Report compares web analytics to sports car dashboard
The Porsche Carerra 2 is a complex, fine-tuned machine designed to get you from point A to point B in the shortest time possible. On its dashboard, you'll find just about everything the driver needs to monitor performance and reach your destination. According to a recent issue of The Wanderlust Report, your destination website, like the Porsche, should be a fine-tuned machine that helps move visitors from the initial visit through the travel planning process, onto commitment, and with any luck, all the way to brand advocacy.
Mark Shipley, President and Chief Strategist at Wanderlust, explains: 'Your website is the center of any strategically sound destination marketing campaign. It's the repository of your most valuable content. Any page on your site could be the next stop from one of your marketing efforts - Tweets, Facebook posts, TripAdvisor comments, news releases, email blasts, banner ads, ppc ads, mobile apps, YouTube videos - whatever you are doing online or offline to drive traffic to your site.'
Tracking Results with the Web Dashboard
'Like the Porsche,' Shipley continues, 'any destination, resort or attraction website should have a dashboard where you can monitor which of your efforts are performing up to expectations for creating traffic, and which need attention or reevaluation.'
A Website Marketing Dashboard can vastly improve your ability to monitor and improve your destination marketing ROI. 'In the past few years, a number of highly focused stand-alone applications have been introduced to improve the performance of website and internet marketing efforts. Frequently, we've used them ourselves and recommended them to help our clients,' said Shipley. Until recently, however, there were significant limitations on the kinds of data you could monitor about the results of your internet marketing campaigns.
Shipley provides an example: 'Wordtracker, for instance, can help you discover keywords and phrases, but it can't tell you how well your site ranks for those keywords, which words are delivering the most visitors to each page of your site, and which are resulting in the highest percentage of conversions.'
While Google Analytics can do many things, including painting a vivid picture of your website visitors as a group or in segments, it can't tell you much about any single visitor. 'Google Analytics can't describe visitors' behavior, who they are, how they got to your site or where they converted,' Shipley explains. 'Nor can it tell you which visitors have been the most active and what content they found most valuable.' In the spring of 2009, however, Google changed the rules of the game. 'Thanks to the release of Google API, many of these limitations have been eliminated -- opening up the opportunity for the next generation of internet marketing tools: The Web Marketing Dashboard,' Shipley concluded.
Read more of High Performance Destination Website Marketing in the Wanderlust Report, Volume 1, Number 9.
About Wanderlust
Wanderlust provides marketing, branding and management consulting to destinations, resorts and tourism attractions. We are experts at uncovering what drives people to choose where they go and building integrated marketing programs to attract them - using the internet, social networks, direct marketing and mass media.
Contact:
Mark Shipley
Phone: 518-272-2500
Email: mshipley@createwanderlust.com
