Tag Archive for: engagement
State Tourism Website Traffic Analysis – Q1
This week, we published the first website traffic analysis for the 50 official state tourism offices. The analysis was conducted by TwoSix Digital to benchmark and rank traffic to each tourism organization’s website. The analysis ranked each state by total traffic, average monthly visits,
The state of California currently leads all tourism offices with more than 7 million website visits in the first quarter of 2019. They topped the scale ahead of second place Florida by more than 4 million website visits. Rounding out the rest of the top five are Hawaii, Colorado and Michigan in terms of total website visits in the months of January through March.
An interesting note was the dominance of mobile traffic–more than 77% of the website visitors accessed the state tourism websites via their mobile device.
All of the data was gathered via SimilarWeb, a third-party traffic and website analysis application. SimilarWeb’s innovative marketing intelligence allows users to gain insight into any website’s statistics through a global panel of consumers that work across a range of devices and websites.
The state with the most engaged traffic was Washington, followed by Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware,
Another interesting note on the complete data set was that even though California had the most overall traffic, they produced the least engaged traffic based on our engagement scale ranking.
We do realize these numbers will not be “apples to apples” in terms of overall website visits recorded through Google Analytics or other tracking software installed on an individual website. But, by collectively recording the aggregate data for all 50 states from an identical source utilizing the same methodologies, we will be able to draw a very accurate analysis of the traffic positioning.
The traffic analysis will be updated each quarter throughout 2019. In those updates, we will include additional insight into how consumers utilize state tourism websites. The full year of analysis will even out seasonality trends and provide a more complete view of each tourism office’s website traffic and engagement metrics.
Click here to download the complete data set and the infographic!
4 Easy Ways to Get to Know your Digital Audience
A digital marketing strategy is primarily driven by the wants and needs of your audience. Knowing both what they want to see and what they need in order to create a conversion can help build a base for your digital strategy. Audiences are always changing, so it’s imperative to frequently check in and learn about them. Here are 4 simple ways to get to know your digital audience:
1. Investigate Google Analytics
You can learn several things about your audience by looking through your Google Analytics account. Check out these different metrics:
- Demographics: age, gender
and location - Interests: Affinity Category, In-Market Segment
- Behavior: Top pages by Sessions on your site, Engagement via Average Session Duration & Bounce Rate, and Page scroll depth
- Specifics: Browser use, Network, and type of Device
- Acquisition: Source/Medium, Referrals, and Social
- Site Searches: What your audience is looking for on your site
2. Perform Keyword Search
Performing a keyword search is a great way to help you discover what sorts of niches your audiences are interested in your destination. There are several tools that you can use to help generate keywords associated with your site.
Try out the Ubersuggest tool to help you learn about what keywords to implement into your niche content landing pages. This will help you not only understand what users are looking for when searching keywords related to your destination, but also help you come up with content ideas for the long run.
3. Check out Social Media Insights
You can also learn about your digital audience by looking through your social media accounts’ audience insights. Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter all vary on the data that they are able to provide for users:
- Instagram Business: top locations, age range, gender
- Facebook Business: age, demographics, location, actions of people on the page, audience insights
- Twitter Insights: audience interests, consumer buying styles, typical demographics (age, gender, location), and top performing posts
4. Send out a Survey
If you’re unsure of what kind of content to produce, try sending out a simple survey to gain a better insight on what kind of content your audience wants to see from you. Check out this example of a survey to help you gain more insights on what your customers want:
Finally, always remember that your audience can and will change over time. Don’t be afraid to take time to intentionally learn about their habits, demographics, social media usage, and other metrics. No matter what your findings, it will help you gain a better perspective on what they want from your organization.
For more tips and tricks on how to master your digital marketing strategy, be sure to subscribe to our e-newsletter and follow us across social media.
Social Engagement Custom Audiences and Likes vs Favorites
Custom audiences by social engagement on posts?
Facebook Marketing Strategist Jon Loomer discovered what could be a new targeting tool for Facebook advertisers: the ability to create custom audiences based on social engagement.
Loomer posted his discovery in a blog post noting that when he went to create a custom audience he had more than the regular 3 option types for creating a custom audience. He had one additional option: people who have engaged with your content! This new targeting option does not appear to be an available for the majority of advertisers yet, but opens up some interesting possibilities. Loomer notes that he’s only able to create custom audiences off of people engaging with videos, but it appears the function is built for multiple types of content. Imagine how dialed in a custom audience list could be by targeting people who had already engaged with your content previously!
While Twitter recently introduced a similar feature, something like this has been a long time coming for Facebook. Time will tell when it rolls out for the rest of us and in what capacity.
We heart the Heart more than the Star
Many people bemoaned Twitter’s decision to kill off the Favorite button and replace that with a Like button similar to Facebook. However, the move appears to be paying off for the social network. Locowise reports Twitter has seen a nearly 29% increase in people liking tweets vs favoriting them. The study included 1,500 Twitter accounts over a three month period with more than 2.2 million tweets.
Locowise noted that a big reason for the increase is due to the favorite button being used to archive material for later compared to the like button. That’s in comparison to a like which provides an immediate representation of your approval of something. While Twitter has been struggling in recent months, positive news like this is promising for the social network.
Longer Video Ads, Algorithm Tweaks and Air Travel Demand
Instagram rolls out 60 second video ads, multiple account switching
While there are several reports indicating our attention spans are getting shorter, Instagram is doubling down on video ads by unveiling 60 second ads that will soon be widely available.
A statement from Instagram said the longer video ads would allow advertisers to tell unique stories that better tell their brand message.
Although only a handful of advertisers would have access to these longer video ads (just in time for a certain big game this weekend…) the wider advertiser base would have access at a later date.
Additionally, some iOS users can now switch between multiple Instagram accounts without repeatedly signing out and signing back in. The feature is already available to Android users, but appears to be a slower rollout (for now) on iOS.
Facebook tweaks the news feed algorithm…again
Supposedly Facebook’s new algorithm tweak to newsfeeds may help increase engagement due to qualitative feedback being used to deliver more relevant content to users. To help with this adjustment Facebook is utilizing a team of tens of thousands of users it calls its Feed Quality Panel to rate experiences every day to help improve what kinds of content is served up and cut down posts we don’t care to see.
Two Facebook software engineers explained that this update should not impact reach or referral traffic for most pages. Declines in referral traffic may occur if “the rate at which their stories are clicked on does not match how much people report wanting to see those stories near the top of their News Feed. This update helps rebalance those two factors, so people are seeing relevant stories to them.”
In short, avoid posting and encouraging actions on your posts which may deliver a short term increase in engagement because “temporary spikes in metrics might then be rebalanced by feed’s ranking over time.”
Global demand for air travel surges
The dark days of the global recession appear to be only memories for the airline industry. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) released the 2015 global passenger traffic results and the numbers are good. The numbers show demand rose 6.5% last year compared to 2014. This marked the best year since the supposed Financial Crisis rebound of 2010.
These numbers were aided by an increase in capacity and all regions experiencing positive traffic growth, but carriers in the Asia-Pacific region accounted for one-third of the total increase.