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By: Jason Miller Leveraging Local Tourism Websites
March 2, 2009
Analytics.
Without them I wouldn't be able to successfully convert website visitors into actual guests. Every week I run various reports to determine how my paid advertisements are doing (such as VRBO) and how much traffic is converting to my website. While VRBO does great things in terms of bookings, the actual conversion to my website is nearly non existent. Potential guests use VRBO to submit leads (that we owners hope to convert) and very rarely click over to your actual website. While this is great we must also consider how to find visitors and send them directly to our websites.
I have a pretty aggressive on-line marketing program for my rentals. Together I have a total of 3 properties all in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. My goal is to capture as much traffic on-line when guests search for rentals in the Shenandoah Valley. A very simple goal, but yet a very challenging goal. My marketing program consists of a main website that is used 100% for SEO purposes and constant web based updates I publish. This site links to the dedicated websites for each of the rentals. Each rental website is linked from local tourism websites, VRBO, and any dedicated advertisements I run.
Interesting enough I'm finding a trend that is worthwhile to report on. Over the past year my website traffic to the dedicated rental pages is nearly all coming from local tourism websites! This past week I ran a report on my website which consisted of 350 unique visitors to the website.
If you look at the report shown to the right you will see that 70.67% of my traffic during this week was a direct result of an advertisement on Virginia.org. Another great number is the local valley websites coming in at 4.80% and 3.47% of my website traffic! The rest of my traffic is pretty much from direct loads (user types www..) or my landing page site for all the rentals (www.WeekendOasis.net).
One question you might be asking is, "That is great but do those users convert?" Yes! While I do not have the firm numbers for this year in regards to conversions from the local tourism websites I can certainly tell you that I am getting a lot of confirmed bookings from these sites. In the next week I'll have actual numbers to publish.
What does this tell me? It is absolutely critical to leverage every single local tourism website. It also tells me to leverage any paid advertisements on these websites this year to see if the increased exposure continues to drive conversions. If you are not taking advantage of local tourism websites it's time to start doing so. Seek them out, publish advertisements, and keep an eye on your analytics.
Jason Miller
Jason@jamz.net
703-468-1823
www.WeekendOasis.net
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