At the recent World Travel Market in London, travel industry experts came together to discuss web analytics and the huge impact that seemingly trivial website observations and tweaks can have on your business. .
Cameron Jones, director of business development at Expedia, emphasized the importance of a responsive website to the business: "In 2006, people were willing to wait 4 seconds for a web page to open. Now they are only willing to wait 2 seconds."
Even a small error in an online reservation system can lead to the loss of valuable customers. In his speech titled "Don't Make Me Think, Don't Make Me Wait," Jones emphasized that customer satisfaction can definitely lead to customer loyalty.
"In fact, 79% of users who are dissatisfied with your website may not make a purchase even if they return to your website, and 27% may not visit your website again," he said .
Jones emphasizes that when using website traffic analysis tools, you can't just focus on conversion rates. The travel industry also spends the same time not only attracting customers to the website, but also keeping them there and ensuring that they complete the entire transaction.
"Often it's cheaper to make better use of users who are already on the site than to attract more users to these underperforming sites," said Vicky, co-founder of Inverness, a Scotland-based Highland business research company. Brock said. "If we can increase the actual conversion rate of 1,000 users who are interested in making a reservation, it is more cost-effective than attracting 5,000 more users to visit the website."
Brock added that the average successful conversion rate for travel websites is only 1%-3%.
“Not every website visitor will ultimately make a purchase,” she said. "However, many people originally had this plan, but because they encountered too many difficulties, the user experience was too poor, and a certain step in the entire process went wrong. They tried hard, but gave up in the end, and the website also failed Lost these customers."
She stresses that this is a simple mistake, but it can also result in lost potential revenue. And because they did not conduct website traffic analysis, many companies did not discover the existence of these problems.
“During the booking analysis process, rescuing an abandoned order is a quick way to do it,” says Brock. "Whether you like it or not, many people visit your website every day hoping to satisfy their own goals and fulfill the purpose of the site, but in the end it all goes wrong, and the site may not even know it."
"Maybe they will try again until the operation is successful. But often, the problem is with the technology. They may keep trying and still not succeed. Then they may call the call center ... but their information will never Won't be back...when you look back at these failed bookings, you made no money despite the guest's efforts to spend their money."
With so many people giving up at the website booking stage, how do you find out what went wrong in the entire process? Brock says you need to go through the booking process for your guests themselves.
"It could be a small character error, or a bank payment system that goes down on a certain day...you have to quickly figure out how many reservations are affected and what their value is," she said.
Brock cites one of her travel industry clients as an example. This client wants to maximize their online revenue. During traffic analysis, it emerged that 0.3% of bookings during the booking process were affected by the inclusion of simple "illegal" characters where the customer entered their mobile phone number. The problem, which went unnoticed by them and affected the site for six months, took just two hours to fix and boosted their revenue by £25,000 ($40,668) in the next billing period.
Jones believes the booking process should be made easy.
“Website traffic analysis doesn’t really require much brainpower,” he says. "You need to ensure that the functions of your website are clear enough for customers to understand at a glance, and that they can give customers an intuitive first impression."
The customer's expectation for the entire page to load is two seconds. Jones said that 40% of customers will leave a page if it takes more than three seconds to load.
"And of those 40 percent, about 67 percent will go to one of your competitors' sites and never come back," he said. “There is value in measuring page load times.”
Jones said that now more than half of companies have started traffic analysis on their websites, and the five most commonly used analysis tools by these companies are: A/B testing, multivariant testing, Customer journey analysis, user testing and cart abandonment.
Jones recommends using multiple tools to optimize analysis. He also insists that the call center's role in the booking process is also important. Expedia tracks the first ten people who call the call center, and if those calls are related to issues on the website, they can know what the problem is. In this way, costs are reduced and conversion rates are increased by displaying these issues in the FAQ section of the website.
“If you had someone dedicated to conversion rates, you could double your conversion rates,” says Jones. "For us, this is a very critical point. For our affiliate network, we have hired specialists to deal with conversion rates, and the results are already showing."