So what have I been doing for the last 2 years?

I believe that my key contribution has been to help professionalise the leadership of this organisation – meaning members money and sponsorship revenue has been used as effectively as possible to deliver meaningful benefits in the form of things like education programs and research.

You don’t want to hear about calls with corporate lawyers, agm & election processes and policy reviews.  So here are 10 important contributions that I have made (though by no means alone) in my two years on the board:

• turned the member podcasts round from loss making activities to a valuable source of revenue and member satisfaction
• professionalised the board and operational management through proper training and resourcing, culminating in the recruitment of an ED specialised in running organisations
• brought globalisation from being isolated in the form of the “international committee” into being a strategic goal and an aspect of every committees agenda – such as with the European team of the research committee
• set a strategic focus on key WAA delivery goals, of which certification is the foremost.  Certification launches in May.
• created a tactical European WAA management post, tackled admirably by René Dechamps Otamendi and now in the safe hands of Aurelie Pols
• facilitated membership revenue share back scheme for global country groups
• weathered appalling economic conditions without dramatic membership and revenue loss or curtailment of activities seen by many membership associations
• dare I say create a series of member meetings, both face to face and online, that were informative and well received
• ensured that the board remains strategic, rather than tactical in its deliberations and meetings while building an set of operational processes and resources that allow effective tactical delivery.  Now to get nimbler…
• relentlessly tackled the questions of member value and communicating member value – I’m not claiming we’re there but we have made significant progress

Lessons learned

I came to the board table thinking I’d be able to tackle the challenges of education, globalisation and member value in no time at all.  In reality I had no idea about the complexities, responsibilities and emotional as well as time demands of running an volunteer based organisation like the WAA, even though I run my own small business.

I can’t deny that at times it has been a frustratingly slow process, or that at other points it has been exhilarating as we have been able to maturely and professionally explore and debate critical decisions and then make necessary decisions, however tough.  I will even admit feeling that on occasions it has been a no win situation where rightly or wrongly we have attracted criticism from all angles, despite our best efforts.

But the amazing board development training I’ve experienced, led by Virtual, as well as an intense close working relationship with people I respect absolutely – such as President Alex Langshur, chairman Jim  Sterne, Board Director June Derschwitz and EDs Clare Madden and Mike Levin have transformed my skills, confidence and belief in myself as a board director.  So much so that I know there is so much more I can contribute as a WAA board director if I am given the opportunity of another term.

But I won’t make an empty but potentially popular promises that I will single handedly tackle this issue or that issue and heroically resolve it alone.  The WAA board currently works very effectively as a team, providing the strategic leadership and a responsible pairs or hands to guide and preserve the organisation for the maximum benefit of all its members.  The WAA as a whole works as an organisation serving its members and as a board we have to agree a course of action, communicate and earn the approval of the membership based on that strategy and then provide the resources to make it so..   It is not about simply promoting our own personal interests.

In two years I have seen this organisation professionalise significantly in terms of staff and operations and as secretary much of my day to day involvement has been in this area.  We still have a long way to go in overcoming the challenge of better getting from strategy to delivery – and we need to better our communications -  but I believe we have built the management team and systems that will take us from being the little start-up to a major professional organisation.

What I would bring back to the board if re-elected

If feel the WAA has invested a lot in me and I have invested a lot in myself over the past 2 years.  I’m ready to tackle whatever the next two years throw at me as the organisation grows substantially and professionalises further.  I believe I have a duty to ensure a smooth transition with the new Executive Director and in seeing the path we have set begin to unfurl – but challenges to ensure our membership can still be as involved and passionate as they want to be.

The secretary’s role, one that I have filled for the last 2 years, is a backstage one but it has been a challenging one too.  I’m perfectly happy working outside the spotlight and hey, someone needs to enjoy spending hours on the phone with corporate lawyers and the ED – and I do, very much.  I hope that shows to those of you that have met me and in the quality of work I have quietly delivered for those who have not.  I attend to ensure your money and your organisation continues to serve your professional needs efficiently, meaningfully and legally!

So, being a Brit, I’m on the Non-North American part of the ballot.  Only one of us will be elected.  I would like to ask for your support.  Members will be receiving their ballots today.  Not a WAA member?  Well join up and vote for me anyway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s get over the barriers first

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

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

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

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

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

How to look at your conversion process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When to stop looking and start acting

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

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

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

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

First let’s get the confession over with

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

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

But things got complicated.

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

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

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

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

•  online booking process optimization

•  the mobile web

….and at last the combination of both!

Hooray, mobile and transactions in the same breath…

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lufthansa example

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You know, the very stuff we bang on about all the time in this blog. Usability. Conversion. Analytics tied to revenue tracking.  Campaign return on investment. All the critical online fundamentals that either save money or generate revenue/visitor satisfaction.

