Building a high-converting website is one of the most important things you can do as a tour and experience operator. This will act as your shop window when people are searching for things to do in your destination. An essential part of this process is to optimise your website for conversions. This means working to increase the sales you make.
Direct sales through a website are usually the most profitable source of business for a tour operator, although it may not provide the most revenue. This is because the costs associated with building and maintaining a website are lower than the commissions paid to online travel agencies and other resellers. Companies with established brands are likely to have more immediate success with their website than those just starting.
One part of website optimisation is relatively simple — make sure the site is attractive and that it contains all the relevant inspirational and essential content that a guest needs to know. The other part requires some analysis and for this, you will need access to reliable information. This information will come from your booking system, Google Analytics, and a range of other tools.
Using a tool such as Google Analytics will give you a good idea of how well different pages are converting and where you’re losing people. There are two ways to look at conversion information. These are last-click conversions and data-driven, or assisted, conversions.
A last-click conversion is where the page that the guest clicked last will contain all the conversion information. These are almost always sales and booking pages unless you have booking widgets installed that take the customer through the whole sales process without leaving their current page.
Assisted, or data-driven, conversions look at the journey the customer has taken through your website and assign a value based on how much the algorithm thinks it is worth. Check these conversions against your booking software, which should be your single source of truth.
A potential customer who is browsing on social media or search should never be more than two clicks away from your sales pages. Inspirational content should be full of calls to action (CTAs) and widgets, and every page should be promoting your products. You will be able to assess how well these are working using data-driven conversions.
You can also use tools, such as Hotjar, that show you how people are using your site, and where you can improve it. Once you have this installed on your site, you will be able to see heatmaps that show where a customer reads and clicks and analyses their behaviour while on your site. You can use this information to make sure your calls-to-action (CTAs) and sales buttons are located in places that customers see and click.
There is also a range of A/B testing software that can be used to examine any changes that you make on your site to see if they are performing as you want or expect. These will present different visitors to your site with a page that includes the changes or the original page. This can be used to test new designs, CTAs, and colours — anything you can change in your design. Usually, A/B tests are run with small quick changes and decisions are made quickly depending on which performs better. A/B tests require a large volume of traffic to be used to make reliable decisions.
How to optimise your website
Making sure your site looks modern and attractive is important. Many tour operator sites look as if they haven’t been updated since the 90s. Many customers will not trust these from the moment they load on their screen. As well as increasing trust, a good-looking site will be more inspirational. The design should be relevant to the types of guests you would like. For some, this will be a corporate design, but for an adventure operator, an edgier design would work better, for example.
It’s not just about presentation. If a site loads slowly, you will be losing customers. A site that loads in one-second converts three times higher than one that loads in five. It will also reduce your bounce rates and increase the number of people who actually arrive on the site. How many times have you closed a page because it is loading slowly? This will also help your search engine optimisation — Google ranks faster sites higher.
Another important part of the development process is to ensure that the website is mobile-friendly. Many people will browse and research their trip on mobile before completing their booking on desktop. Without a mobile-friendly site, you have already lost these customers. Reservations with a short booking window are also more likely to be carried out a phone. Arival says that these account for almost 40 per cent of bookings made with tours and activity providers, and that these customers spend more.
There is a limit to how much work you can do to optimise your website. An excellent conversion rate in the travel industry is four per cent. If your rate is above three per cent, you will not be able to optimise much more and discovering where to make any changes will become difficult. The best option for you at this point is to work on increasing traffic.
When working on your site, there is a phenomenon called banner blindness to be aware of. Every single one of us has developed a natural ad blocker in our brain when browsing the internet. Keep this in mind when designing your pages and make sure people will click on your widgets and buttons. This is also why using a blog post as a paid ad works well on Facebook — it looks less like an ad.