When Your Website Conversion Rate Change Doesn’t Matter [Tourism Marketing Quick Tips – Video Series]

 
Brian Nicholson

In This Tourism Marketing Quick Tip:

Your website conversion rate is a helpful measure of your website’s effectiveness, which is why we work really hard to ensure this metric is reliable and why we watch it regularly. But sometimes, when a conversion rate changes or even drops, it doesn’t matter. In this Tourism Marketing Quick Tip, learn three things that can cause a conversion rate drop that has absolutely nothing to do with changes to your website’s effectiveness.

Three Things to Pay Attention To While Assessing Your Conversion Rate

1. The type of traffic you are sending

If you’re sending cold (top-of-funnel) traffic to people who are just learning about you, you can expect that traffic is going to convert at a lower rate. This kind of traffic can include blog traffic as well as discovery traffic from Facebook, TikTok, or anywhere you’re putting your activity in front of people to get them to consider you. It’s important to know how that traffic is converting, but if your “funnel mix” changes—that is, if a higher percentage of your traffic today is top-of-funnel traffic, your overall site conversion rate will drop. When evaluating the conversion rate of a website or a landing page, filter out display traffic and blog traffic so that any fluctuations in your traffic mix don’t impact the conversion rate.

2. Availability

This one is obvious, but it’s easy to forget about. One of our clients saw a dip in conversion rate, even after we filtered out blog traffic and display traffic. It turns out that their primary tour had almost no availability that month, making it difficult for people to convert. So, if you sometimes have low availability, make sure whoever is watching your website’s conversion rate factors in low availability.

3. Seasonality

Seasonality can impact your revenue and conversion rate because, at different times of the year, people are in different modes of planning. Sometimes they’re in browsing mode, and sometimes they’re in booking mode. Across our client base, it’s pretty common to see conversion rates follow a certain seasonal pattern, so be sure that you are comparing year-over-year and not just period-over-period.

Keep these things in mind when you evaluate your conversion rate to identify when your conversion rate drop is meaningful and needs to be dealt with and when the drop is entirely explainable by other factors.

Follow our Tourism Marketing Quick Tip Video Series for more tips from all of our team members at Blend!

Being able to trust your data is important. If you’re looking for a tourism marketing agency with deep expertise in measurement, we’d love to chat.

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About The Author

Brian Nicholson

Brian is a partner at Blend Marketing. He focuses on brand strategy, positioning, and analytics for the tourism industry.

Email Brian

About The Author

Brian Nicholson

Brian is a partner at Blend Marketing. He focuses on brand strategy, positioning, and analytics for the tourism industry.