09)

2012 - the real year of mobile?

There’s a little tourism/sporting event happening in London in 2012. You may be aware of it. From what I could tell while in Docklands earlier this week, there are certainly lots of cranes and men in hard hats endeavouring to ensure the Olympic Stadium is completed on  time.  (Thanks to suburbanslice on Flickr for the image of the Olympic Park.)

But there is another 2012 milestone accelerating towards us that will have wider construction implications for travel and tourism businesses.  As Greg Dowling, Head of Analysis at Nokia, informed me at eMetrics San Jose a few weeks ago - by 2012 more than half of those accessing the internet will do so from a mobile device.

As a research geek, I like to know the sources of such eye-popping statistics.  I wanted to check for myself that I had understood what he had said correctly and (apologies for the distrust Greg!) that the amazing numbers I was being told were accurate.

And it seems they are.

Leading technology industry analysts, IDC, report in their Digital Marketplace Model and Forecast (June 2008) that:

“Users will access the Internet through more than 1.5 billion devices worldwide in 2008, including PCs, mobile phones, and online videogame consoles. By 2012, the number of devices accessing the Internet will double to more than 3 billion, half of which will be mobile devices.”

And I can tell you Nokia are taking this very, very seriously indeed.

Remember when we all stuck our brochures on the web?

I mentioned the big construction implications of the mobile web.  And like London preparing for the Olympics, tourism providers must realise that the mobile web is a similarly massive event and ask themselves, “Am I ready for these visitors?”

Like parts of London where infrastruture must be upgraded to meet the challenges of an influx of visitors, so there are web offerings that, if not changed, will not be fit for purpose come 2012.

We cannot simply throw existing website content at mobile users and think “job done”.  People will be using devices that are geographically aware.  They are looking for downloadable apps they can carry with them.  People will expect (because its already do-able) that they can use their mobile devices to locate a nearby restaurant that meets their tastes and that has a table now.

Are you ready for that?

It is not an either/or of course.  Mobile is not “replacing” the fixed web - it is augmenting it with a time sensitive, location sensitive layer - one that is arguably also more flexible for interactivity with both objects and other people.

Travel and tourism is where fixed internet users first experimented and became more confident in researching and communicating online - there is no reason to believe that their mobile internet experience will be any different.  Travel, tourism and “familiarisation” applications will lead the way as internet users add another layer of enrichment to their experiences.  In fact they already are - these three excellent posts from Stephen Joyce, Norm Rose and the New York Times give you a flavour of some of the great applications already being used by visitors to navigate their way through unfamiliar places and travel processes.  Where the early adopters lead, the bulk of visitors will soon follow.

So is there a 2012 tourism connection between mobile and the Olympics?

There sure is…  Just as the Sydney Olympics were revolutionised by digital photography technologies, distributing images globally in minutes, London 2012 will be the first heavy test of the mobile internet.  And provided London Underground don’t decide to strike rendering us thoroughly immobile, there is a compelling case (as made here by the Mobile Data Association) that London will be the “mobile Olympics of 2012“  As they explain:

“As early as 2010, all new mobile phones will be mobile internet and mobile email ready and will have sophisticated camera functionality as standard. Mobile social networking and sharing rich moments with friends and family, will be a commonplace occurrence. Therefore visitors to the 2012 London Olympics will be recording and sharing their own personal memories of the games. This “of the moment” dynamic view will provide a great opportunity to experience the Olympics in a unique way.”

They go on (and is this is where it gets interesting for the tourism/travel business):

“By 2012 we will be using our NFC (Near Field Communications) enabled mobile phones on the underground and public transport systems of London as an Oyster card replacement. There are significant opportunities to combine mobile internet, GPS location and mapping to provide visitors to the games with travel plans (using public transport), avoiding congested areas, making reservation in hotels and restaurants, tickets for the games and real-time security alerts and warnings.”

So great, the London Olympics will have even more people glued to their phones and may even edge towards being a “cashless” Olympics if the transactional kinks can be ironed out.  But why is this remotely significant to, say, a hotel in Glasgow or an attraction in Leipzig?

