Blast Analytics and Marketing

How Website Usability Increased Sales in the Face of the Global Travel Recession

Supporting Leaders to EVOLVE

Overview

The global recession has had a significant impact on the travel industry and Costa Rican domestic airlines Nature Air felt the effects. They needed help improving their digital presence with the goal of increasing sales.

Challenge

A majority of Nature Air’s sales were coming from North American travelers that used Nature Air to easily and inexpensively travel from the centrally located capital of San Jose to the tourist destinations along the Pacific and Caribbean coasts. The U.S. and global recession had caused an overall decline in web sales, as well as overall sales. Nature Air partnered with Blast Analytics & Marketing to assist them in enhancing their website to increase conversions and sales.

Solution

Usability Testing

Through usability testing and other qualitative analysis, like online surveys, the obstacles hindering site visitors from booking flights became apparent. From this analysis, major changes were made to the main navigation, content, and the Calls to Action that lead visitors to important information on the site such as the booking engine to purchase flights.

Search Engine Optimization

Previously the site was receiving a lot of traffic from people who were looking for general information about Costa Rica, but not enough traffic from people who were interested in specifically traveling within Costa Rica. Blast Analytics & Marketing helped Nature Air develop and optimize content that was more specific to the type of information that potential Nature Air customers needed to find and book a domestic Costa Rican airline flight.

Results

Overall conversion was increased substantially. On the 17 flight destination pages, which is a critical steps in the buying funnel, Blast increased conversion 591%. This led to a 70% increase in web-based sales over record sales in the same month the prior year.

Blast also increased overall non-paid search traffic by over 19% from just two months prior. Nature Air previously had no rankings in the top 10 for ‘airlines in costa rica’, ‘costa rica airlines’ or similar keyword phrases. We were able to deliver #1 rankings on Google for both.

Within 30 days of implementation Blast delivered:

  • 53 – #1 Rankings on Google
  • 114 – #2 & #3 Rankings on Google
  • Plus, countless Top 10 rankings on related keywords

Nature Air’s commitment to its website as the primary revenue generating vehicle has been strengthened by these results. Through usability testing, using Google Website Optimizer (now called Google Content Experiments) and data analysis, Nature Air and Blast Analytics & Marketing have created a culture of optimization that will continue to help them capture market share during the storm of this recession.

How easy it was to navigate; it was not so easy last time I tried it about 3 months ago! Thanks for the improvement!

4Q Visitor Survey