Marketing metrics can seem like a jumble of acronyms: SEO, P/V, UTM, CAC, CTR, CTA, CPA. The list goes on. So, how do you know what to focus on, how to measure it and how to actually use the data to grow your business?
We talked to Samantha Patil, founder of Well Traveled, a travel membership club and booking agency, for a fuller picture of which metrics are most meaningful to her business and how they inform her business strategy.
Develop a Strategy
The good news: You don’t need a robust data suite with several fancy visualizations to get useful insights out of your data. If you’re paying a high fee for sophisticated tools without getting organized and thinking through strategy beforehand, it’s likely a waste of both money and time.
“There are a million things that you could be tracking, but they don’t all matter,” Patil said. “It’s about picking the metrics that are going to affect the bottom line of your business.”
Patil recommends taking time to organize your data and develop processes for managing it first. “Then, you can start to think about the goals that you want and what you are really trying to get to. You can then work backward to figure out what metrics are right for you.”
And, you don’t have to do it on your own. Well Traveled initially used Excel to export and analyze data. Now, the team works in Google Data Studio and Mixpanel to analyze data. While they manage their own data processes internally, a marketing consultant builds their initial dashboards and makes sure that the data is aligned with their strategic goals.
Learn What’s Working for You
Metrics in isolation don’t mean that much. It’s when you combine them with intuition, customer knowledge and market insights that they become actionable. Patil explains her approach as being data-informed rather than data-driven, stressing how much context matters.
“When you’re looking at data analytics, you might see something that looks really interesting, but is that helping or hurting your business in the long term?” she said.
To make that distinction in her own business, she digs into booking data. Her team looks specifically at its repeat purchase rate overall, then further breaks it down by how long someone has been a member, and whether they’ve used Well Traveled’s booking services or just the membership.
The company’s retention rate is high, at 75% for membership renewal year-over-year (about the same as Amazon Prime, according to recent industry research). But when they looked at the renewal rate for members who had used their booking services, the number jumped to 94%; those are Netflix numbers.
“Because people use the platform differently — some will come in and just use it for recommendations, while others only use it for booking — (this data) helped open our eyes to the potential for sharing more of these benefits with our broader audience and that broader membership base,” Patil said.
Build on Your Niche
As a business, you can’t be everything to everyone. This is true for marketing as well. Setting a wide target audience makes it harder to reach the people who will see your value and become paying customers. When you’re focused on search engine optimization (SEO), metrics can be hugely informative in guiding your strategy, especially in a crowded field.
“I think it’s no secret that search terms and travel are really hard to bid against when you're going up against sites like Expedia and Hotels.com,” Patil said.
Her team addresses this challenge by bidding on longtail searches, or longer, more specific keyword searches — think “best pet-friendly hotel Atlanta” vs. “Atlanta hotel.” Though longtail searches have lower search volumes overall, they are easier for smaller players to rank for.
“Terms like ‘best date night in London’ will actually rank pretty highly for us, or at least on the first page in those search results,” Patil said.
In addition to ranking in organic search results, less competition for keywords also means lower cost for paid search. You can do keyword research using Google’s Keyword Planner, tools built into your customer relationship management software or a planning tool like Moz or Semrush. You can also double down on the topics or audiences that are already finding you via organic search by using Google Analytics to see which terms they’re using to discover your brand.
After implementing an SEO strategy, use metrics like bounce rate and conversion rate to see on which pages customers are leaving your site and on which they’re converting. And, keep in mind that content is a long game. You should see results from your SEO strategy in six to 12 months.
Get in Front of the Right People With the Right Message
“We’re always tracking the path that someone came through,” Patil said. This tracking is done through UTM codes, which are parameters added to a URL that track what led a user to the site. You can also use UTM codes to track the medium (social post, partner blog, etc.) and campaign.
You can use these metrics to determine not just which strategies are worth doubling down on (or leaving behind), but also to hone specific messaging tailored to audiences who are coming in through that channel. Customers who are coming in thanks to an influencer on TikTok are likely to have different travel needs than those coming in through a Facebook group or organic search. Metrics can help you understand who those customers are and what kind of messaging they respond to best.
Well Traveled personalizes its messaging on custom landing pages for each of its partners. And it’s not only about clicks or page views: Brand building is just the first step.
“I think sometimes it’s easy to get a lot of people in the door and focus specifically on traffic driving, but it’s important to analyze the quality of that customer coming from that channel,” Patil said.
You will be able to take a longer-term lens on what it means to be a high-quality customer by tracking channel data. To tell if a program is working, you can look at how a customer is performing and behaving once they’ve taken a trip.
Validate Your Whole Business, Not Just Marketing Channels
Every company and travel advisor is going to have slightly different goals and metrics to consider based on their business and marketing strategy. Not every travel advisor will need to launch custom newsletters or a TikTok channel to meet customers where they are. But all travel advisors should care about customer experience and satisfaction.
Many studies have shown that word-of-mouth and referrals are one of the highest conversion channels for travel advisors, bested only by business from repeat customers. You can use metrics like inbounds from referrals as proxy metrics for customer happiness.
Patil looks specifically at retention and repeat purchase rate, which for Well Traveled is 60%. “If they do book with us, we know they’re very likely to book again. More times than not, we know they’re going to be a member for life,” Patil said.
This knowledge can also help you understand customer acquisition cost (CAC) in context. It might be worth investing more in a growth strategy, for example, when you can be confident that the customer is likely to book with you again.
If you track retention and referrals and are not happy with the numbers you see, that is also important information that could indicate any number of things about your business. As you make improvements, you can use those metrics as a north star to see what’s working.
Originally featured in the Summer 2023 issue of The Compass magazine.
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