Well, here’s a few reasons to start with:

• Critical mass - many times we have heard that “this is the year of mobile” only for that promise not to materialise. But now a perfect storm of handset advances, content/application development, increasing wi-fi network availability and a major trigger event such as the Olympics means 2012 is a very realistic horizon for the mobile internet to become an absolutely mainstream platform in travel.
• Mobile phones are beginning to be used ‘transactionally’ - even if not quite yet as the purchase device  (booking a table for a nearby restaurant in 15 minutes time is a transaction, even if the purchase is completed in the restaurant).  At the moment, phones are typically acting as really smart guide books…but this kind of transactional development means that people should start using them to first move closer to the point of purchase, and eventually to keep and spend money.
• The combination of User Generated Content, Social Networks, GPRS and Mobiles means that information will be shared among a target group more quickly - this has benefits (eg you are shifting stock at a discount to clear it) and drawbacks (word gets out quickly if you’re product is duff).

So, peer to peer communication, as epitomized say by Trip Advisor, becomes even more rapid, even more geographically sensitive, even more context aware.   As one leading phone manafacturer who will remain nameless pointed out “not only do we know where you are right now, we know who is in you address book” - those things can be easily pulled together for custom recommendations.

Doesn’t that have the potential to dramatically increase the power of peer to peer influence and word of mouth?  And will you be ready?

I’ve already got web analytics on my site, thanks

Given that the team behind Tracking Tourism have recently become Scotland’s first Google Analytics Authorised Consultants (and are one of only six firms in the UK with this accolade to our name), it seemed natural enough that this week’s post would have something of a web measurement feel to it.  Because we’re jolly happy about our achievements.  Because we (quite literally) have the T Shirt - as modelled here so fetchingly by me.

And because while we’re finding that more and more businesses have the tools to allow them to undertake analysis, we have the sneaking suspicion that having the tools and using them for meaningful actions are two different things.

Imagine a tourism business networking event, not very far from you.  Two strangers strike up conversation:

Tourism Business: “So, what do you do?”

Stephen (or Vicky): “Well, we deliver customer insight and web analytics services”

Tourism Business: “We already have Google Analytics/Urchin/Nedstat thank you very much”

Stephen (or Vicky): “And what has your business done differently on account of the information that has given you?”

Tourism Business: “……”

OK, we do sometimes make better conversation than that - but the point remains.  Using a web analytics tool and simply owning a web analytics tool are not the same thing.

The answer to your unique business question doesn’t come just because you got Google Analytics, Omniture or any other measurement tool.  A basic report or a dashboard is not analysis - on its own it cannot give you the answers you need to take action to improve your business.  Sadly, (or happily if, like us, you really really love this kind of thing) - web analytics isn’t ’something you’ve got, thanks’, its something you do.

Getting buy-in to real web analytics

OK, it’s something that we’ve banged on about in the past.  The theme of measuring your website is something that we’re spent a lot of time writing about  on Tracking Tourism (click here for all previous stories).

But despite our humble efforts, you probably still know colleagues, companies and possible even bosses who don’t see the “what’s in it for me” of really using online data to drive the business.

So here are five reasons you can use to convince the unenlightened that job security, profits and heck, near-nirvana, are likely to flow when you take your data seriously - and then do something with it.

1. Show them the money (and the glory)

People that run organisations spend a lot of time caring about where money is being made, saved and lost.  They are typically less interested in page tags, page views and referrer strings.  Buy-in to real analytics comes when it is framed in terms that relate to revenue.

And this doesn’t just apply to big business - every website with a commercial objective makes a contribution to money earned, money saved and yes, it also involves money being spent, either literally or in terms of time.  Real web-analytics is used to drive improvements in the efficiency of those costs.

So at its very simplest, don’t stop at reporting that there were 500 brochure downloads from the site this month - follow it through to its revenue implications.  We posted 500 fewer mail packs, saving £5,000 and can anticipate an additional 50 calls to the booking line in the next 2 weeks.And glory?  Well that relates to performance against competitors.  Unsurprisingly, revealing insight about this will also generate more excitement and action than reports about page views.

2. Show them the customer

The online customer can be perceived as more mysterious - even sinister - compared to its offline counterpart, despite the fact that they are often one and the same.  All the little things you observe about real world visitors seem to vanish online.  You do not even know if the “right people” are even finding your website.

But smart web analytics can help build a picture of the customer online.  For example, it can inform you about the vocabulary and intent of visitors to your site.  You can see the language and words customers use when thinking about you - something that is significant in an intelligent marketing campaign and to search engine optimisation.