But, what we have found, is that compared to a straight e-commerce business this has been technically far harder to achieve for the tourism businesses.

So hard that it has kept us away from the blog that we love as we have dived deeper into data, code and various site architectures than is healthy before lunch – and for site after site.

And so this post is an exploration (and a plea for your thoughts) on why that may be.  Why are tourism and travel businesses often technically and organisationally less able to maximise their performance from what in many cases is, or should be, their primary sales channel than say a straight e-commerce retailer?

And what can travel and tourism businesses do themselves, and through their technical suppliers, to overcome this in a way that drives efficiency in their business and improves the online user experience?

But first things first:

• This is not a blaming exercise. Common with many in the industry, each of the very successful businesses we are working with are fully bought into the idea of generating more revenue from the web and to the idea of improve their online user experience in order to generate more bookings.  The type of business I refer to in this post actively wants to get better, yet encounters technical challenges nevertheless.
• Nor is this about specific organisations – each of the clients we have been working with have shared common issues, but that process has highlighted to us just how often those issues are shared by travel and tourism businesses the world over.  This is about the many, not the few, and the points made here apply to general businesses in the industry, not specifically to the businesses we are working with.
• This is not just a “nice to fix”, it is a fundamental that matters to the bottom line and to the visitor experience.  It is nearly 2 years ago since we reported how customers are more satisfied with submitting their tax return than booking a flight – and as an industry (perhaps with the exception of some leading Online Travel Agents and travel technologists) the online travel shopper experience isn’t getting much better.

Why is this so difficult?

So why isn’t it easier for a small to medium tourism or travel business to seize online opportunities to drive revenue, delight customers and slash operating costs?  Why, even when the strong management desire is there, is implementation often so much harder than the “advising” national/regional tourism bodies might have you believe?

I don’t have the answers but I still think the question is worth tackling.

What follows are my personal thoughts and they don’t represent any one specific business (even if you do think I’m talking about you, I promise, I’m not).  They may be mis-guided (do let me know) and there may be easy fixes I’m not seeing (in which case I beg you to let me know).  But here are my ideas on why I think we are encountering so many technical, structural and strategic challenges now that are impeding the ability of travel and tourism businesses to fully succeed online.

1. Travel and tourism rarely thinks of itself as an e-commerce or even an online business. After pure online retail, travel/tourism is the next biggest e-commerce revenue generator on the web. But unlike the online retailer who created a business purely focussed on the web, many tourism businesses have evolved stealthily  into e-commerce businesses – so stealthily they may have barely noticed and do not have a rolling development strategy in place.

And for those for whom the majority of priorities/staff are involved in offline servicing of real-world visitors, it is no surprise that the businesses doesn’t think or behave like an e-commerce business – even when it is.  But the danger of not thinking in those terms is that the tourism business puts up with far lower proportions of direct online bookings than it could achieve (significant given this is typically the cheapest sales channel).  It may also fail to deliver the customer the level and quality of online self-servicing that the visitor actually desires.

This isn’t unique to travel though – think of the traditional high street retailer like Marks and Spencer, or the cinema like Vue – these too have “evolved” into e-commerce businesses even if the bulk of their staff service customers offline.   It is possible to do this with great success.

2. Under-investment, under-valuation and under-delivery of critical technical skills. Compared to straight e-commerce retail, where failure to deliver online means the business as a whole will fail fast (as opposed to potentially fail slowly), I believe tourism and travel has typically under-invested online as it has undervalued the channel’s contribution to the bottom line.  Tied to this is then the issue that by choosing what appears to be the cheap option, businesses find themselves either experiencing a massive under-delivery of skills and service levels, or they become tied into highly inflexible systems with hidden costs.  Too many times it is both.

3. No room for the online specialist.  Another symptom of the undervaluation of the channel, therefore the under-investment & under-performance is that is extremely rare for a travel or tourism business to have an online or development specialist (and I refer here to businesses of a size where this could potentially be achievable).   They are at a massive disadvantage compared even to far  smaller retail e-commerce businesses, or to pure OTAs, where a developer/online marketer is typically sought in the early rounds of hiring.

Without any access to a trusted online specialist, there is often then an organisational lack of confidence in its technical knowledge.  Negotiations with technical partners are frequently started at the outset with the admission that “I’m not technical” or “we’re not interested in how it works.”  For the unscrupulous supplier this is easy pickings.  For the merely incompetent it means that the lack of skills are likely to go undetected long after the damage is done (and why would the supplier both improving their skills at their own expense, if the customer doesn’t know/care either way).  And for the competent supplier it is demotivating and not likely to produce their very best work.

