Back to work... it's that time again for all the rafting outfitters to evaluate their websites and figure out the latest SEO for their site rankings. With social networking being derigeur, the whole SEO ballgame goes out the window (or so they say...). Page views are no longer as important as they were before. With Ajax, stickiness becomes more difficult to measure. Is it the time the consumer spends? Or is it the ROI?
I'm a nuts and bolts kind of person. I want to see numerical results. So, when I see profit margins shrinking because of PPC and other strategies, I have to re-evaluate, even when the internet marketer is telling me otherwise. It's the bottom line that has the tendency to gather all my attention... especially after speaking with the accountant... ha!
For this year, we have decided to try, once again, to ratchet back the number of paddlers we accommodate in a given season. Last year, we pulled all marketing internet traffic around the beginning of August in a half-ass attempt to slow the sales down. By the first of August, we were sold out for the entire season. But, that left us with hardly anything to offer for the rest of the season.
Our staff, for an entire month, stayed busy by invention. Each time the phone rang, the entire staff just cringed. The phone was an enemy in which we only said, "... sorry, we're sold out this weekend..." Then the consumers were hitting the store online and showing up without reservations on the day of the trip. (Yes... we have a gazillion disclaimers on the store site... people still showed up on the day of the trip anyway...)
Our biggest concern for this upcoming season is how to control the internet traffic in such a way as to not overwhelm our small staff, and to have this traffic in a more reasonable flow... yeh, right... if we can do this, we will have accomplished a miracle.