Building pictures of real people, real customers - who just happen to be in the online phase of what will often become a real world relationship - can be very useful in breaking down fear and resistance in businesses wary of further web investment.  It can also reveal the shocking implications of poor customer experience online.  Which leads us too….

3. Show them real people walking away

If 99% of your visitors fell out of the back of the bus en-route to your business, week after week, wouldn’t you be as mad as hell?  There may be choice words to be had with the bus operator.  Someone would probably declare that “something must be done.”

And if the same is happening online?  If 99% of visitors are “falling out of the site” without making an enquiry, day after day.  Shouldn’t something be done about that too?  Smart web analytics demonstrates where people are leaving on mass, which pages are under-performing - but it also informs the actions and tests to improve those pages.  And, of course, it informs the financial cost of inaction.

4. Show cause and effect

Basic analysis tells you how people are finding your website site.  Good analytics tells you whether the money you are spending on marketing, promotions and SEO campaigns is actually making you money.  It tells you whether your actions are creating the desired effects.On the flip side, it can also reveal how your actions (or inactions) are costing you business, impacting your search engine visibility or causing your marketing expenditure to be wasted.

5. Show them the future

The very best analytics doesn’t just look backwards, it looks forwards. It attempts to use visitor behaviour, customer satisfaction and search trends to inform advance decision about promotional expenditure, staffing and priorities.

For example, with one of our clients, we have found a direct correlation between visits to specific pages of their website and physical visits to their attraction 5 days later.  A big peak in visits to those website pages means they can expect more people than usual on Saturday - which means opening the overflow carpark and bringing in more staff.

At a more simplistic level, if you knew that the peak time of the year for Google searches for weddings in Gretna Green was July, would you wait until September to advertise these packages on your website?  By staying ahead of the customer activity cycle, you predict the future to your marketing advantage.

Getting to the big-wins

If your reluctant friend is now convinced of the value of data, how do they get started on the path to true enlightenment?  Well, first get the data set-up right - by ensuring every page is tagged correctly, that filters are in place etc.  All things we’ve written about before.  Not one of the sites I have checked in the last two weeks has had every page of their website correctly tagged - and what you get in that scenario is garbage in, garbage out as they say.

Then focus on measuring the right questions for your business - what really matters and what do you need to measure in order to track that. Who needs convincing and what is the best way to report to achieve that.  And don’t lose sight of people in the numbers.  Tourism and hospitality are people focussed industries - don’t lose the customer in a sea of reporting.  Use the data to get closer to the customer and how the business is delivering on their needs.

Buy-in help or training if you need it - you don’t delay fixing the hot water because no one on your team is a plumber.  You get one in, or someone gets packed off to night school to learn.  Fast.  The same has to apply to web analytics - it is simply too important to the business bottom line to languish for a few years until someone magically figures out how to do it.  There is expertise out there (hint, hint) - it probably makes financial sense to use it.

And that near-nirvana I mentioned?  That occurs when you create a business culture where analysis is in the DNA.   And for the unconvinced, these businesses do exist.  More importantly they exist in the travel, hospitality and tourism sector.  Travelocity is one, but they can be the very smallest of businesses as well as the very large. They’re probably those same guys eating into everyone else’s market share right now.

If analytics is something you do, not something you get, then how do you do it?

Funny you should ask….  Next week’s eMetrics Summit in San Jose, California, kicks off with an analysis symposium to tackle that very question.  I will be one of the presenters charged with distilling all my best thoughts and tips on “how to analyse” into just 10 minutes each!  For me, it really promises to be the analytics highlight of recent years as I believe we have focussed for far too long on smart tools, not smart thinking.

To quote my friend and eMetrics Summit guru Jim Sterne as he re-mixes the Wizard of Oz:

“Why, anybody can have data. That’s a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the earth, or slinks through slimy seas has data!  Back where I come from we have Summits - gatherings of great learning - where people go to learn how to analyze that data.

And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and leverage their marketing investment, and with no more data than you have.  But - they have one thing you haven’t got - a ticket to the eMetrics Analysis Symposium!”

Its not to late to get your analysis symposium ticket here.

