As COVID-19 restrictions begin to relax at different rates across the world, we are seeing a wave of varying degrees of travel interest returning as well. For most of these regions, this is falling in line with changes in restrictions, which has resulted in areas like the southeast and western regions of the United States, as well as some areas of Canada, looking at increasing web traffic and consumer interest in leisure travel.
Why are we so interested in tracking web traffic right now? Because this particular metric is just about the best, pure indicator of user intent and audience interest in travel. And not only can you track your website’s individual organic traffic, but we’d also recommend that you check out our website Data + Insights Hub, which is dynamically tracking against over 200 destinations to best inform your benchmarking of data.
In addition to organic traffic, here are two other tactics that you should consider:
Monitor the performance of your marketing based on geo-segments in your target audience.
If you haven’t already, we recommend breaking out your audience sets and respective marketing efforts into drive versus fly markets. Both of these will have different lead times, with drive being as small as a couple weeks to a couple months, and fly being a couple months to a year in the future. Let user behavioral data be your guide!
Keep an eye on Google Trends in your market.
The same search terms that always drove interest to your destination may actually change in light of the pandemic. Key phrases related to hygiene, outdoor dining or other social distancing friendly attractions relative to your destination will likely become hot topics. See what people are looking for, and shift your strategy accordingly.
We’re always looking for new data points to analyze, and next up we’ll be taking a closer look within the Simpleview ecosystem at Book › Direct data, which is showing us some interesting trends in hotel related conversions. We’ll also be publishing location data on throughput and activity within busy U.S. airports. All of this provides insight into the state of the traveler within the marketing funnel, so keep an eye out for these new data charts within the client portal as well as our Data + Insights Hub.
To learn more, watch this week’s episode of Layover Live—or reach out to our team to take action on any of this data, build a recovery strategy or engineer a campaign.
