On average Brits spend 30 hours preparing for a holiday, with the typical consumer visiting 8 websites throughout their purchase cycle – including research on destinations and hotels, review reading, searching for the best deals and exploring nearby attractions. The data – from Club Med UK – also highlights social media has a trigger for deciding which destinations to initially research.

Ensuring a customer stays on board and does not abandon the website once products are in the cart poses a very diverse challenge for travel SEO specialists where so much information and temptation is on offer elsewhere. So how do you reduce cart abandonment rate and increase overall sales?

Targeted Search with Targeted Content

The cart abandonment rate for a key destination or product highlights the exact number of customers who have decided to go elsewhere.

In past blogs we have covered getting a travel SEO strategy right from the start. Strategy should be considered with depth and consider all steps of the user’s journey.

If a user searches ‘holidays in Canada’ and yoursite.com ranks first the initial click could be in the bag, but it doesn’t necessarily signal purchase intent. As such, targeted landing pages – showing in this case – with an overall insight to Canada create an initial area for a user to interact with a website within the research phase.

Featuring a breakdown of the types of Canada holidays on offer and destinations within Canada on the page create the opportunity to move further within the website and for the user to start building an affinity with the brand.

 

Utilising Behaviour Flow

Within Google Analytics the use of the Behaviour Flow tool has a huge benefit in understanding cart abandonment rate, with the additional possibility of understanding where abandonments occur before a website user has entered the shopping phase.

Using the goal flow and behaviour flow travel website owners are able to determine which pages are leaking the most traffic. There could be an issue with the checkout itself if the exit page turns out to be the checkout page.

If destination pages or product pages have the highest exit rate then there is a possibility that users are looking for something different, or calls to action can be improved.

Using the statistics for exit rates in behaviour flow is the start to understanding where the holes in the website are, but seeing where users are passing through the website is the first stage in utilising the stronger elements of a user experience offering and potentially multiplying these across the website.

Effectively, we are able to see strengths and weaknesses in user journeys and where resource should be allocated to expand upon (or remove) these elements.

 

Set Up Goal Funnels

The next stage in reducing onsite abandonment comes in the form of goal funnels.

Using goal funnels creates an expected path for users and therefore allows web owners and SEO specialists to see whether users carry out particular actions within the path to purchasing a holiday.

Within these funnels, there’s a possibility to set up different levels of entrance as well, allowing travel website managers to determine the highest first time entrance medium, second time entrance, any additional entrances and the final entrance before any conversion.

Simply, this allows travel e-retailers to know which channels work best at any given time in the sale cycle and what the key focuses for conversion rate optimisation should be.

 

Ecommerce Abandonment

Pairing behavior flow and goal funnels makes it possible for travel website managers to get a percentage of cart abandonment.

It may take a couple of days to see any meaningful data once goal funnels are set up. This data can then aid in shaping on ongoing digital and organic marketing strategy moving forward.

Polaris provide effective and strategic travel SEO services with excellent results seen on a global scale.

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