Stop measuring nonsensical numbers: Common advertising Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are not effective for tourism
The belief that there are universal KPIs is wrong. Key indicators can only be considered if they represent the key to success. Today’s Internet indicators mainly come from the advertising industry and are unsuitable for tourism and are not very effective.
If you operate a website for advertising purposes (whether social networks or pages with content), you want to maximize the length of time your users spend on it in order to increase contact with the respective brand. Here one strives for well-known measures such as high click rates and many page impressions – always with the aim of collecting a lot of data about the user and bringing a lot of advertising to the man. A bounce, i.e. leaving the page after a short time and after only one page views, is therefore considered a bad sign.
KPIs must make the individual objective measurable
Why are these classic measures not effective in tourism? They simply cannot represent the success parameters for this sector. If you focus on the users and their experience, current KPIs automatically “deteriorate”. But this is by no means bad! A low number of page views is just one sign that the user has reached the desired information with just a few clicks. And when apps, chatbots and language assistants are used, the usual KPI tracking is completely ignored.
That’s why we design the technology (whether app or website) for our customers so that guests can find the right result as quickly and easily as possible. All pages are super performant with short loading times, so you don’t have to spend a long time in front of the screen. We build map-based solutions that are generally just one page and dynamically load all other content. If you use the Route Planner, plan your tour with 3 clicks, click on save and then leave the page to take the tour with you on your smartphone, which has been automatically synchronized, the measurement parameters for classic KPIs are extremely poor. From the point of view of the usual measurement methods (by which all agencies, consultants and website operators today measure the success of their website), a catastrophically bad website was built. For the guests, however, it’s the best user experience possible.
Other parameters are relevant for tourism players
It is probably clear to everyone why those certain user behavior values are measured at all: so that one knows one’s guests digitally and can tailor the measures to their needs. But which parameters are relevant for tourism?
- What did a user actually do on site?
- What did he look at when and on which application?
- Where does a guest travel at what time of year and why?
- Which content is used by whom and when, how often is it viewed, stored and actually used/checked in on site?
Partners who use the Outdooractive Technology and enter content into the database have already received some important key figures in their reporting – they can view the information in the Outdooractive Destination Management System (DMS). The topic “tracking” and “understanding the guest” is of particular concern to us. For this reason, we are constantly expanding our reporting to include other relevant metrics. Day after day, we work on understanding our users better, evaluate data and present it in the best possible way. With these groundbreaking KPIs, we provide the destinations with “insights” into the data of the Outdooractive Platform.