Re-think Your Metrics: Travel Booking Isn’t Linear (Tom McCallum interview, Part 1)

Josiah’s note: The following comes from a conversation I recently had with Tom McCallum. In this article, Tom discusses the travel booking process, and how it takes place today.

As John Wanamaker famously said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

I blogged on this a while ago – it’s becoming increasingly difficult for marketers to track their campaigns. I’ve noticed that as I deal with conventional tourism marketing – they’re not so familiar with online media. Their methods of tracking in all cases — not just online marketing metrics –but off-line: what’s the value of print, what’s the value of TV, what’s the value of radio? All of these conventional media buying metrics in which the old-school media buyers have so much experience… they find very difficult to track new media.

Travel Booking Isn’t Linear

There’s no straight line from ad campaign to purchase in travel marketing anymore. There’s just so many factors that go into purchasing travel.

If you take Expedia as an example – their numbers are down in a number of areas. People are using them as the Amazon.com of travel, they research there first, but increasingly Expedia and other Online Travel Agents are finding it more difficult to give people reasons to book there. As I was recently reviewing a survey done for luxury hotels and brands, it was quite stunning to see the stats on how people are booking directly through the hotels.

So there are no easy answers.I think it comes down to that really scientific thing: gut feel!

I feel a little bit like a Steve Jobs of travel marketing sometimes — “To hell with the research! This is what we need to do.” And I think hotel marketing is really in a state of flux right now. We have all the people that we’ve been dealing with for years — ad buyers, media agencies — but they really don’t understand online behavior enough yet.

It’s a Branding Issue

And then when you look at social media brand building, for example, like Gary Vaynerchuk has been doing. It’s the whole personal brand thing, and is so applicable to hotels – especially independent hotels.

We’ve got a great example of this with what Joie de Vivre hotels has been doing: building almost a personal brand of each individual property.

We get far too hung up on metrics. I think you get buried in numbers and put off by numbers. So I’m sounding a bit like an ad rep — saying not to worry about the numbers, and just buy my ads. But I think with regard to online metrics, I’m really just interested in how many unique site visitors I have, how many new visitors I’m getting, where they’re coming from, and what type of search they used to find us. Not just direct referrals – but the phrases that people are using to find us online.

And that’s the disconnect. If you find that 40% of people are finding you by typing your hotel name into a search engine — you’ve completely lost connection to your metrics. Where are they coming from? It could be a print ad, it could be completely residual, it could be they saw a special promotion and the price is right.

This is the way I see people coming to my client’s sites. People don’t bookmark websites anymore – they simply type it into Google. For example, if I don’t know the name of your blog, I would just type in “hotel marketing blog” — and arrive at your site. People just do that for everything.

Focus on Website Optimization

The important thing is website optimization. Let’s concentrate on website efficiency. Get people onto the site in the first place, and that’s where you can begin creating some good metrics.Monitor their path through your website, and adjust for sales efficiency.

Obviously for hotels, the question is: are we making it possible for them to book a reservation in the way they want at any stage? You want to make sure there’s a widget on every single page that allows anyone to commence the booking process at any time.

So do everything you can that you think would be effective in bringing people to your website and then focus on converting those visitors to bookings.

This Requires a New Approach to Marketing Planning

Don’t just say “I have $1 million to spend to market my hotel this year,” and then going down the list of marketing options – so much on this, so much on that, so much on the other. Instead of doing it as a top to bottom list — like a CPA would do a budget –take a sheet of paper and draw a big circle at the center. Write “website” in the middle of that circle, and then everything else that needs to be focused on how to get people to your site.

Every single resource, you spend on marketing needs to answer the question: “How will people get to our website?” Once you’ve done that, look from the perspective of inside your website, and imagine the different sources that people will be using to arrive there. How did they come to you?

Conversion isn’t linear. People don’t just come to your website and book when they get there.

Make People Feel Good About Their Decision

They’re going to look for pre-reservation validation. They are going to check what people are saying about the hotel on TripAdvisor, they’re going to check rates elsewhere, they’re going to check alternatives.

And then even after they’ve made the purchase, you need to make damn sure that they feel they made a good decision. People will often do just as much research after they’ve bought something. This is often overlooked: what do we do to make sure we hold onto the reservations we’ve got?

Do you have enough information on your website and web presence – Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor – so that someone who has made a reservation feels absolutely comfortable they have made the right decision? This is important for making sure they have a good time, because when they arrive at your hotel their mind will be relaxed that what you promise, you can deliver.

And then of course you get into all the stuff that isn’t online. A lot of the stuff I encourage my clients to do is incredibly old-fashioned. And that is: get them to you once, show them a great time, and then they will tell the world. It’s just that the Internet is word-of-mouth on steroids.