IN-DEPTH: Interview with Barbara Pezzi, Director Analytics & Search Optimization, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International

Assessing how fragmentation of traffic channels is shaping up web analytics trends in the travel sector

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. July 15, 2011

Major search engines have been trying to offer better, faster and more accurate personalised search, and have also been enhancing their social search offerings, enabling users to get more information “from the people that matter to them”.

Travel sites themselves are connecting more with their customers through social media and interactive website features. Even as travel sites increasingly embrace new features such as videos, it is recommended that the only way to accurately measure the performance of new content, whatever that content may be is to test it in a live environment against a default and measure the change in desired response. Every change needs to be measured by its impact on conversion rates, revenue, lifetime value and overall success of the visitor completing the objective.

In order to understand the latest trends in web analytics, EyeforTravel's Ritesh Gupta spoke to Barbara Pezzi, Director Analytics & Search Optimization, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International. Excerpts:

Considering the way search engines are evolving and the manner in which content is being delivered on websites, what according to you are the main challenges in web analytics as of today?

Barbara Pezzi: Google Instant and Preview could potentially bring some minor tracking issues, since previews can at times fire-off a page view. However, the percent of visitors actually clicking on previews is so small, that it will hardly have any impact on the overall numbers. At least, that seems to be our case so far, based on the data.

I think the main challenges lie much more in the fragmentation of traffic channels, which now include social media networks. Whilst search, referring sites or emails are easily tracked, social networks are much more complex, as most of the interactions happen offsite and on the networks themselves.

Marketers' goal should be able to understand their market segments and be able to anticipate their shopping behaviour in order to capitalise by meeting their needs. What is being done to track engagement at the finest level and determine content based on measurable results?

Barbara Pezzi: There are a number of very sophisticated tools out there that will enable not only to track individual sessions in minute detail, but also to personalise content based on a set of criteria, from keywords used, past site behavior or purchase history. The tools are available. It is simply a question of funds, to pay for the tools and internal resources, to manage and optimise the tools in question.

It is being highlighted that for the PC web, a majority of users report that website speed is more important to them than rich functionality, when it comes to the overall quality of the user experience. What do you make of this assessment and how should one prioritise or balance out facets such as speed and functionality when it comes to websites?

Barbara Pezzi: I personally agree. Page speed is incredibly important: users these days do not have the patience to wait for a page to render and will simply go elsewhere. At the same time, it is a known fact that Google seems to take page speed into account when ranking sites and they have recently introduced a dedicated page speed section in Google Webmaster Tools as well as page speed report in the new versions of Google Analytics. It is a clear signal that they take it seriously and so should we.

The introduction of custom variables to Google Analytics opened up many possibilities in measurement for site owners. Can you provide an insight into the same going by your experience?

Barbara Pezzi: Custom variables are one of my favourite features and I have actually run out of slots (currently limited to 5 per site). They allow you to extend Google Analytics default metrics and collect site usage data that is unique and most important to your business, like visits from a specific subset of users, most popular site sections or visitors who performed specific actions, such as posting a review. I use them for a number purposes: to identify our loyalty members, to review how our non-English content is performing, to segment those visitors who have viewed our property videos or have booked more than one room in a single session. I can then segment the data and run custom reports based on these variables to further optimise the site experience for these specific groups of users.

Can you elaborate on the latest trends pertaining to conversion management? How do you assess the maturity level of A/B and multivariate testing solutions in the travel sector?

Barbara Pezzi: Conversion optimisation is still very much underused in the travel sector. The main OTAs and large hotel chains have been investing heavily in this with great results, since even a 0.1% decrease in conversion rates would result in millions of dollars in lost revenue. However, the great majority of travel companies are still lagging behind, especially hotels. I don't think the reason is due to lack of affordable technology. There are a number of great tools now that make the process very easy and are relatively cheap or even free, like Google Website Optimizer. I believe the main reason is the lack of skilled human resources, infrastructure and even company culture. Implementing a testing tool is easy: knowing what to test and having the IT resources in place to continuously update the site based on test results is the hard part. We are currently in the process of installing a testing solution on all our brand sites, which will be integrated with our analytics tool, and I just cannot wait to have it all up and running.

Much of the data in Google Analytics is about what happens after a user chooses to visit your site; whereas, Webmaster Tools reports are more focused on data from before the user makes that choice. Google recently mentioned there has been an integration between Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics with a limited pilot. What do you make of such development?

Barbara Pezzi: It is great news and we have all be waiting, and hoping, for this to happen. This will allow webmaster data such as queries, impressions, and average position to be seen within the Google Analytics interface, and then analysed with various features, such as advanced filters. The search data is actually only one of the reports available in Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). GWT is a great tool in itself, traditionally used by webmasters and SEO practitioners, which should be much more popular amongst marketers, being a source of very valuable information like crawl rates, page load times, content link popularity to name a few. The integration with Google Analytics should hopefully expose some of these great data to a wider audience.

Paid search not only drives traffic and conversions to websites but one can use paid search to optimise organic and social media efforts. How do you think paid search is being currently used for optimising organic and social media efforts? For instance, it is recommended that keywords with higher impressions, click through rates, and conversions should be considered when looking to increase organic traffic, or when developing a social media campaign.

Barbara Pezzi: I would hope that by now most companies have aligned their SEO and PPC efforts, since the two are so tightly related. I do not think there has been much integration with social media, especially since many are still working out how to handle social media in the first place.

Personally, I am not so sure if paid search would be a good source of inspiration for social media, since the language is very different. Paid search is about clear calls to action with the sole purpose of gaining the highest amount of conversion at the lowest possible cost. Social media is generally the opposite: nurturing and building long term relationship with as little “hard sell” as possible.

Furthermore the audience is completely different. Whilst paid search can be used to identify and test potential keywords to be integrated in the organic strategy and social media can also support the organic strategy when correctly optimised, I am not quite convinced paid search should be used to define social media messaging. It could however be used to advertise and grow a company social network.