What are the best ways to evaluate my destination website?

Destination websites have become vital tools in our marketing armoury, but are they as effective as they should be? Karin Elgin-Nijhuis offers an overview of methodologies available to evaluate and benchmark your existing website and to avoid expensive mistakes while designing and developing new websites.

Websites are playing a vital role in DMOs' marketing strategies... but there is still only limited understanding of whether they are really effective. How is your knowledge of quality criteria and critical success factors for websites in general and for DMO websites in particular? How does your site compare with those of other destinations? Have you got an insight into the search performance of your website?

Measuring Success
This article contains a summary of hints and tips for the various methods that are available to measure a website's quality and performance. These methods are also addressed in a 2008 publication, ‘Handbook on E-Marketing for Tourism Destinations’, produced by TEAM Tourism Consulting, on behalf of the ETC (European Travel Commission) and UNWTO, the World Tourism Organization. It is available via the ETC and UNWTO websites.

It also draws upon some of the methodologies developed for the UNWTO Destination Web Watch evaluation and benchmarking scheme.

Expert Analysis: Website Audit and Strategic Website Evaluation
It is wise to use experts to undertake an audit and evaluation of a website. Audits and evaluations may include desk research, validation of code and testing of other technical aspects of the website and mystery shopping.

Website audits and evaluations should be based on a set of accepted, research and best-practice based quality criteria and critical success factors, such as those that have been developed for Destination Web Watch (DWW).

The DWW Website Audit is designed to provide DMOs with a quick and reliable tool to evaluate the quality of their websites. It also enables a DMO to benchmark the performance of its site against other DMO sites. It assesses approximately 150 quality criteria and critical success factors for websites in key categories: accessibility and readability, identity and trust, customisation and interactivity, navigation, findability and search engine optimisation, and technical performance.

The in-depth strategy-based DWW Website Evaluation covers the qualities of a site as a destination marketing site and judges a DMO’s performance as an online marketer. The evaluation takes as its starting point the DMO’s overall marketing strategy. The content and functions of a website are evaluated in terms of the presence, quality and performance of internet services, that is, information, contact, relationship, transaction and entertainment services.

A DWW Website Audit or DWW Strategic Website Evaluation report will propose recommendations for correcting weaknesses and contain an action plan for optimisation of the website.

Online Surveys
Online surveys, initiated by e-mail and on websites, are an excellent and immediate means of obtaining more information about customers. Like offline surveys, the information gained will depend on the sampling method:

A survey form positioned on your own website will obviously be a survey of site users A survey form distributed via a link in an email sent to contacts in the DMO’s CRM database or part of it, can provide information about all customers irrespective of their previous or current contact channel with the DMO.

A form hosted by one or more third-party online media may enable the DMO to gain information about the market generally, or a segment of it.

There are cheap and easy do-it-yourself online survey tools available. You will need to find one that works in the language and culture of your target market. Examples are Survey Monkey, Constant Contact and AreYouNet.com which offer French, Spanish, and English. However, expertise and experience in practical social research, questionnaire design and use of the internet are prerequisites for a successful survey.

Offline User Surveys
Traditional market research techniques (telephone, postal, personal interview and group discussions) have substantial advantages over online surveys. These include the potential to achieve higher response rates (and hence a more representative sample) plus more opportunity for follow-up surveys (some time after first contact with the user, to find out about the impact of e-marketing).

Online Experiments
Tracking user behaviour on an existing site can yield valuable insights and online experiments can take several forms such as AB testing (also known as split path or champion-challenger testing) and multivariate or multi variable testing.

AB testing determines which is the better of two alternatives, A or B, with visitors randomly divided into two groups. Each group is shown a different version of a web page to determine which version leads to higher conversion, average order value, application completion, or other target. Multivariate testing isolates the elements on a page and helps to find out what elements matter, and which combination is the strongest.

Advanced testing and automated optimisation can also be achieved using the Taguchi method which is seen as a most powerful method to collect information on possible significant improvements.

Laboratory Testing
Unlike online experiments laboratory testing takes place in a laboratory setting. Selected users are asked to perform a series of typical tasks using a website and are observed while performing these tasks.

This way of evaluating websites has a myriad of possibilities for analysing the user-friendliness and functional effectiveness of websites. The way in which observations are recorded and other data are collected, is often a combination of notes taken by observers, audio-visual records of what the test participants do and say, the analysis of, for example, the server logs or page-tag logs on the behaviour of the test participants, questionnaires to be filled in and debriefing interviews.

Eye tracking, the process of measuring the point of gaze and/or the motion of an eye, has become a popular laboratory testing methodology as it can provide powerful analyses of how people interact with a website: whether they have, for example, trouble navigating or whether they do indeed give attention to what you think is critical information on a page. Test participants’ eye movements and pupil dilation measures are monitored and recorded by miniature high speed cameras as they interact with the display, recorded on video and converted into maps giving insight in aspects such as viewing history and ‘hot spots’.

Web Analytics
According to the Web Analytics Association, ‘Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimising web usage’.

Web analytics is not only about website traffic data, though web traffic data is indeed the backbone of a web analytics programme. Internet data includes website traffic data (server-side and/or browser-side data) as well as data from usability studies, transactional database systems, customer entered data and online surveys.

A web analytics expert can not only help you spot the weaknesses, but also the hidden opportunities of your website. Analysing web traffic data will help you find out ‘what’ is happening on your web site but, of course, for the information to be useful, you have to find out ‘why’ your web site visitors are behaving as they are.

There are over 50 vendors of web analytic software tools. The majority of these tools transform web traffic data into more useful information through segmenting, filtering, summarising and reporting on web traffic data. Other tools enable more advanced testing and analytics techniques, such as real-time multivariate testing.

e-Commerce Metrics
For DMOs that sell on their own site, or are sales partners with others, metrics and statistics are an essential tool in determining how many potential customers look, but decide not to book. Combining metrics with the other methods outlined above, will provide information to enable the destination to work towards reducing this figure.

Avoiding Expensive Mistakes
As we have nowadays a thorough knowledge of the internet user’s behaviour, wishes and requirements and a large number of research–based guidelines, reliable testing is possible and should be part of the design and development process. A detailed and helpful guide for developing ‘usable and useful web sites’ is offered by the USA Department of Health and Human Services. Examples of methodologies that help avoid expensive mistakes especially in the early phases of the design and development of websites include card sorting, working with scenarios and personas, paper and digital prototyping.

Other Methodologies
Academic and commercial research is continually developing and assessing new evaluation methodologies. A handy overview of methodologies is the Usability Methods Toolbox by James Hom.

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TEAM Associate, Karin Elgin-Nijhuis, is a specialist in online branding and marketing and has extensive experience in assisting organisations and companies in developing and optimising their web activities and e-business. Karin is part of TEAM International and is responsible for the development of TEAM business in The Netherlands.

Much of the material for this article is available in the new e-Marketing for Tourism Destinations handbook which was co-authored by Peter Varlow, Karin Elgin-Nijhuis and Roger Carter, along with contributions from other industry experts.