Tracking Your Travel Advertising Makes You Money and Save You Pain

FACT

Most tourism destinations and companies spend lots of hard earned money on advertising and promotion to get clients to visit or take their trips, but rarely know what was effective. Or worse, what was a total loss.

This can be frustrating and potentially fatal if you don't get the results you need.

"The most important measure is financial return," stated Eric Grothwoll, former marketing director for successful multi-sport adventure company OARS. Eric generally receives better than 3 to 1 return on their promotional investment. "All promotions work in conjunction with each other. I am always looking at what's working and what's not."

John Willard, president of Wilderness Expeditions agrees, "Tracking advertising saves money." John found that by monitoring their advertising and promotions monthly and making changes as necessary; his advertising and promotions was far more effective without spending more money.

E-Marketing - The Most Trackable Marketing

Savvy businesses effectively use staff and technology to capture useful information about their prospects who visit their website.

"It's important to have log reports that are detailed and give you good marketing information. This is something you should insist on from your Internet service provider", Laurel King of Adventure Sports Online stated. The software they use is called Web trends and tracks the top ten URL's used to access your site, top key words used, pages most often hit, average time stayed, etc.

Marketing with the internet (E-marketing) is one of the best strategies to track exactly what key word phrases are getting traffic and what ads yield the best return on investment. Google Adwords allows you rotate two different ads for the same group of key word phrases. What this means is the market will tell you, based on your click through rate (CTR) what offer has the highest response, i.e. demand.

It gets even better. Google, unlike Yahoo Overture, Google will even LOWER your cost per click (CPC) for your ads with higher CTR. More web traffic for less money. Plus Google has free conversion tracking to determine your return on investment for e-newsletter sign-ups, brochure requests and reservations. This is place to start your travel advertising.

A Word of Caution

Google does have some subtle nuances that if not done right, will cost you a bunch of money with little return. But with a little guidance and some tips, you can out market your competition easily.

According to Dan Austin, Co-Director of Austin-Lehman,