Seeing the big picture with a Website Marketing Dashboard
According a recent issue of The Wanderlust Report, your destination website is like a high performance sports car, and requires a dashboard to fine-tune the performance of your marketing efforts. The marketing experts at Wanderlust suggest a Website Marketing Dashboard can vastly improve your destination marketing ROI.
'The Web Marketing Dashboard's main page brings together the best of Google's Analytics data with the data your website collects to give you a much more robust view of your marketing efforts,' stated Mark Shipley, President and Chief Strategist at Wanderlust. 'You can view big picture statistics - such as visits, pages per visit and bounce rates - and watch how they trend over time, and drill down to more detailed metrics for greater insights. By overlaying the your website's tracking data, you can gain a better understanding of where your traffic-driving efforts are paying off.' Shipley explains. The Wanderlust Report offered this look at some of the possibilities of Website Marketing Dashboard tools.
Google Analytics reports
Google provides a number of Analytics reports that are a must for the Web Marketing Dashboard, including visits-by-location maps, most-viewed pages, referring sites, and search phrases.
'Alone, Google Analytics tell you a lot,' said Shipley, 'But when you combine the referring sites and search phrases reports with your own website's data, you can see which sources and keywords are resulting in actual conversions.' Imagine how you might change your internet marketing plan if you were to find that the sources and keywords that drive the most traffic - and hence, where you have focused the most resources - result in the lowest rate of conversion.
Shipley offered this telling example: 'This was a trend we discovered on our site. Our pay per click campaign [ppc] was driving a ton of traffic to our website, however it was inflating our bounce rate by 150% and wasn't even in the top twenty conversion sources. We were able to test a number of alternative scenarios and determine that ppc was not a good investment for Wanderlust at this time.'
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.
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Contact: Mark Shipley Phone: 518-272-2500 Email: mshipley@createwanderlust.com
