Without insights, website optimisation is guess work. If you really want to improve your travel website conversion, you need to start with the data to understand how customers are currently using your website. I will talk you through the most important areas for you to understand and how the travel industry can interpret this data.
Your understanding of where to optimise your online experience will be the strongest when you combine quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative research primarily tells you what is happening, and qualitative insights tell you why.
Quantitative Data:
Quantitative analysis provides you with a large sample of data, so you can understand the key facts. When exploring your quantitative analysis, your aim is to understand which areas of your online journey are working well, and which aren’t. You can also start to use techniques such as surveys to understand why this might be the case whilst still gathering a large sample of data.
Google analytics (GA): GA is the most common website data tool – if you use alternative reporting then feel free to use this, as the approach is the same. There are 4 key areas of your website data to assess:
Entry points:
- Where are your customers coming from (PPC, SEO, email marketing)?
- How are these customers converting?
A low conversion rate for a channel could suggest that you are enticing them in with information and then not providing the insight you need on your website.
Landing pages:
- Which landing pages attract the most traffic?
- How are these customers converting?
A low conversion rate from pages suggests that you are not showing a customer what they are looking for. If someone clicks on a link for cheap hotel deals from google, they will be expecting to find deals – not just a list of hotels at reasonable prices.
The customer funnel:
It is likely that your site follows linear steps with landing pages, search results, product pages and a checkout. There might be additional steps, for example airlines and hotels frequently try to upsell other products & package holidays will probably have a flight and hotel selection page. You want to map out your funnel and understand:
- Where customers are progressing with ease?
- Where do you have the highest drop-off rates?
Keep in mind that different steps of the funnel naturally have different progression rates – your progression from your results page is likely to be the lowest, as browsing customers decide here if your prices and products are right for them before committing further.
You can also understand if customers are visiting the same pages multiple times, which is usually an indicator of customers trying to compare holidays or having flexible search parameters – again you might be able to better optimise this experience.
These three key areas will give you your initial understanding of where you might have gaps in the customer experience and opportunities to improve. You then need to combine this high level understanding with other insights to understand why customers are dropping off at certain points.
Component level data:
Once you understand the main customer journey, you can dig into page level specifics where there looks like there is an opportunity to improve. Key examples of this are form completion and error rates. It’s not uncommon for travel websites to create friction in the checkout form. For example, by making it compulsory for customers to provide their passport number. Customers might might not have this available when they want to book.
Behavioural analytics:
Combining your funnel data with tools like hotjar provides a strong understanding as to where you can optimise.
You can view scroll depths, mouse clicks and mouse moves to understand where customers spend their time on the page, which features are helpful and where customers are becoming frustrated. You can also see screen recordings of sessions to watch how customers use your site and what they find challenging.
Surveys:
You can use hotjar, or other tools, to ask questions. Common examples of this are:
- Exit surveys. These are used to understand your reason for leaving without making a purchase
- Post purchase surveys. These aim to understand what you found easy and your reason for booking.
- In site surveys. These can be used to ask page specific questions to understand why your customers might love your luxury hotel page, but get frustrated by your summer holiday deals finder.
AB/MVT data:
If you run your own AB tests, you can gain a lot of insight from assessing what has and hasn’t worked. If something has worked, and you understand the rationale behind this, then you might be able to see how this pattern could help in the rest of the funnel.
For example, if I look at a common theme for the AB tests that I have ran over the past years – the most successful theme is reassurance. Travel is an expensive purchase. Experiments that highlight the following factors help a customer feel confident about booking with you:
- Value for money
- Why a product is great ie – best rated, popular among other families
- Flexibility or cancellation terms
Travel is a very important purchase, which means that purchase anxiety is typically high. Understanding that the theme of reassurance has been successful, helps me to understand where else I can add value.
Qualitative data
Now that you know what customers are doing on your website, you need to continue to understand why they are behaving this way. The best way to achieve this is by speaking to your customers to gain qualitative insights.
This can be done in 2 main ways:
User testing: This allows you to understand customers thoughts and behaviours as they use your website and where they might find it challenging.
If you have a new version of your website, a prototype or a concept you want to try out, or you want to see how customers are currently using your website, you can carry out usability testing. This lets you see frustrations and pain points with how they use your site, but doesn’t provide you with any detail on real-life decision making and how a customer would act if actually spending money.
Talking to customers: By speaking to your customers, you can understand why they use your website, why they travel and what their requirements are. You start to build a stronger picture of what customers’ motivators are and how they are more likely to act in a real life scenario. This helps you to uncover new opportunities and assess where you could make the experience easier for customers to achieve their goals. Customers looking for a honeymoon are likely to have very different requirements to customers looking for a family summer holiday – by speaking to them, you can start to understand what they need.
There are several ways you can speak to your customers, and they don’t all require a big budget. You can:
- Use an agency to recruit customers for user testing/interviews
- Recruit customers directly to speak to through social media/email mailing lists
- Visit travel shops, hotels or the airport to speak to real travellers
- Speak to colleagues from departments that don’t your website very often
To get these kind of insights, and understand how customers truly use your product, you could use techniques diary studies. If you’re more interested in getting a general understanding of customer motivations and thoughts on travel websites, you could use customer interviews or focus groups.
Your aim when speaking to your customers is to understand:
- Customers perception of your product: What do they like about your brand and experience? What do they use your website for? why? This helps you understand what you’re already doing well and can continue to optimise. It also helps you to uncover the deeper rationale for why someone uses your brand and this might spark ideas for new features.
- Customers perception of competitors’ products: Why do they use other competitors? What are their favourite features? Why? This allows you to understand if you have any gaps in your offering that you might want to serve.
- Uncover their Jobs to be Done: Why do they travel? What are they really trying to achieve? This helps you to discover their actual needs and think about how you could serve your product to them in a different way, or implement new products to meet these needs.
You should use your qualitative insights to compliment your quantitative insights. Once you have gathered this research, you will be able to paint a really clear picture of what customers are doing on your website and why. You will see what customers’ real motivators are and where you serve these well. You will be able to understand the key opportunities you have to optimise this experience and use this data to generate ideas on how best to do this. Read this article to see how you can use this data to optimise the customer experience.
I can help you to analyse your insights and grow your online sales. Get in touch to see how I can help you to grow your business.