Singapore Travel Agencies: Online Report

How the Online picture of Singapore Travel Agencies looks like?

The following data is taken from Hitwise Singapore Industry Report for Travel – Agencies, based on Singapore internet usage for the month of February 2008.

Majority of traffic to Travel – Agencies industry is coming from local websites, which is no brainier.
The table belows show the top 10 websites based on visits

Another way to look at it:

The top 10 websites gather 46.06% of the market share in Feb 2008. Zuji is still number 1 travel site based on visit with almost double the market share of the closest rival Asia Travel.
Out of the top 10 sites, Yahoo Travel is powered by ZUJI so actually Zuji has much bigger market share.

Search Engine Traffic

Search Engine (Google/Yahoo) constitute a lion share (55.38%) of Upstream traffic from Search Engine before visiting sites in “Travel – Agency” industry.

For those of you who are wondering what Upstream traffic from Search Engine means, it basically is the traffic that Search Engine sends to Travel sites. Loosely translation, it refers to Singaporean who use search engine to find the travel sites that they are looking for.

Couple with the UpStream Traffic trend, one can see clearly the need for any sites in “Travel – Agency” industries to embark on Search Engine Marketing (paid search or Search Engine Optimization). The funny thing is, not many local sites in “Travel – Agency” are using SEM at this stage.

Just in case some of you don’t notice from the above picture, the average percentage of upstream search engine traffic for the ‘Travel – Agencies’ industry was 33.20% for the 6 months ending February, 2008. This is almost double the value for “All Categories” Industry Average.
This shows that on average, Singaporean use Search Engine to find Travel products more than the average of all other products combined.

Most popular Travel Search Terms for the 24 weeks ending 23.02.08

To marketing managers: Do you see your brand name there? If yes, what is your rank? No 1? or No 10? if No, what should you do???

Clickstream Analysis

Clickstream Analysis indicates which other websites or industries are visited before and after visiting the ‘Travel – Agencies’ industry.

Action points for Marketing managers:

• Does your companies have a website?
• Does your companies offer online promotions/bookings?
• Do you know where most of your sales are coming from?
• Do you know where most of your visitors are coming from?
• Review your media plan, marketing plan and see if the money was spent in the right channel? right industries based on Clickstream data?
• What would you do if you spent most of the marketing money to portal frontpages when you know that on average they rank no 8 in top upstream industries?
• Do you understand web analytics? More importantly, do you have a web analyst or web analytics specialist in your marketing team to analyze data and come back with Action points?
• etc…

Much can be talked about Online Travel and how Marketing Managers should integrate Online Marketing into their overall marketing plan effectively.

Yet, i am hungry now so see you next time 🙂

Thanks for your time and attention. Feel free to share your feedback via comments and please continue the conversation.