Information and Purchasing Habits of Travelers
AATT MONITOR
Given the huge importance that search engines have acquired in the election of destinations for travelers, we have considered necessary to evaluate the presence of the websites of each Autonomous Community's Tourism Board. Given its coverage of online search activity, Google, and more specifically Google Travel Spain, who has developed a method to determine SEM and SEO evaluation for these organisms, has collaborated to this study, considering the criteria that follows.
For the purpose of this study of the SEO/SEM positioning of several Spanish Tourism Board websites, two separate studies where performed. One the one hand we had SEM positioning, and SEO on the other.
SEM Evaluation: The purpose of the same is to determine de quantity and quality of the SEM initiatives that the Autonomous Communities in 2010 have undertaken in 2010, in relation the their websites. To do so, Google ad campaigns in every market, language have been analyzed, considering the following:
The following factors have been evaluated:
- Investment: Evaluated on a scale of 1 to 7, 1 being that with the largest investment.
- Impression Share: Evaluated on a scale of 1 to 7, 1 being that with more impression share (An Impression Share of 35% indicates that, for each of the cases in which an ad could have been served for a given query considering the structure of the account, keywords, match type, quality score, etc., it was indeed finally served. The remainig 65% of the times the ad was not served, due to two possible reasons: Not high enough Rank=Quality Score * CPC, or not enough budget).
- Impressions: Evaluated on a scale of 1 to 7, 1 being that with more impressions.
- CTR: Evaluated on a scale of 1 to 7, 1 being that with the highest CTR.
- CPC: Evaluated on a scale of 1 to 7, 1 being that with the highest CPC.
- Average Position: Evaluated on a scale of 1 to 7, 1 being that with the highest Average Position
- SEM Evaluation: Final evaluation of each website.
SEO Evaluation: The purpose of the same is to determine the organic position of the first result corresponding to the Tourism Board website. Data for the year 2010 has been analyzed in Google.es and Google.com for Spanish IP addresses, in Spanish language.
The SEO assessment has been approached as follows:
- The biggest 50 queries to each destination were selected.
- For each of those, we recorded the position of the first organic link (only if found in the first 3 results pages)
- The final evaluation is calculated as the weighted average of the position and number of queries, for each of the 50 queries.
