Travo Summit 2012: Time to stop analysing and start acting on Big Data, says QuBit

Only 8% of people who come to your site will purchase a holiday, the other 92% will leave and never come back – but Big Data can improve your conversion rates.

Only 8% of people who come to your site will purchase a holiday, while the other 92% will leave and never come back – but Big Data can improve your conversion rates.

That was the message from QuBit chief executive Graham Cooke addressing the Travolution Summit this week.

He also told delegates that proper use of Big Data could give firms the business agility to implement solutions quickly, which would then save on labour costs, increase site speed and reduce marketing.

Cooke said: “Big Data enables companies to leverage personalisation. They use information exchange to create personalised, powerful experiences. Getting it right makes a big difference – and a lot of money.

“We’re working with an airline in the US at the moment which has increased conversions by 17% by showing the right deal to the right person at the right time.”

Cooke added: “Buying travel 20 years ago from a high street travel agent used to be an extremely personal, knowledgeable, friendly, advisory experience, but now it’s happening on an iPad on the kitchen table.

“There’s no sales person there – no wonder people are abandoning their baskets and conversions are going down.

“It’s a huge, huge loss. You’ve invested loads of marketing pounds getting them to your site only to lose them because you just don’t know them well enough to know what would be relevant to keep them there.”

Cooke advised using tag management to add structure to the data.

“It connects and joins your data together. This is a very exciting step. It can take as little as 38 seconds to add a tag and if you do, you can then worry less about the processes and more about the actions you’re going to take from the Big Data you’ve got,” he said.

“Analytics have been giving us great excel spreadsheets for years but now we need to move out of reporting and into acting on things.

“We need to understand where our customers are coming from, when they are coming and work out what’s the most relevant thing to show that person to engage them.

“When they scroll down, you want them to find more and more stuff that’s relevant to them, which will make them less and less likely to leave,” said Cooke.