John and Gillian Winkler run a small holiday cottage in Scotland, and they operate a blog site of free advice to other holiday home owners at http://holidayhomewebsupport.blogspot.com. John used to be the marketing correspondent for The Times of London
Hit and run visitors to your web site give you only a few seconds. You've got to grab them then.
Some of your visitors are determined to find you.
Just because you get enquiries from your web site, it does not mean your site is good. Many holiday sites could be a lot lot better.
But there are many internet tarts who hit and run. They find you, have a quick look and if they don’t see what they want they’ll move on to some else.
The following problems will kill off a large number of your site visitors very quickly.
Not showing a link to your prices on every page. That is what they look for
Not showing a link to your availability on every page. That is what they look for
Not showing them how to contact you on every page
Having links from one page to another which do not open
Showing 2006 prices in 2007
Showing the site has not been updated
Showing poor photographs
If you look at this site then I'll tell you about the visitor statistics. The total visitors are much higher than for other similar sites in the area. www.bayviewkentallen.co.uk
We know exactly how our visitors move from one page to another. There is a tool we use called Google Analytics which shows us. It also shows us where they come from and the sites which refer visitors to us. We can see easily how well our inbound links are peforming.
We know how long they spend on the site on their first visit, and how many pages they look at. On average it is 3.6.
We can tell which pages they use to come into our site. It is a big advantage to have over 40 pages in the site. One of the best entrance pages is Scottish Weather and we have not promoted this page.
60% of our visitors bounce away from the site as soon as they open it. It is not what they are looking for.
80% of our visitors are new, and 20% are returning visitors.
60% of our visitors spend less than 10seconds on the site. On our cottage details page they spend on average 1min29secs and on our winter break page related to hill walking they spend 1min14secs
36% of our visitors are clearly in the wrong site altogether because they bounce out of the first page immediately.
We know from the Google analysis for every page, where the visitors come from and where they go to. Serious prospects visit the cottage details page, and the availability page, and the prices page. The other pages get far fewer visitors.
John Winkler
http://holidaysscotland.blogspot.com
PS you want to show your availability, because many visitors will not fill in a form and wait for a reply. They are off to book somewhere now.
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