And if sunny California (or eMetrics London in a few weeks time) or the thinking great thoughts can’t tempt you, those of you in Scotland are welcome to attend a free Web Analytics Wednesday networking event in Glasgow for some drinking and chatting instead.  It take places this Wednesday 29th April and you can register to attend here.  Stephen and I hope to see some of you there!

Posted by Vicky

We work a lot with tourism and travel providers operating customer satisfaction feedback systems to help improve their services and offerings.   But I’ve met a few people recently who have expressed scepticism about customer rating systems generally and it strikes me that this scepticism could be the result of not looking at the data in a more rounded context.  Or due to receiving data derived from flawed methodologies.

The scepticism was expressed along the lines that these kind of things always show that 90% of customers are satisfied. The implication of this is that rating systems aren’t really telling you the full story. So, while we’ve previously written here and here about using comment cards, these recent comments show that there is still a little more ground to cover in this area.

I can understand the view that customer rating systems are inadequate - but this typically occurs only if you are looking at the data derived from the customer in isolation.  As we wrote in one of the previous posts, “comment cards are just one of a suite of businesses information sources”. In other words, you shouldn’t rely on comment cards alone for customer feedback in its broadest sense. (And with such rich data all around you, why would you want to ignore the other sources?). But let’s start by looking at this “90% satisfaction guaranteed” issue a little closer as I feel that a rating like this is not as pointless as critics suggest.

To my mind it’s all about context. A 90% satisfaction rating expressed as a snapshot of customer sentiment can be fairly meaningless. However, a 90% satisfaction rating for an activity compared to (for example) the rating for a different activity, a different period or even a different location does start to have some meaning.

It’s about trends, not absolute scores. It’s about comparisons, not absolute ratings. It’s about context.

But let’s have a look at this using some real data.

Context One - data over time

The following charts are drawn from ‘real life’ but have been anonymised.

Starting with the one on the left (click on it to open a larger version in a new window), the orange line represents a lower control limit (one standard deviation from the average downwards meaning that 68% of all monthly results ever fall within this range - and if you are interested in why I’ve used only one standard deviation, see the  second comment at the end of this post). The average is the grey line in the middle. The blue straight line represents an upper control limit (again one standard deviation but upwards). I’ll explain the purposes of the control limits in a moment. There is also a dark grey line which is the trend of the scores. 

In this first graph we see a green line charting the percentage of people who completed a comment card for a particular aspect of their experience and who said that they were satisfied. Looking at this line, we can see that indeed it hovers around the 90% mark but that there is some variation. So what can start to take from this information?

Firstly, you will expect some degree of variation when analysing data one month to the next - it’s just natural. But there are times when a change is ‘unnatural’ and this is when control limits come into play as they alert you to when something has fallen outside of the normal corridor of performance. And these control limits can only be derived from looking at this data in a historical context as this gives you the most realistic guide to what is normal and what isn’t.

Secondly, looking at the trend line you will notice that, if anything, it has dipped a little. It’s probably nothing to be worried about.  But if, for example, the line represented a customer service rating and, despite months of internal training, around one in ten of your customers were still leaving feeling that they had got substandard service.  Wouldn’t that be a concern to you?

Context Two - data compared

In our second example on the right (click to enlarge), there is now a second line of data about a different service.  This was rated at the same time as the first service and by the same respondents.

Firstly, it should be noted that these lines are not moving in lockstep (they actually have a correlation coefficient of around 0.25 indicating a practically non-existent relationship).  The trend lines further indicate that the levels of satisfaction are moving in opposite directions and so we have a clear indication that, despite the high ratings for both lines, the responses are nevertheless suggesting that there are differing levels of satisfaction with them.

Now we’re starting to get towards something useful.  We can start to ask what is going on to make people less satisfied with service A than service B over time.  It is even possible to start to test operational changes to look for a positive uplift.

You MUST be happy!

The context in which the customer feedback was taken can also affect satisfaction levels (although the data I’ve worked with suggests that aggregated satisfaction levels tend to be quite similar).  For example, I analysed the results of feedback from one destination where the respondents were required to hand the completed score cards  straight to the accommodation provider collecting the forms. Unsurprisingly, 85% of people claimed to be elated by their recent accommodation and 5% dared to only be satisfied.  In a context where the data was collected more anonymously, this split would probably be something more like 55% and 35%.  In both cases, we could argue that 90% were satisfied although the second example is probably closer into the truth.

