How is your website doing?

graph websiteBenchmarking the Performance of City Tourism Organisations’ Websites

The importance of the internet for the travel and tourism industry has increased rapidly over the past few years. There is particularly dramatic growth in internet use for travel information searches. Part of the core business of the city tourism organisation (CTO) is providing relevant and up-to-date information to their visitors. Today this is predominantly through our destination websites and social media channels. Developing and maintaining a destination website requires a high investment of budget and time and a city cannot remain competitive without an online presence. Consequently city tourism organisations have to ask themselves two essential questions:

–       How do our websites perform?
–       How can we deliver better results from our online investments?

Answering these questions requires us to compare key figures and statistics on your website performance with similar sites from other cities, your competitors. You will never truly know the quality of your online performance without comparing it with others.

We spend a substantial amount of money in our websites. Benchmarking our online performance against each other is important in enabling us to know, rather than imagine, our levels of success. The Research and Statistics Group is proud to announce the launch of a brand new benchmarking tool allowing European Cities to benchmark their website’s performance via TourMIS.

By comparing figures, we can learn answers to questions such as:

–       What is a high number of unique users on a site like ours?
–       How many pages is each unique visitor viewing on average on the site?
–       Where are the other cities getting their traffic from?
–       Where do my visitors come from?
–       And much more!

This approach can help European cities to identify areas for improvement, identify if one’s performance is outstanding, and most importantly learn from best in class cities. This is of utmost importance since CTOs’ marketing budgets will continue to shift from traditional forms of advertising to online marketing and we need to understand return on investment.

If you would like to know more about the web benchmarking approach or are ready to join the ECM Web Analytics project, we encourage you to get in touch. Further presentations featuring preliminary results are also available from the download area of European Cities Marketing’s Intranet.

About TourMIS web analytics tool

The web analytics tool available in TourMIS has been developed by the Vienna Tourist Board in collaboration with European Cities Marketing’s scientific partner MODUL University Vienna, and is now available to all participating ECM members.

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Contact details:

Irem Önder
MODUL University Vienna
Department of Tourism and Hospitality Management
(p) +43‐1‐3203555‐420 (f) +43‐1‐3203555‐903
irem.onder@modul.ac.at | www.modul.ac.at/onder

Karl Wöber
MODUL University Vienna
Department of Tourism and Hospitality Management
(p) +43‐1‐3203555‐300 (f) +43‐1‐3203555‐903
karl.woeber@modul.ac.at | www.modul.ac.at/woeber