Keep visitors on site

A recent survey by Nedstat has revealed that a third of all visitors to a travel website will leave after only looking at one page and that only one in every 200 visitors will make a booking.

The figures compiled were collected after tracking 41 million visitors to 10 travel company and travel agent websites over a 6 month period.

The study also concluded that on average, people stayed on site for 6.5 minutes per visit in which time they viewed an average of 4.5 pages. The Nedstat and Genesys survey has revealed that one of the most important factors for keeping visitors on-site is to ensure that they are directed to a relevant “landing page” rather than a generic home page. An example would be that if someone was specifically looking for “Gatwick airport parking” in Google, when they make their selection from the returned results, they’re taken directly to a web page or more specifically, a landing page that deals with “Gatwick airport parking” rather than a page that contains general information about Gatwick airport or directions and flight times.

Further details show that 55% of sites were visited directly from the URL being typed in, 20% from links on another site, a further 20% via search engines and the final 5% from adverts.

In short, if you have a great travel site with highly relevant landing pages or a great travel blog with useful information and links, you have a much better chance of gaining and cultivating new visitors.