In a situation where you do have frequency data for all the scores (ie counts of how many excellents compared to how many satisfieds), it is worth looking at it in some more detail to get sense of how sentiment is shifting.

For example, are there more ‘good’ than ‘excellent’ scores?  for most items but for a few that situation is reversed?  This might indicate that while 90% are satisfied (’satisfied’ being, as noted earlier, the ‘goods’ and ‘excellents’ summed) the balance of satisfaction lies at the lower end than the upper for most items. And that those that buck this trend are worthy of note.

But what is satisfaction anyway?

But there are still important questions floating around in the background here and they probably all flow out of the main one of, “what does ’satisfaction’ mean?”

What I mean by this is satisfaction indicate something good, all right or possibly inadequate.  For example, the data behind the charts above is coded in such a way that the rating delivered by a respondent is give a numeric value (eg bad = 1, adequate = 2 etc).  From this it is possible to calculate that your visitors were 4.2 out of 5  happy this month.   Unfortunately, such an approach can also demonstrate that your visitors were 1.4 out of 3 female, something that is just plain silly.

So, the approach we have taken for the purposes of top line reporting is simply to allocate results to discrete bands - if, for an example, the score is a 1 or 2, then it shows that the customer was dissatisfied, and anything above that suggests satisfaction.  This means that you get an easy overview of the level of satisfaction.

But, you might say, I’m not interested in people being satisfied, I want them to be elated!  A noble goal to be sure but I’m not sure just how elated one can be at the process of buying a coffee or noting that the toilets were clean. There are some things that just don’t excite people that much to cause them to rate them highly in feedback forms!  They’re only notable when they go wrong!

But I guess that this is all really confirming something we’re said in the past - if you are measurng customer satisfaction but only skimming the data then you are potentially wasting your time.  Only through a more indepth and intelligent use of it can start to yield up the nuggets useful for your business.

Filed by Stephen (07/04/09)

Optimizing business, not just websites - music to my ears

The eMetrics Summit is always a chance to learn directly from the best web analysts and emarketers in the world. But at this week’s Toronto eMetrics I really felt Travelocity took it to another level. Shankar Mishra, Travelocity’s Director of Enterprise Business Intelligence presented on developing an enterprise web analytics strategy.  Not reporting.  Not doing cool stuff because it is interesting.  But building a framework that relates all web metrics to business outcomes.

A framework prompted, he reckons, by a question from Travelocity’s Chief Financial Officer John Mills, of: “Where is all the money you claim to be generating?”

Travelocity and the brands they own - such as Lastminute.com and World Choice Holidays - are naturally sitting on vast quantities of data.  The web is their business, so there is a critical imperative that they are continually optimizing not just websites, but web businesses.

Shankar expressed a refreshingly strategic view of the importance of true analysis, not simply data and measurement.  Too often organizations struggle to simply measure what they have, reporting on what their tool has to offer them, not on the business essentials.  He explains:

“You need to come up with independent metrics based on the business objectives and outcomes, not the tool’s data….and a framework which relates all web metrics to business outcomes”

“Socialization” of business critical insight

Travelocity’s focus is not on what can be done with the data they have, but what they want out of that data.  The framing of the right questions, focus and clarity of goals, strategic optimization of the business - not simply the website.

I have always felt that web analytics is a subset of a wider intelligence strategy - which is perhaps why I found Shankar’s session so valuable.  My own presentation in Toronto was about moving from clues in web analytics data, through to surveying and conducting user testing with real customers, in order to understand motive and real context.

But context, insight and causality are not sitting within your analytics tool - they’re with the people inside the organisation and the cutomers you engage with.  Why Shankar blew my mind so thoroughly is he presented an enterpise level analytics strategy that factors in human nature and politics, as well as actionable measurement.

They go through a circular analytics process whereby they:

• monitor
• analyze
• prescribe
• act

It is the prescribe stage that leaps out for me.  It includes the usual testing and prototyping - but it is the “socialization” aspect that in my mind is the critical one.  It is the step almost invariably missing - the people bit.

Through “socialization” - or “the people bit” if socialization sounds a little too George Orwell for you -  they know what is and isn’t compelling to the internal folks that are affected.  They create checkpoints of who needs to be convinced and what people will really find useful.

