KPI.. Keeping it cheap?

Behind every successful business there is the capacity to measure the factors that really count in achieving their marketing objectives. The internet offers exceptionally effective tools in this regard, since unlike any other medium, every activity performed by every user leaves a measurable trace.

However (and this is something that really astonishes me!) in the fiercely competitive panorama of the online travel & hospitality sector, many players still think it is enough to track the most-visited pages, where visitors come from, or the average time spent on a website and will only allocate very limited resources to actually understand and monitor the traffic informations. This is even more puzzling when considering the range of professional tools that are now available at very reasonable prices and the economic urge to optimise all metrics to keep down conversion costs.

The rising cost of acquiring a customer online means you have to measure exactly what happens both when a customer is captured by means of, for example, a given keyword, and when a customer is navigating the website. Only by relating these indicators to your own economic tourism logic and to the specific logic of each customer can you guarantee sustainable distribution costs and continual improvement of performance.

Kpi measurement means moving from a “webtracking approach” (a nice picture of your traffic to bring to the board, that will die in a drawer), to a revenue-oriented “web analytics approach” , i.e. typically gathering, filtering, analisying your data in a structured way that allow you to daily improve your search engine marketing, your navigation, your product offering…your ROI.

My personal word of wisdom here is to take off a minimum percentage of your search marketing or advertising spending and investing it in understanding and fine-tuning your online presence.