Gaining insights from your proprietary web data
According a recent issue of The Wanderlust Report, the real power of using a Website Marketing Dashboard is in the proof. 'By combining Google Analytics with your proprietary website data,' Wanderlust President and Chief Strategist Mark Shipley explains, 'you will no longer have to wonder which inbound marketing strategies are working best for each conversion goal because you'll know.
'If you spend time building inbound links for your destination website content with SEO, social media, news releases, link trading and directories, it helps to know which of those efforts are delivering quality traffic,' Shipley says.
Google Analytics can tell you, for example, that organic search on Google is your number one referrer and that Twitter is your third. But when you overlay your website data, you'll quickly see that Travel Industry Wire (number four) returns twice the percentage of quality traffic than both Google and Twitter. 'If conversions are your goal, now you know where to weight your effort,' Shipley points out.
Keyword Ranking vs. Conversions
'Another interesting thing that an Internet Marketing Dashboard can reveal,' Shipley says, 'is the difference between ranking for a keyword and the quality of traffic that results. In other words, just because you rank high doesn't mean you get quality traffic.'
With a Search Engine Phrase tracker, you can monitor phrases by the number of conversions they generate. Shipley offered this example: 'The phrases that generate the most conversions on our site include 'the wanderlust report,' 'destination positioning,' and 'tourism advertising agency.' While today we rank number five in Google for the keywords 'destination branding' and the phrase has generated the highest amount of traffic to our site by far, the resulting conversions are unimpressive. This kind of insight helps us understand where our organic search campaign is working, and where it needs attention,' Shipley concludes.
Put yourself in the driver's seat
Like a high performance sports car, your website should be able to provide the feedback you need to fine tune your website marketing efforts. By having your Destination Website Marketing Dashboard tools in place and understanding how to gain insight from the data, you can take your website from 0-60 in no time and turn it into a finely-tuned conversion machine.
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