“don’t even think about data - just figure out the question. Then start talking to people who are stakeholders, the people down the line who’ll be impacted”

Before they think about data, they examine needs, usefulness and what compromises may be required to achieve traction.  This isn’t proclaimed from above (or as is even more common, unsuccessfully attempted from the bottom up) - socialization appears to be an essential consensus building process for the success of their strategic analytics.

This is a lesson that I believe businesses of all sizes can take on board.  People typically take actions based on what other people tell them about data - not because you have the best tool set on the planet.  People take actions because other analysts and marketers tell them stories about data - in language they understand.  And because those stories have a meaning that resonates to their specific role, they will be invested in making decisions that ultimately improve the business.

Too often we look at what is interesting, or we report about web data in vocabulary that means something to us - not to finance or operations.  Shankar makes the point at the heart of their socialization process, which is that “it has to be compelling to someone else as well - and it will be more compelling if the person impacted has been involved.”

I thank Jim Sterne and the eMetrics team for an excellent conference - and I also thank Shankar at Travelocity.  It’s a great return on your time and energy to have your brain so thoroughly stimulated!  Roll on eMetrics San Jose when we get to wrestle with “how to analyse” - because, you know what, I just happen to have a few theories on that

Post by Vicky

What business are you in?

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

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

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

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

No, what business are you REALLY in?

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

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

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

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

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

Let me explain what prompted these musings….

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

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

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

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

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

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

Destinations everywhere - but how many really stand out?

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

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

“We are in the happiness business”

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

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

They would be emphasising their features, not their benefits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Stephen (26/03/09)

What I took from ITB Berlin Day 2 is that systematic testing and analytic pays.  Haven’t we mentioned that before on the odd occasion?

Testing pay as you go mobile ticketing

It was fascinating to learn about dBahn’s - Germany’s national rail provider - development and testing of  mobile ticketing.  They already have electronic ticketing for book ‘before you travel’ journeys.  Travellers can receive their ticket in the Form of a 2-D-Barcode via MMS (Multi Media Message). The code is scanned like an online-ticket from the telephone screen by the conductor (read more).

But dBahn are also running a highly sophisticated test of pay as you go mobile ticketing, utilising the phone as a wallet.  The ticket and payment is entirely integrated into NFC enabled mobile phones (NFC is a new, short-range wireless connectivity technology - more here).  Users get a monthly bill for travel as with their phone bill.

dBahn have integrated all public transportation between Hannover and Berlin and are using real paying customers to test the service.  If it works then in 2011/2012 it will be rolled out across Germany.  If it doesn’t - or if NFC phone adoption does not reach critical mass - they will “review strategy”, potentially walking away.  Now that’s an efficient test.

Site optimization…. more than middle or side, green or blue

One of the business case examples that most impressed me was Mr & Mrs Smith, the boutique hotel specialists focussing on romantic getaways for couples. (Check out their blog and see if you can resist spending!)

Utterly focussed on their specific target market, meticulous in understanding that market and their needs, testing and analysis seems like the oxygen their business breathes.

They are using multi-variant testing and high end web analytics (Omniture) to test and retest the critical elements of their site.  This is to ensure that every part of the site - from forms, to descriptors - are converting into business at the highest possible rate.  This is a serious approach to online optimisation - something that I fear the industry generally can often lack the knowledge, or perhaps confidence/skills to really attempt.

Every aspect of their marketing campaign activity is measured and its performance judged carefully according to tangible conversion factors such as new membership and revenue per member.  The information gleaned informs their subsequent actions and means that as a relatively small business, they can be as lean and profitable as possible.

Tamara and James, the driving force behind Mr & Mrs Smith, modestly reflected that there has been a huge amount of learning on the job, particularly in terms of developing and bringing in-house the skills they required.  But I strongly believe (well I would, wouldn’t I??) that their efforts in this area demonstrate conclusively how using data intelligently can establish a business as a real market ‘player’ and have a distinct advantage in these difficult economic times. 

And on the subject of measuring Twitter…

PhoCusWright at ITB was twittered with great aplomb (with the bloggers to thank for that I think). In fact, Twitter was used so heavily during the event to share comments and ask questions of the panels that the hashtag #ITB09 ranked as high as the 5th hottest Twitter topic of the day.  Lots of hype for the tool of the moment.

But - are your Twitterings generating results or wasting time?  Are you influencing or invisible? Well at last you can find out.

