Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Key lesson #6: Monitoring
It is essential for DMOs to keep track of the dynamics of the search engine triad: the changing
popularity and algorithms of search engines, the changing competitors on various tourism
domains, and the changing behavior of travellers. Monitoring systems should be adopted to track
these changes by assessing the ranking of each site, the changes in search volumes and the sudden
drop or increase of conversion rates. Thus, search engine marketing is a continuous effort,
requiring constant evaluation after the initial SEO and paid listing campaign. The tools for
monitoring the rankings and tracking website performance include analytics tools such as
Google Analytics and Google AdWords. With these tools, every user who clicked on a paid
listing or website can be tracked and the DMOs or businesses could precisely monitor Return
on Investment (ROI). Accurate data can reveal where visitors are visiting and what they are
clicking on, which provides a wealth of information about businesses' web pages and online
advertising. In addition, tourism businesses need to better monitor the information sources from
the third-party and social media websites such as tripadvisor.com and take advantage of them.
Future developments in search engine marketing
Online marketing has been a focus of much research since the Internet became an important
information source for travel marketing (Buhalis and Law 2008; Gretzel and Fesenmaier 2000;
Wang and Fesenmaier 2003; Wang and Fesenmaier 2006; Werthner and Klein 1999; Werthner
and Ricci 2004). The increasing importance of search and dominance of search engines gives rise
to the need for fresh thinking because the focus for online marketing has shifted from improving
the usability of a website toward utilizing search engines to attract and infl uence online travellers.
In addition, the continuous struggle between different players on the Internet has been evidenced
by the threat posed by websites such as Facebook in that social media are gaining important
ground since their enormous amount of information that is not readily available for the search
engines to index. This requires a paradigm shift that embraces a new set of notions including the
social media for travel, the so-called Web 2.0, as well as the 'search economy' and the 'link
economy'. Also, these trends demand a shift of marketing paradigm from delivering messages to
infl uencing conversations between consumers and business partners and stakeholders. More
studies are crucial in exploring the third-party information sources created by the consumers
and other information resources.
Additionally, the conception of the dynamic relationships in the search engine triad indicates
that there is a need to develop new metrics that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of SEM
programmes. For example, how should marketers defi ne and measure the competitive space for
a destination in the search context? How should the effectiveness of a tourism organization or
business on search engines be measured? The metrics should include search volume for certain
keywords, the ranking of a site or page on those keywords and the conversion rates. The
benchmarking metrics might be different from one business to another, depending on the goals
and strategies of the DMO or businesses. For example, if transactions are one of the goals, the
revenue generated from clicks directly from search engines will be one metric; if the goal is to
forward clicks to the web pages of other local tourism businesses, then outbound links should be
monitored and reported frequently.
Last, the performance of the businesses, the performance of competitor websites and changes
on the search engine algorithms should be monitored, tracked and studied continuously. Since
user behaviour, information on the web and search engine algorithms change constantly, the
online experiment at one time might not hold or be relevant over a longer time period.
Obviously, within the changing technology fi eld any study of search engines is bound to be a
