Aussie Web Analyst

I was using the STA Travel website last week as I had a £60 gift voucher that i needed to use up but I ended up fairly frustrated with the website design.  Based on my own experiences, there are some quick fixes they could make which I am positive would lead to an improvement in their conversion rate and therefore an increase in revenue.

Most of the issues I faced were due to the page content not matching the page expectation.  When a user clicks on a link, they generally have an idea of what they should be seeing next, based on the name or context of the link.  A failure to meet this expectation will often lead to the visitor leaving the site – I only stuck around and tried harder to find the information I was after due to having that voucher.

My experience with the STA Travel website

My idea was to take a local tour, somewhere in the UK and so I selected ‘tours & treks’ under the tours menu at the top.  I wasn’t really after an ‘Adventure Trip’ as per the heading of this page but assumed this is a generic name for all tours and ignored.  I was interested in Europe and chose one of the three options to click on for Europe (all lead the same place).  Scrolling down this page, I found the section for England, Ireland and Scotland and clicked on the single link provided to search through this tours.

So far, the experience was all reasonable.  It took me three clicks to get to a point where I had basically told STA Travel that I would be interested in tours for the UK.

Unfortunately, the page presented (eventually, very slow loading) is a search page, requesting that the visitor advise STA Travel of the continent, country and tour duration they are interested in.  Given I have already given the first two pieces of information, this is a little frustrating.  There is also a set of boxes, one for each continent.  I guess an easy way to bypass the search box would be click on one of these boxes?  No, this just takes you to the page for that continent (in my case, the page I was previously viewing) with this page containing a set of links back to the search page.

As I had a voucher, I forgave STA Travel for requesting information I had already given it (I would love to see the exit rate for this page) and requested to see tours in the United Kingdom of up to 1 week.  I would have preferred to specify weekend trips of not more than 3 nights but did not have the option.  This returned 27 tours (not in any particular order that I could identify) with the first 10 being displayed on the first page of results.  If you are clever, you will realise that you can sort this list by clicking on any heading (I wasn’t that clever and only discovered this while writing this post).

Within this list of tours, it was surprising to find for Oktoberfest (Germany), Rome, Prague and Paris.  Also surprising were the 8 day tours.  As I could not specify when I wanted to go on a tour, the Christmas and New Year tours were valid responses, just not relevant to me at all.  Of the 27 tours, only 8 were for the UK, of less than a week and were not a Christmas/New Year tour.  Given I had the voucher, I did what I suspect many would not do (this should be fairly obvious in the web analytics data using funnels or navigation reports) and stuck around to look further.

A little issue, when clicking on the next button for the next page of tour results, your view stayed at the bottom of the list of results.  In an industry where the cost of switching is negligible (unless you have a gift voucher), the settings should be adjusted so that the visitor is viewing the top results for that page without having to scroll to the top of the page.

I have not travelled around Scotland (the University of Aberdeen is very pretty though) and the two sentence short blurb sounded interesting so I selected ‘more info’ for the tour ‘Skye High’.  This took me to a page that displayed the exact same blurb and four buttons, two for ‘call us’ and two for ‘email enquiry’, all for ‘enquire about this tour’.  No information about tour dates, itinerary, what you get for your money and definitely no option to ‘book now’.  Given that STA Travel has a checkout engine for booking flights online; if after all this pain you still wanted to book a trip through them, why don’t they let you give them your money.

Should I add that i didn’t get a response when I tried emailing through an enquiry.  Or that there is no option to book Eurostar online if you are not a student or under 26.  And that the experience with looking up ski holidays can be worse than that above – the page doesn’t display properly in Firefox (you are happy to ignore what proportion of your visitors?) and I got the line ‘your chosen criteria returned no results’ (when I clicked on the link for ‘more’ under the section ‘On the Piste’).

How to use web analytics to identify and help fix these issues

Most of these issues are obvious without web analytics.  However with web analytics, you can quantify the scale of the issue.  The key metric to be looking at is the overall site conversion rate, what proportion of visits result in a sale or a request for more information from the visitor.  I can very confidently say that this metric is currently lower than it should be.

The key reports that should be run are

• exit page reports to understand if people are leaving from pages that aren’t natural exit points (indicating they are frustrated and giving up).
• funnel/clickpath reports to understand if people are not navigating through the website in the sequence they are expected to.
• page views per visit and frequency reports to see if they have high numbers.  This is what I would expect to see if people are having to search through the website for the information they are after.  The key question is whether visitors keep on trying until they do find that information and make a purchase or if they give up and go to a competitor instead.

With some clever calculations, it is possible to estimate the amount of revenue that is being lost as a result of people giving up on a site.  This can be used to make a business case for investing in the website improvements.  Web analytics also makes it easy to measure the improvements due to any changes that are made to the website.  If multivariate testing is used, you can even prove in advance that the change will make a difference and the scale of the improvement, at minimal risk.

STA Travel needs to immediately look at their conversion rate and understand where people are dropping off (giving up on) their website.  The proportion of visitors using alternative browsers to IE should also be looked at, no major company can be happy with a website that cannot be viewed properly by around 40% of their visitors. I hope these issues are already being pointed out by internal web analysts at STA Travel.  And that if they need assistance, they are talking to their WebTrends consultants (as that is the tool they are using).  I am happy of course to offer my assistance as well but I will be charging for any future advice.

Tags: Site Improvements, STA Travel, Web Analytics