Eric Peterson has come up with a great tool  - Twitalyzer - specifically for Tracking Influence and Measuring Success in Twitter.  You can even combine your own exported data from Google Analytics with Twitalyzer.   Twitter addicts and sceptics alike should check out the Twitalyzer blog - you’ll be able to judge whether its worth your business’ attention based on hard evidence!

So what might PhoCusWright at ITB in 2010 bring?

Well I hope it will bring a lot more tangible examples like this.  Businesses using tools and technologies - not for technologies sake and not because of the hype - but to systematically improve customer experience and business profitability.  Those firms that will best emerge from these challenging conditions are those who know where to cut and where to spend - and that requires data and smart analysis.

Posted by Vicky

Opportunity, Apocalypse and Twitter

The Tracking Tourism team is currently in Berlin attending ITB and, courtesy of PhoCusWright, the conference organizers, attending the PhoCusWright@ITB conference and Bloggers Summit. All in all, a fantastic chance to meet with the great and good of travel and analyse where the industry is, where it is going and what the heck can be done about it.

And what a day one it has been - social media optimism, mobile as critical to business strategy, a new word “moxie” for the vocabulary - oh, and a dash of economic apocalypse.

We’ll have a series of posts over the next few days looking in detail at some of these themes, but we thought we would kick off with a quick report from the opening day, including the Bloggers Summit part of the conference.

Wise words from Philip C Wolf

The briefing from PhoCusWright’s CEO, Philip C Wolf, is always a highlight for me, and this year was no exception. With a self-confessed “keen sense of what’s hot and what’s not” he proclaimed 2009 as the year of 4 Ms:

• Money - not just lack of it, but also in terms of low interest rates and “bottom feeding” investors

• Media - “its all rough and tumble right now” with pay per click and user generated media really impacting travel distribution models.

• Mobile - “2009 is the year when mobile platforms become a strategic business imperative” (quote of the day in my opinion!)

• Moxie - (for readers outside of North America: verve, pep, know how and guts). The business acumen to “be comfortable swimming against the tide”

As Philip explained, it takes lots of moxie to control costs in the operating plan, while simultaneously investing in capital expenditures/innovation. For if companies only play defence then at best they may preserve their business entity - “but what if you work really hard to preserve something that is out of sync when the tide starts rising?”

Philip was careful not to dwell on bleak economic scenarios. His focus was primarily on identifying opportunity and “the big rewards for gutsy innovation”. He explained the signals of recovery that his analysts are looking out for.

The views at the ITB Convention Future Day was both more apocalyptic while actually reinforcing some of Philip’s sentiments.

You don’t even want to hear the worst case scenario…

I guess “Tourism in Times of the Global Financial Crisis” was never going to be uplifting. In the course of his introduction, Professor Max Otte, author of “The Crash Comes” managed to depress the audience into shell-shocked wide-eyedness with promises that “there are lots of bombs still to go off”, that the global banking system is technically insolvent and that in the worst case scenario of global depression “all bets are off“.

Professor Lipman of the UNWTO tried to raise spirits but somehow “as the economy goes so goes tourism” didn’t achieve the desired bounce. He did however express the goal to get tourism on the table as part of the G20 stimulus package discussions, due to its critical role in two way trade.

Some good news to be had the fact that a lot of the fundamental shifts in responding to the customer in travel have already been underway for some time. Meaning those who have already invested in understanding what the customer wants and building business models that enable them to deliver on that are in a stronger position. But as Dr Auliana Poon of Tourism Intelligence International warned:

“Customers have long memories… destinations and companies not on track with what the customer wants will fall by the wayside… customers are deciding”.

People still want to travel - I loved Dr Dieter Semnelrioth of the TUI’s analogy that “25 million Germans are sitting on their packed luggage.” But the early bird offers are not working, bookings are down - operators may move straight to last minute deals, eroding margins. As we have heard previously, customers are not trading out completely, but they are trading typically down (though it is the middle ground, 3 stars, feeling the most pain).

“Transformative” was used a little too much for comfort - the point being that there remain opportunities and that to quote Dr Poon “this recession will force us to live differently and travel differently and travel differently.” But transformative sounds kind of apocalyptic to me - after all, isn’t transformative what they said about the Black Death?

