This is why visitors to your DMO website don’t come back (and here’s what you can do about it)

Every DMO marketer worth her salt knows that the key metrics of a website's effectiveness are reach and conversions, but knowing how to increase these two numbers is an ongoing puzzle for most DMOs. These days the standard DMO website includes several areas of loosely organized content, along with a hodgepodge of external links, booking engines, and social plugins. This approach could loosely be summed up as "more is more", a belief that visitors want something, so let's throw as much stuff on the site as possible and hope they find what they need.

Travelers are a hungry bunch when it comes to consuming web content in the days leading up to and during their trip. According to a recent study by Millward Brown Digital and Expedia, the average customer of OTA (online travel agencies), such as Orbitz, Travelocity, and Priceline, visits 38 travel sites in the 45 days preceding booking.The same study lays out a series of sample purchase paths, which show users bouncing between sites at an increasing clip, peaking at an average of 15.5 sites in the week just prior to booking.

At first blush it would seem that all this activity must be good for DMO sites, but the details of the study tell a different story. Unfortunately, all the sample paths include the DMO website only once, meaning that as voracious as the appetite of travelers is for content, they don't seem to be finding much of what they need on the relevant DMO site. Another recent study, this one by Travel 2.0, points out the problem even more bluntly:

Unfortunately, while DMOs and CVBs receive a lot of new traffic and new visitors, we do a poor job in delivering the content and experience desired by the consumer.

Here's the chart from that study showing number of visits made by each user of a DMO site:

Perhaps even more troubling than the low rate of repeat visits, was the average length of time each visitor spends on-site. According to the report, 65% of visitors spends less than 30 seconds on the DMO website:

These charts from Travel 2.0, along with the sample paths from the Expedia study, point to a disturbing truth for DMOs: the standard DMO website is just not that useful for travelers. As Travel 2.0 writes:

Ask yourself this: could you find information on your website, about the most popular tourism attraction in your town, in less than 30 seconds?

Perhaps more to the point for DMO marketers, how likely is it that a visitor spending less than 30 seconds on your site will convert? Obviously, if users are bouncing from a site and not returning, there is almost no chance of a conversion. So how can DMOs address this problem, and get their visitors to spend more time on their site and to return more often?

In our next blog post, we're going to look at conversions and conversion paths in more detail, and also talk about how to create a deeper relationship with travelers. In the meantime though, here are some general approaches that can help:

1) Focus on key questions.

Marketers today have more metrics at our disposal than ever before, and yet the sheer volume of data tends to create more confusion than clarity. If you're using a tool such as Google Analytics to track usage of your website, you know that there are hundreds of different metrics that can be combined, sliced, and diced into a myriad of different reports. Combing through all the possible reports can be frustrating and can distract you from the numbers and trends that really matter. If you feel overwhelmed, start out by focusing on the metrics that address a few key questions:

• What percentage of our users are returning?
• What's the bounce rate (i.e. the number of users who visit one page and then leave?)
• What's the average number of page views per visit?
• What's the average length of time on-site?

Look for the reports that show you week-over-week and month-over-month trends for these metrics, and add them to your dashboard. Use those reports to get a quick snapshot of how your site is doing right now, and as a baseline for comparison going forward.

2) Assess your site from the point of view of a visitor.

Too often, DMO websites are organized as buffets, rather than set menus. Travelers don't want everything all at once, but come to your site at specific points in time to conduct specific activities. Each activity requires certain content and functionality. If travelers can easily find this content and functionality, then they can convert; otherwise, they will go elsewhere and likely not return during future phases of travel. We'll discuss these phases, along with the relevant content and functionality in a subsequent blog post, but for now think about what visitors need to do when evaluating possible destinations, booking a destination, planning their itinerary, arriving, and following their itinerary, as well as post trip activities (sharing, returning, etc.) Take each use case and try to complete the necessary activities through your site (or better yet, have a friend or someone unaffiliated with your organization try.) For each use-case, try to answer the following questions:

• Was I able to complete the activity?
• How long and how many steps did it take?
• Was there enough content and functionality to complete the activity or would I need to go to another site?
• Was all the content and functionality I saw relevant, necessary, and credible?
• Were there any steps or content that could be eliminated?

3) Clean up and link your conversion paths.

Once you've done your assessment of your site based on use-cases, you should have a better idea of whether the organization and content is conducive to conversions, and how to streamline and improve your conversion paths. The good thing about this approach is that in lieu of redesigning your entire site, you can usually layer new conversion paths into your existing site by rearranging content, refining your menus and calls to action, and de-prioritizing content outside of those conversion paths. In other words, this is something you can do right now (and immediately reap the benefits of), without waiting for your next big redesign project.

In addition to streamlining your conversion paths, you should try whenever possible to tie together your paths. When a visitor gets to the end of one path, such as booking a hotel, he should be started on the next path, such as planning or selecting an itinerary nearby. Ideally the visitor should be able to bookmark his progress through each path, so that he can easily return and pick up where he left off. It's also helpful to have your analytics software tracking this progress so that you can continue to assess and refine the conversion paths. You can use third-party tools to fill in some of these steps; however, it's important to keep the visitor within your brand for as many as possible. Consider using brand-able, third-party tools such as LocalNav to provide more comprehensive end-to-end content and functionality while maintaining your brand presence.

Sources:

• http://advertising-expedia.sites.hubspot.com/path-to-purchase
• http://travel2dot0.com/destinationmarketing/who-is-the-average-dmo-website-visitor/