Squared Online - Module 4 - Think Optimised

Outline insights & recommendations58% of Essence Tours’ traffic and 55% of the conversions are from direct suggesting a lack of or inefficient digital marketing activity. To drive more conversions from digital channels and to improve the ROI of our investment we recommend:Driving more relevant traffic to the site by testing PPC and optimising for organic search, which currently only drives 10.8% of the total traffic.Optimising the content to keep people on the site: Bounce rate is very high, especially for mobile (65%) and referrals (80%). We need to A/B test pages to bring this down to <50%.Optimising towards the right conversion: Essence Tours should place a higher focus on converting users to holiday enquires (currently 34% of total conversions) that are more correlated to sales than other conversions (eg competition).

- EXECUTIVE SUMMARY -- EXECUTIVE SUMMARY -

Module 4 project: Digital Marketing measurement proposal for Essence Tours

August Group 18 - Ben Alcraft, Nicolas Keller, Alina Manoukian, James McGrath, Alex Pollock, Anne-Sophie Robineau & Rachel Xavier 1

¹As a more convenient way to work on the case, we decided to put ET instead of Essence Tours throughout the report for space gain & avoid lengthy repetitions

Recap ET's performance - Data Period: 24/12/14 to 24/01/14In the period 24th Dec - 24th Jan Essence Tours¹ had 1519 sessions from 857 users. Traffic to the site is from direct 58% or referral 31%. Mobile is only 12% of total visits. There were 149 conversions at a rate of 9.81%. The company sold 45 holidays at a value of $52,600 with Africa making up 61% of this. ET converted 5.2% of users to make a holiday purchase.

Identify current business goals & insights to hit defined KPIs

Insight: Seeing the world shouldn’t start at 6amObjective: Establish Essence Tours in the Luxury Travel SegmentGoal: Improve sales of the Never-Ending-Summer Campaign KPI: 10% conversion uplift month on month (MoM) for the ‘Never-Ending-Summer campaign

AttributionOur recommendation is not to invest in attribution at this stage in time. We believe that at the moment analytics provide good insight and Essence Tour’s goals will be better achieved by investing in the testing proposals outlined in this report

- EXECUTIVE SUMMARY -

ESSENCE TOURS Digital Marketing Measurement Model

Create awareness Generate leads

Support off & online marketing

efforts

Provide information on

each destination

Provide information on

each destinationCapture leads

Provide “Refer to a friend”

functionalityWebsite

goals

Traffic/visits from marketing efforts Time on page

# of brochure downloads

% of bounce rate

# of clicks on social links

Conversion (newsletter)

Competition sign-up

Conversion (general enquiry)

Conversion (destionation &

bespoke enquiry)

# of referred friends

KPIs

ET’s Digital Marketing Measurement Model identifies 2 main needs - to create awareness of the holiday packages available & to create leads.ET’s main website goals for driving awareness are to support marketing activity and provide information and links to their social communities.The main KPIs for each goal are traffic/visits from marketing efforts, time on site, brochure downloads, bounce rate and links to their social platforms.ET’s website aims to capture data through each conversion point & encourages users to refer to a friend (F2AF). The F2AF functionality has been identified as a stand-alone lead generating tool as ET is unable to use and store said data before gaining permission from the referee¹.With ET’s “Never Ending Summer” campaign, the aim is to increase conversions 10% Month on Month (MoM) for the next 12 months. Given the time period used to analyse the results (24th Dec-24th Jan), the recommendation is to drive 5% MoM for Africa as this destination is in it’s booking peak in Jan² followed by 2% for the remaining two destinations and 1% for the bespoke holidays.For the purpose of this document, the main goal & KPI in focus is to capture leads for all destinations including the bespoke holidays. Our approach is to set the target initially for 12 months with a performance review after 3 and 6 months to optimise & shift the % increase according to the peak months to book.

¹http://blog.dotmailer.com/refer-a-friend-data-the-legal-rules/ 04.02.2016 ²http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/the-best-time-to-book-flights-region-by-region-10087029.html 04.02.2016


http://blog.dotmailer.com/refer-a-friend-data-the-legal-rules/

http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/the-best-time-to-book-flights-region-by-region-10087029.html



Insight (2/2)

¹http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/standard-metrics-revisited-3-bounce-rate/ 06.08.2007²http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2013/04/how-does-your-bounce-rate-match-up-to-others-in-your-industry/ 2014

Traffic Report

Key data point Bounce rate from organic: 70,99%Segmentation Mobile & Tablet, Returning user

Insight (1/2) ET’s bounce rate is 70,99%, which is above the cause for concern threshold (35%)¹ as well as being above the average of 47,7% for lead generation sites².

