Sta Travel Creates A Targeted Online Experience With Webtrends ...
CASESTUDY / stA tRAVel
851 SW 6th Ave., Suite 1600
Portland, OR 97204
STA Travel Creates a Targeted Online
1.503.294.7025
fax: 1.503.294.7 1 30
Experience with Webtrends Analytics
World’s largest student travel organization gains crucial insight into
Webtrends Sales
customer preferences, retools web sites based on analytics data.
1.888.932.8736
sales@Webtrends.com
Europe, Middle East, Africa
At A GlAnce Results:
+44 (0) 1784 415 700
• Optimized online campaigns and communications by monitoring all engagements on the
emea@Webtrends.com
web, including social network sites and applications.
For offices worldwide, visit:
• Improved online experience for visitors, using analytics insight to retool web site features
www.Webtrends.com
and experiences.
• Combined analytics and other business results via open industry-standards data formats,
providing broader insight into business performance.
• Added multiple ways to access and share analytics results, including real-time dashboards,
pdf emails on multiple devices and SmartView™ performance overlays.
chAllenGe
Since the 1970s, STA Travel has helped adventurous students plan summer trips and spring
break excursions. Over the years, the company’s close connection with its customers and
their needs has fuelled its growth into the world’s largest student, youth and budget-travel
organization, with a global network of hundreds of branches and 20 regional web sites.
When STA first ventured online, its web sites did
little more than extend the company’s rich
“Webtrends Analytics provides answers
selection of trip-planning resources and booking
to the questions we need to continually
services onto the web. The sites operated
ask ourselves to better understand and
independently within their geographic regions,
without a global system, architecture or
serve our customers online.”
platform. As a result, STA Travel had limited
- cRAiG hepbuRn, GlobAl webmAsteR foR stA tRAVel
visibility into customer flow within its web sites.
The company had little sense of what customers
were searching for which travel destinations they were interested in, or the parts of its web
sites that generated the most trip reservations. Even the countries from which people
visited the sites were a mystery.
The impact: STA Travel was losing one of the core ingredients of its success – its keen
understanding of its customers and their needs.
solution
In 2005, STA Travel introduced a global strategy for ecommerce technology to coordinate
its regional web sites and streamline its online user experience. The company looked to
Webtrends to provide the analytics insight necessary to make this new strategy successful.
STA Travel deployed Webtrends Analytics, the online marketing industry’s most powerful
and flexible analytics platform, to measure all aspects of the organization’s online presence,
from static content on its web sites to buzz generated on other web sites or blogs, including
social media sites such as Facebook or My Space.
“Webtrends Analytics provides answers to the questions we must continually ask
ourselves to better understand and serve our customers,” said Craig Hepburn, global
webmaster for STA Travel. “How many people are downloading our latest podcast and
then listening to it? How many people are submitting content to our site, uploading
images and writing blogs? What are people saying about us on Twitter? We now have
insight on all of these questions and many more.”
In addition, STA Travel now has multiple ways to monitor and report on the wealth of online
data at its disposal. Marketing and web teams in each of STA Travel’s regional markets can
monitor key performance indicators in real time, via performance dashboards, or they can
receive reports in pdf format by email and view them on any device. If they need to drill down
into the performance of specific web site features, campaigns or promotions, they can use
Webtrends SmartView™ overlays, which provide quick visual snapshots on the fly.
In addition, web managers can further analyze the customer data and combine it with
information from the company’s call centers, email information and sales to gain a broader
view of the company’s performance. Webtrends’ support for open industry standards, such
as ODBC and web services, enables this data integration.
Results
Webtrends Analytics has enabled STA Travel to run its online business in a new way. Instead
of relying on the intuition of site managers or vague indicators such isolated page views, STA
Travel creates marketing campaigns and adapts its web sites based on how customers
actually engage with the company and its brands on the web.
STA Travel can follow the online journeys that its customers take as they plan and book
their own global jaunts. The company can monitor where visitors tend to enter its sites,
the pages that stall their progress and the educational resources they most often use
before booking flights or making other reservations. The insights gained from this data
have helped STA Travel identify and fix pages from which people tend to exit the site, as
well as build stronger connections with web sites from which people most often arrive
before booking trips.
“Webtrends gives us the ability to understand and observe the current trends on our web
sites,” Hepburn said. “This helps us to develop a strategy and a process for making tactical
changes online – and how to prioritize the development for these changes.”
After the release of the iPhone in the United States, STA Travel was able to quickly determine
how to optimize its sites for these popular new devices. The changes were then made on other
STA Travel sites before the launch of the iPhone in these regions, ensuring an optimized
experience for customers as soon as they began using these devices on their local site.
STA Travel has been so impressed by the results that it hopes to soon be able to use analytics to
gain insight into how visitors are interacting with applications on its sites and provide targeted
content based on these interactions. For instance, on its Mapmyadventure page, STA Travel and
Webtrends are exploring ways to pinpoint destinations where visitors are clicking within an
onscreen map and then provide hotel deals or cheap flights for these destinations.
“Webtrends has fundamentally changed the way that we develop the site,” Hepburn said.
“We now can observe and understand the trends in Internet use, and develop a strategy
and a process for making tactical changes online.”
About STA Travel
STA Travel is the largest student and youth travel organization in the world serving over two and a half million students each
year. With retail locations in the United States, a 24-hour call center and an online presence on www.statravel.com, students
have access to comprehensive travel products and services including discounted student airfare, accommodations and tours,
discount cards, student travel loans, travel insurance, foreign currency exchange, international cell phones and visa application
services. STA Travel is the exclusive distributor of the ISIC card and the Blue Ticket™ in the United States. STA Travel also has
extensive resources and expertise to service group clients with its International Programs and Group Services division.
About Webtrends Inc.
Webtrends is a trusted analytics advisor in the business of collecting, analyzing, delivering and ultimately transforming
data into understanding. Webtrends delivers the industry’s most recognized search engine marketing, visitor intelligence,
and analytics solutions to enable companies to understand their customers, drive engagement, and enhance marketing
and brand awareness. Thousands of global organizations, including Microsoft, Reuters, General Mills and Ticketmaster
have chosen Webtrends business solutions and client services expertise to optimize their customers’ online experiences.
Webtrends was the first web analytics company, founded over 15 years ago.
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