29 Mar 2010, Posted by Peter in Featured, Travel 2.0, 0 Comments

Your Bounce Rate: Keeping it Low. Guidelines For Tourism Businesses.

Marketing your travel service to an online audience also means that you are marketing to an invisible audience… unless you have the right tools at your disposal AND you know how to utilize them effectively. While sitting in some terrible Cape Town traffic this morning I thought “its kind of humorous how the benchmark for online tourism marketing is raising in terms of flashiness, bold visual elements, humor, colour, class and style, while your audience is becoming harder to identify, categorize, and even harder to impress and convert to loyal users, rather than viewers.

When utilising the correct analytical tools you can get to know a great deal about your audience and their behavior, but not always the logic behind it.

Your Bounce rate is a good example of this. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, in short, your bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who access your website and then leave again without exploring other pages or elements of your website. This rate is typically presented as a percentage and is clearly shown on measuring tools such as Google Analytics.

Q: Why is a high bounce rate such a bad thing? A: Because you are left in the dark.

You now have successfully managed to communicate with potential clients, successfully created channels driving them to your website, successfully implemented tools to track them, and successfully lost their attention. And you don’t even know why.

When it is out of your hands

People are curious. They do not only access sites relevant to their primary needs. They explore, follow recommendations, follow links, and love to weigh their options. You will always have people accessing your site without navigating through all your beautiful pages. Therefor a bounce rate lower than 35% should be considered good. Don’t be too hard on yourself.

When it is not

Use an accurate marketing message

When looking for travel products online consumers seek specific value, whether competitive pricing, niche product offering, or premium assistance and support. Your marketing message should always be relevant to the information and product the viewer will find on the other side of your link. Let’s make it practical. Say you are running a 4 star lodge in your destination (in my case, Cape Town) and have some great winter specials coming up. Sending out a message saying ‘Visiting Cape Town? Get great deals here!’ will probably drive a large amount off traffic to your hotel site, but is it an accurate message? The terms used are broad and could promise something greater than discounted accommodation rates. That specific message is likely to appeal to someone looking for a site offering or comparing travel deals and packages in general, rather than promoting a single service.

Consider using more accurate and product specific messages. It might not drive the same massive amount of traffic, but it will lure the right audience. These are visitors who engage in your site and inquire about your service – the type of visitor you can track, list, and build a relationship with. A better marketing message could be ‘Need accommodation in Cape Town? Click here to see our 2010 winter rates’.

Create a pleasant experience, make your product accessible

You do not necessarily need a newly developed travel website with all the bells and whistles to keep a visitor’s attention. You need something that works. Something that answers questions. Flashy landing pages with a long loading time, complicated navigation, academic terminology and loading bars are all things that can diminish the user experience. Keep visitors on your site by keeping these barriers as low as possible.

Offer value

When visitors leave your site (whether they bounced or not), they will compare what they have seen, and what they have been offered, to the services and value of your competition. Make them feel that they are benefiting from finding your website, and they would be losing out if they didn’t. This will not only keep them around, but also bring them back. A very simple way of creating a sense of invitation is by using a personalised welcoming message, rather than a formal introduction. You can also offer value to visitors by offering a thank you ‘gift’ for visiting your site. An example of this is  a discount coupon only accessible through your site, or a competition with an online entry form. Keep in mind that these should be visible the moment the visitor lands on your page. You need to grab them as soon as a you have their attention.

Keep content current

For me, one of the biggest turnoffs when visiting a travel site is seeing outdated information. Make sure that your information, image gallery, and especially your rates are up to date. Be careful to add a news section or blog to your site if you do not have the capacity or content to update it frequently. An outdated news feed can send visitors running and push up your bounce rate, even if all other content is up to date.