However, the themes mentioned at the PhoCusWright session earlier - particularly Moxie and Money - also made an appearance at an earlier presentation by Rolf Frietag, delivering the results of the largest worldwide travel survey in the form of the ITB World Travel Trends Report.

Put simply, if you have the guts to invest in the present climate, then there are great opportunities - construction costs and interest rates are low but you’ve got to be able to ride out a recession potentially lasting until late 2012.

I (Vicky) have lots more notes from this session, with each sound bite more depressing than the last - but for all our sakes I will handover to Stephen and the cheerier travel bloggers and their discussions on social media in tourism and travel.

The Top Social Media Trends for Travel and Tourism

The bloggers workshop sessions explored what blogging folk from within the industry believe are the top social media trends for travel and tourism.

Asked to choose a main theme for the coming year, the panelists opted for:

* More Twitter
* Better understanding how to use social media
* Increased use of social media as a PR tool
* More Twitter
* Employing a social media guy

These issues were then put before the audience to vote on what they thought of these prognostications. Despite the endorsement of Twitter from the panel, I seemed to detect a degree of skepticism in the hall and Twitter got lowest audience votes on key trends - suggesting perhaps that people feel the need to drive philosophy change and strategies, rather than simply focus on specific applications.

The discussions moved onto practical applications of social media within travel organisations. Klaus Hildebrandt reminded the audience that businesses didn’t used to be able to see how the web could deliver revenue - they finally saw that it comes with investment and effort. To get buy in to social media is to highlight the business cases, the good examples of how to add this to strategy.

Kevin May of Travolution cited the Queensland Dream Job as the perfect example of an integrated destination campaign using both traditional PR and social media marketing.

Stephen Joyce summarized the workshops with the sensible conclusion that “your customers are talking about you anyway. How are you, as leaders in your organisation, going to step into the conversation in the most meaningful way?”

However, while PhoCusWright is following a deliberate policy here of focusing on the can-do in the programming of the conference on the basis that wallowing in gloom isn’t really going to help any of us, I think there is still a world represented here at this conference that is a) frightened at what’s to come and b) has bigger fish to fry than considering the best way to use Twitter.

As a Twittersceptic (note not a Twitter-phobe!), I thought the more practical suggestions from the panel included:

• The role of mobiles will increase (more on this in a coming post)

• Using 2.0 for PR in a more savvy way and integrating this messaging with traditional forms of PR will grow

• Feedback 2.0 - tourism providers might start to listen to what their customers are saying across multiple channels.

• Context rather than content will become important - you need to get to the real info you want, not wade through interminable irrelevant guff.

• ‘We must do our homework’ - Companies must take a hard look to define what goals they want to reach, what target groups do we want to reach?

• Traditional metrics for online activity are inadequate for measuring social media.
• New metrics such as ‘volume of mentions’ will become important in judging success.

We look forward to tomorrow’s PhoCusWright@ITB09 conference.

Around New Year, it’s customary to write posts and articles with ideas about what will happen in the coming year.  Well, this post is a little late for that but I thought I would play with the question of ‘what will happen in the coming year’ and ask instead ‘what would I like to happen the coming year?’

By this, I mean things that could conceivably happen within the industry. Wishes about winning the lottery, the England cricket team winning the Ashes, somebody finding a pot of money down the back of their sofa that pays off the world debt etc are frankly too ludicrous to mention here. And so instead I am talking about those things that I think are more realistic (if still unlikely to happen!)

Wouldn’t it be great if…people understood the distinction between User Generated Content and social media?

This is one of the most common muddles that we come across and this confusion can have investment implications so it’s important to be clear about what the difference is between these two.

While similar information can appear on these channels, the tourism provider that says, “I’ve gotta get me a Facebook page” but is unaware of the stinking reviews they’re getting Tripadvisor and the videos of their cockroaches on Youtube is getting their priorities wrong.

Wouldn’t it be great if…businesses saw the recession as a long term opportunity rather than a short term one?

I have this (probably unfounded fear) that lousy tourism providers in the UK will get a boost this year on account of the weakness of the pound and the growth in domestic tourism.  What I would like to happen is that this is treated as a rare opportunity to show visitors, domestic or otherwise, what’s great about travel in the UK.  I fear though that some might feel that it’s an opportunity to gouge a market where demand has grown, while cutting back on service and value delivery as far as possible.

Wouldn̵