Your website traffic increased 20% year over year (YoY). Is that good? Or has your traffic decreased 20% YoY? Is that bad? The answer is it depends—primarily on these 2 things:
Is last year’s data a good baseline?
If last year was unusually low or unusually high due to weather or some other market forces, or if you’ve made a major shift in your ad spend, then using last year’s data as a baseline can be misleading for this year’s assessment. In this case, you may need to make an adjustment, like looking at two years ago rather than one year ago.
Has market demand shifted?
If 20% more people are searching for “Maui Ziplines” this June than last June or if there are 20% more visitors on Maui this June, then you should expect at least a 20% increase in your traffic. In that case, 20% isn’t necessarily a win, but rather the expectation. And a 10% increase in traffic means you might actually be underperforming in the market. But if your growth exceeds 20%, you may have made some gains relative to the competition.
Tools to Gauge Market Demand
- Tourism Marketing Search Trends Tool. Our tool taps into Google Search Trends to let you easily compare data from the last few years month by month.
- DMO Data — Assuming that your Destination Management Organization releases visitor data on a regular basis, this can be a great source of data to tell you whether demand is up or down vs. last year. We will often look at flight data or hotel occupancy data for a given destination.
So, as you’re evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing, don’t just use last year as a baseline. Keep an eye on other factors such as market demand as well.
Find more data tips in our Tourism Data Library. Follow along with our Tourism Marketing Video Quick Tip Series here.