Despite its visually responsive design ET’s’ bounce rate for mobile (77.11%) is high, especially considering that mobile bounce rate is very important3. Referral traffic is also above the site average at 68.09%.Returning visitors’ organic bounce rate is 70.19% and direct traffic is 46.71%, demonstrating a stronger level of engagement for direct traffic.“Refer-a-friend” and competition sign-ups are among the top pages for goal completion, suggesting that many visitors return only to enter the competition or refer-a-friend.Altogether, this means that arriving traffic is not interested in browsing further and is not likely to convert for holiday destination and bespoke packages.3http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-web-metrics-digital-marketing-own-rent-strategies/ 25.03.2014

Testing proposal


http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/standard-metrics-revisited-3-bounce-rate/

http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2013/04/how-does-your-bounce-rate-match-up-to-others-in-your-industry/



http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-web-metrics-digital-marketing-own-rent-strategies/

Key data point 55% conversions are made with direct visits onlyInsight:. Even considering a the importance of offline word of mouth for the older generation (which could be driving high % of direct conversion), ET’s digital marketing efforts are not doing enough to drive conversions. In particular, the lack of organics search (9% of conversions) and PPC (0%) of conversions is surprising as there are 4,000 searches per month for Africa Tours.²

¹http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/marketing-roi-workshop-reflections-onsite-resourcing-behavior-variables/ August 9 2007

Site Content Report Top Conversion Path Report

Testing approach


² Source: Google Ad Word Planner, Feb 5th 2016

Key data point Homepage Exit Rate is 50,00%

Insight After filling out the information request form users are returned to the homepage site. There is a lack of additional content to keep users interested and build a deeper experience. As a result, users exit the site.

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/marketing-roi-workshop-reflections-onsite-resourcing-behavior-variables/



Testing proposal

Goal URL Report

Key data point Goal value $32,400 for Africa

Insight Africa has the highest conversion out of the 3 destinations offered by ET (24) generating over half of the monetary value of $32,400. According to The Independent1, the best time to book flights to Africa is 2 months prior to travel, which coincides with the summer period there, which is February to May.Newsletter sign ups, tell-a-friend and the competition generate over half of the goal conversions with $0 value assigned.At the lowest number of conversions, bespoke holidays also have $0 value, indicating the fact that customers are drawn to the most prominent sections of the homepage -images on the carousel and destination images mid-page.

¹http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/the-best-time-to-book-flights-region-by-region-10087029.html 02.02.2016





Location Report

Insight (1/2) The U.K. and mainly England is by far the most important country for Essence Tours. The U.K. not only has a strong lead in the session department with 53.72 % of the sessions in total, but it also contributes $41,075 to the $52,600 in total to the Goal Value (All goals).

Key data point Goal Value Netherlands 9.41 %

Testing proposal

Insight (2/2) Although only 1.65% of the visitors are from the Netherlands they generate 9.41% of the Goal Value (All goals). The Netherlands are known for a high share of the population taking part in tourism trips¹ and together with Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.S. among the countries with the wealthiest population over 60².The overall strength of the U.K. and the good conversion in the Netherlands means that traffic and conversion in the rest of the world is rather weak. The vast majority of the other countries generates too little traffic to justify verifiable insights. We recommend to raise traffic first and then re-analyse the behavior and conversion in other countries.

¹http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/File:Tourism_trips_of_residents_(aged_15_years_or_more),_2014_YB16.png 04.02.2016²https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/10/03/these-are-the-best-and-worst-countries-to-be-elderly/ 04.02.2016


http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/File:Tourism_trips_of_residents_(aged_15_years_or_more),_2014_YB16.png



https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/10/03/these-are-the-best-and-worst-countries-to-be-elderly/



- Essence Tours should not use an attribution model at this time

- The priority for Essence Tours is to gather and analyse offline and online data, and make improvements to its website/marketing based on the 15 recommendations in this report

- However, a time-decay attribution model should be used in the future to highlight the most effective points of conversion and maximize ROI

- Apply an algorithmic attribution model later on when the improvements have had time to produce results

ATTRIBUTION

- SUMMARY OF RECOMMENDATIONS -

Attribution models are very useful for interpreting the value derived from digital channels but do not include information on offline marketing, offline to online conversions or the influence of external socio-economic factors which may vary greatly in Essence Tours’ disparate markets. Before applying an attribution model it is important for Essence Tours to collect more (basic) online data, and build the most accurate picture possible of all offline activities and conversions.

Once Essence Tours has grown internationally and acquired a sophisticated PPC strategy, our recommendation is to implement an algorithmic model, as it will allow them to more accurately interpret data from multiple sources from different markets, in real-time.

The time-decay attribution model will allow Essence Tours to make informed decisions about the most profitable digital channels and how best to distribute marketing spend going forward.

Following a 6-month review on overall website performance, the recommendation is to implement a time-decay attribution model. This model would increase credit along the path of conversion according to how close each touchpoint it to the final point of conversion.
