Which data do you collect and why does it matter to you?

Years ago, I sat in on a tourism marketing conference session by the always-superb Brian Matson from TwoSix Digital. The topic was social media and marketing meaurement.

Brian asked the DMO audience how many had Google Analytics, or some sort of analytics software, installed on their website.

I expected everyone to raise their hands.

Instead, only about half the room did.

What?!

Brian was pretty surprised, too.

He doesn’t have much more of a poker face than I do, but he was very good at gently and kindly reminding these folks that Google Analytics is free, and they can’t possibly measure what matters if they don’t have measurement tools installed and gathering data over time.

So, now it’s time for true confessions.

I used to be conscientious about tracking website and social media performance data for Tourism Currents. I have a simple Google Drive spreadsheet to track stats like most popular pages and blog posts, conversions, YouTube video stats, which social platforms send referral traffic and does it convert, etc.

I also note social media account data like engagement rate, because this one stat – a solid, growing engagement rate – can lead to more visibility and reach, more followers, more success. Not every piece of data is worth your attention. Focus!

Then GA4 (Google Analytics 4) came along, and the learning curve was kinda steep and frustrating for me after years of knowing right where to go to get exactly the data I wanted. I also became a caregiver for my Mom and replaced a knee and a hip (super-not-fun.)

I started to wing it a lot more when it came to data and knowing what was working for my business.

As a Mighty Team of One with a reasonable amount of marketing experience and knowledge, I could get away with fooling myself for awhile.

But, I KNEW I was winging it.

I also knew that I could not stand in front of DMO staff or their tourism partners during my own digital marketing workshops, and tell everyone to measure things if I wasn’t doing it myself.

Like I said, no poker face, and I’m a terrible liar.

This is me giving you permission to screw up and drop the ball, OK? Life happens.

This is also me telling you to get ON the ball if you need to install analytics on your website and start looking at your own data, because you can’t tell what’s working for you if you don’t set goals and then measure the data.

Go here to get smarter about GA4 and your website content performance.

This month I popped open that spreadsheet and finally did my update work. Yay!

(Some spoilers) I confirmed that the Tourism Currents LinkedIn Page is still my top social performer, and that both the Tourism Currents Facebook Page and Tourism Currents Instagram accounts actually do have OK engagement and send me some traffic, even though I feel like I’m shouting into the void on both platforms.

Also be aware that figuring out which data matters to you is in the middle of upheaval as more of your visitors, guests, and customers use AI for search.

I’ll point you to two articles that gave me food for thought on this:

• Gathan Borden on what it means when ChatGPT shows up in GA4, and
• Melvin Boecher on what AI search means for hotels, tour operators, DMOs, and travel creators.

Where do you get stuck when it comes to your marketing data? Leave a comment and let me know.

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