Return on Investment (ROI) is one of the biggest marketing mysteries we are facing collectively as an industry today. You should not be spending money on marketing where you do not track your spend. Metrics are not perfect, but you should also understand that if you don’t measure your marketing efforts, you are relying on “hope” marketing. This is a dangerous business in today’s marketing environment – you just can’t be sure whether or not your efforts and spend are successful. Just as importantly, you may diverting resources away from other, more successful, opportunities.
Broadly speaking, though, we find there are generally two camps in the travel and tourism business:
- Those who spend and don’t measure, relying solely on ‘hope marketing’ – spending marketing time and budget and ‘hoping’ it goes well.
- Those who have all the metrics in place, but don’t do anything with it for any number of reasons – lack of time or know-how perhaps.
It can be a difficult area, but you need to strike a balance between best practice and the real world. It is not always black and white, particularly in areas like social media, PR and brand equity. The first questions is: Are you measuring the right things?
I encounter a lot of wastage of precious marketing budgets. An area that upsets me most is trade shows, where it’s common for leads to not be followed up. On many occasions I have seen garbage bins at the exit of some travel shows filled with brochures!
There is no true way to measure these sorts of tactical executions of your budget. But in the digital age where it is easy to truly connect with interested travellers, you must question the ROI of every dollar and hour spent on a campaign.
Measuring ROI on your website
Your website is your “shop front and your face,” so make it work for your business. To do so, you need to determine exactly what you are measuring and align this to your business goals. Typically this means measuring revenue, visitation and costs.
Google Analytics makes it easy and free to measure and track your website stats. It allows you to link them to specific goals and measure success.
First, establish a website tracking cycle that allows you to:
1. Determine your overall strategy with both long and short term goals
2. Establish a baseline by recording your data and statistics (take into account seasonal fluctuations and exceptional occurrences)
3. Proceed with tactical execution
4. Collect data over a period of time
5. Compare baseline data to the new data
6. Refine and adjust your campaign
This way tourism marketers will be able to measure goals such as sales, leads, revenue, blog post hits, and audience development.
The beauty of online backed by Google Analytics is that it allows you to measure criteria such as online bookings and purchases, filled out contact forms, sign-ups to newsletters, PDF downloads, number of visitors to the site, traffic by keyword, search engine or mobile, and geographic location, among many other useful measurements. You can also measure branded traffic. Branded traffic is when a traveller searches using your business or destination name, or types your domain name directly into the search bar.
By following the above guidelines you can go on to tweak and refine your campaign goals. This is the digital age, so you can rinse and repeat for measurable ROI business success driven by your website.
About the author
Bronwyn White is the co-founder of MyTravelResearch.com, a market research and marketing firm specializing in the travel, tourism and aviation industries. Its specialty is providing insights that are actionable. Founded by principals with lifetime careers in travel, tourism and aviation, MyTravelResearch.com exists to build the visitor economy and successful tourism businesses.
