Visit London gets 'WebTrendy'

Tourism group Visit London has received a significant boost in website traffic following changes made using intelligence gained from web analytics.

London's visitor and marketing agency has been working with WebTrends since the beginning of 2006 to understand how its online presence can be strengthened.

And with a site revamp in the pipeline – due to be unveiled next Wednesday – a lot of work has been done to find out exactly what users want from the site.

Speaking to silicon.com, Jeremy Willmott, user experience and design manager at Visit London, said: "What we saw was we could do a lot more [with the site]."

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The Visit London site lists 250,000 events in London and 150,000 attractions and also offers booking facilities to foreign and domestic visitors.

Willmott explained a more 'granular' or detailed approach was needed to continue driving visitor numbers on the website.

Another issue was accuracy. Willmott said: "I wasn't convinced it [the old package] was totally accurate. We couldn’t dig enough out of the data."

WebTrends technology allowed the team to look more deeply into certain areas to really refine what the website offered. Willmott said: "Now we can see what channels are driving impressions."

The Visit London team can now examine how effective ads are when they are located on particular sites and also on individual web pages.

Willmott said he requested around 350 reports on individual areas – 200 more than WebTrends offers as standard.

He said: "We were probably a pain in the neck for WebTrends."

But the result of the work - and the £50,000 spent to get the system in place - suggests it has paid off.

Willmott said the website now has more visitors - site traffic has risen by between 10 and 15 per cent in the past year - who are staying longer and making more bookings.

Willmott said: "It [the investment] has paid for itself over and over in terms of the insight we’re getting. It's the most valuable research tool we've got on the digital side, hands down."

As a result of the analysis, the re-launched website will feature a virtual tour guide and maps showing where different attractions are located.

Willmott described the latter as "the next best thing to actually standing out there in the street".