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et al . surveyed in the literature have been tourists, practitioners, policymakers, researchers and
students. One example of this is Morrison et al . (2004) who advocate a Balanced Scorecard
(BSC) approach which seeks to measure website performance on a range of factors including:
customer, fi nancial, learning and growth, and internal business processes. They provide a
standardized form to evaluate DMO websites, which comprises technical aspects, user
friendliness, site attractiveness, marketing effectiveness, link popularity, trip planner assistance
and legal compliance. As with the BSC approach, these areas are then weighted to give an
overall score so that comparisons can be made across time and with competitors (Morrison
et al . 2004).
User judgement methods involve different cohorts (students, tourists, researchers, policy
makers) evaluating user satisfaction or perceptions of a particular website. These studies tend
to evaluate the websites using modifi ed SERVQUAL-type survey instruments. Numerical
computation evaluation methods use mathematical functions to compute tourism website
performance based on a number of factors.
Automated methods use information technology software to evaluate the success of websites.
The advantages of these techniques include their consistency in evaluation and greater objectivity
compared to human-based evaluations. Technical indices of website usage have been used to
evaluate the effectiveness of DMO websites (Sterne 2002). These indices include such metrics as
average time spent on a particular page, cost per click, click-through rate. These metrics can then
determine key performance indicators for websites, such as ROI on a website by comparing
website sales versus costs. As with the evaluation techniques of marketing strategies implemented
through traditional channels, determining what works and what doesn't for DMOs is more
diffi cult because DMOs do not have the ability to control tourist travel, like a private sector hotel
or airline would (Middleton and Clarke 2001). They can only infl uence travel decisions. There
are many external and internal factors that infl uence tourist decision-making (Papatheodorou
2001; Seddighi and Theocharous 2002).
By analyzing these web metrics, DMOs can see at what stage of the website browsing visitors
are navigating away (Hieggelke, n.d.). However as many DMOs are public entities, they may
generate little or no revenue of their own. Their objective, then, is to pull tourists to the
destination. One popular tool for measuring website performance is through the automated
method of Google Analytics. This web analyzer provides easy to understand statistics concerning
the website (Plaza 2011). Google Analytics is a free service, offered by Google, which can answer
such questions marketers might be interested in, such as 'how deep do visitors navigate into the
website? Are search engines more effective than referring site entries?' (Plaza 2011). Some of
the common metrics associated with Google Analytics and other web analyzers that can assist
DMOs to evaluate their websites include visits to the webpage, page views, pages viewed per
website visit, bounce rate and average time on site. The tool can track website visitors from
different referrers, such as highlighting those who came from search engines, display advertising,
pay-per-click networks, e-mail marketing or links within PDF documents.
Combined methods, as the name suggests, use a combination of different methods to evaluate
websites. Clearly, it is diffi cult for any one method or even a combination of methods to capture
a single criterion for website evaluation. Hence, there is no absolute right or wrong methodological
paradigm - one size doesn't fi t all.
The importance of websites has developed as Internet-based marketing can offer the destina-
tion for unique opportunities over and above traditional marketing. It can provide potential
tourists with up-to-date and accurate information on tourism products and services; it can offer
potential tourists the opportunity to develop an immediate and constant conversation with the
DMO; it can provide potential tourists with the opportunity to purchase tourism products and
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