Most U.S. Tourism Websites Are Woefully Underused
Skift Take
For all the noise tourism boards try to create with flashy TV ad campaigns and social media efforts, are they forgetting to put their resources behind online marketing 101? This data certainly suggests so.
Editor: Recently we've started a new monthly feature on top trafficked sites in various sectors in travel, using data from SimilarWeb. We have found SimilarWeb’s traffic stats to be a relatively good barometer of consumer web activity, better than other traffic comparison sites, at least as far as proportional comparison goes.
So far we’ve looked at the top online booking sites, the top airline sites, the top hotel brand sites, and the top travel media sites around the globe. Today we’re looking at the top official consumer tourism and destination marketing organization sites run by states and cities across the United States (in terms of traffic), for October 2013.
Biggest Takeaways from the Numbers Below:
The pathetic traffic numbers for these sites. We couldn't believe it at first, and cross-checked with verified Quantcast numbers for those available, which we've noted below. Even if Similarweb is undercounting, as it seems to be based on Quantcast numbers, and even if you double traffic to each of these sites, it still comes up to puny numbers, especially if you compare them to the top travel media sites.
For the amount of dollars in ad campaigns spent by these states and city tourism boards and the buzz they create among the travel industry, the online results don't seem to match it.
It seems that the resources devo