4. The booking system barrier & ad hoc bolt ons

For many tourism and travel businesses, the website started as a fixed brochure-type site and it evolved into an e-commerce site through the addition of third party e-commerce provisions and off the shelf booking engines.  There is nothing wrong with this in theory, for a site should never be viewed as finished and should be able to adapt.  And there are a number of good third party party booking systems out there, including our friends at ezRez and Rezgo who are occupying very different niches in the market.

But coming back to point 2, that integration of ad hoc elements, sometimes across multiple domains and microsites, has often been clumsier and less skilful than is desirable.   It has also often been reactive rather than strategic development, undertaken in isolation from overall operational planning.  User experience, search engine visibility, the ability to optimise the site and general business flexibility are impacted.   Businesses may find themselves paying for expensive amends to inflexible systems and set-ups, for example when they want to add web analytics tracking to transactions or want achieve bookings in fewer clicks.

Few existing providers (as opposed to new market entrants) seem to have embraced the rolling technology model, ie “we’re going to build an agile integrated, fit-for purpose system now, knowing that our needs, our customer needs and technology will be continuously evolving”.  Instead, where public bodies and businesses have built their own systems, these have frequently been costly, delayed and if ever fully fit for purpose, they have become quickly outmoded.

I think part of the reason for this is educational, as outlined in the next 2 points.

5. The educational/best practice examples shown by public tourism bodies

I think that due to their political remit, it can happen that public bodies focus their technical education and training/support on the smallest operators with the simplest online challenges, at the cost of those with more complex technical needs.  For example, by focusing on the small accommodation provider at the cost of the tour operator.   This can create the illusion that for all organisation types “adding e-commerce” is something one-off, quick, cheap and simple – rather than something strategic, ongoing and central to business operations.

At the same time, those same public bodies issuing the advice can be amongst the worst offenders at creating the costly, giant of an outmoded site that becomes almost too expensive to walk away from (more about the sunk costs fallacy here).  For the small/medium business that is looking round for an example to follow, they do not necessarily represent the best role model.  So, by looking only to the existing tourism sector and its associated public/support bodies alone, it may not be possible to find the best practices and understand where the benchmark for success really should be.

6.  Sectoral isolation

So, final point.  I accept that travel and tourism has its unique features and challenges as a sector.  But, the customer/website visitor spends more of their time on sites from other sectors – they have a holistic view.  I think that when it comes to e-commerce and online best practice – and to seeking third party suppliers with good skills/reputations -  the travel and tourism industry needs to look wider to fully be inspired, to understand what investment levels/supplier performance standards are required and to see where the market is moving.

Other businesses from all sorts of sectors have tackled how to get the best online results from the smallest necessary investments.  They have made all the mistakes and learned valuable lessons in the process.  From pizza delivery, web dvd rental and gaming, to straight retail e-commerce – businesses are proving that small teams can deliver profits and great customer service from their online investments.  I think tourism needs to look at other sectors more often, not just to understand how to to fix problems, but to visualise what really good actually looks like online.

Any thoughts on how to fix this?

To conclude, yes I appreciate that only many, many levels retail e-commerce and travel/tourism e-commerce are very different beasts.  For the e-commerce retailer (as for the specialist online travel firm) failure to invest and failure to get the web technology right means they fail fast.  But I think that for the tourism business that doesn’t invest and doesn’t get the technology right, there is still a significant risk to the business, it is just less immediately apparent and failure plays out more slowly.  Ad hoc fixes become more embedded and costly,  as opposed to forming strategic rolling investments,  yet feel ever harder to walk away from.

I think for those working in the field of support, education and development of tourism and travel online there are skills gaps, confidence gaps and value perceptions that need to be addressed.  I’d argue that looking primarily to the simplest model of the micro-accommodation provider when delivering education/advice does no favours to the sector as a whole.  There are typically far more complex e-commerce business models and configurations to be planned and invested in, demanding a higher level of technical awareness from management and a more sophisticated educational infrastructure to support them.

For the ambitious business owner determined to maximise online success, there is distinct value in talking to e-commerce retailers, as well as your tourism sector peers, when it comes to making critical decisions about suppliers, investment and online strategy.  If you don’t have confidence in your own technical skills, can you find a way buy them in, share them or borrow them, so that the online channel and associated expenditure doesn’t flail around outside the control of your main operations?

But I am aware that all I have done here is highlight my take on the questions and associated problems – where do you see the solutions?

Posted by Vicky

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

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

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

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

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

Tracking Campaigns – an example.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Campaigns + Goals = now analytics gets actionable

As Vicky argued in a previous post,

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

In other words, you need goals.

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

The table above shows us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what?

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

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

The technical bit – how it’s done

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

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

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

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

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

Filed by Stephen (17/06/09)

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

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

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

And it seems they are.

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

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

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

Remember when we all stuck our brochures on the web?

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

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

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

Are you ready for that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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)