Leading Travel Ecommerce Sites Struggle with Digital Marketing Data Quality, According to New Research

OREM, Utah, April 15, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- In the second installment of The Return on Marketing Technology research series, Lima Consulting Group and ObservePoint conducted extensive research on the top 140 global travel websites to get a granular look at their digital marketing technology deployments.

The research report titled "The ROI of Marketing Technologies: How the Top Travel Sites Stack Up" shows that only 89.3% of all pages audited have a web analytics tag; and 36.8% of pages report inflated page view metrics across all sites. These factors contribute to poor data quality for some of the web's biggest digital marketing spenders.

"According to research by Gartner, CMOs will spend more on IT than the CIO by 2017," said Paul Lima, principal at Lima Consulting Group. "This should come as no surprise as marketing technology continues to have a bigger impact on the bottom-line of organizations that have a major ecommerce presence. However, marketing in a data-driven era means that the marketers need to ensure they are basing their decisions on accurate data. Correctly managing tags are at the core of this movement."

Key Findings
Lima Consulting Group's experts have distilled the data into the following findings:

1. Online Travel Agency (OTA) sites are deploying the most marketing technologies, followed by airlines, online hotel booking aggregators, rental cars, and hotel brand sites
2. One-third of all travel sites have deployed a Tag Management Solution (TMS), and half of those with TMS use free over premium enterprise-class web analytics solutions
3. Sites with TMS use more technology, benefit from better user experience and performance, but do experience slightly decreased site load times
4. Composite site performance scoring allows digital marketing teams to have greater confidence in data-driven business decisions

How the research was conducted
In July 2013, Lima Consulting Group (LCG), an online marketing strategy firm, and ObservePoint, a digital marketing technology auditing company, audited the top 140 global travel web sites using ObservePoint's advanced tag auditing solution.

Tag auditing is a systematic, comprehensive evaluation of the current tag configuration on a web site. When an audit is performed, tag-auditing software "crawls" a web site, and executes all of the code on every page. This helps accurately test and confirm the function and configuration of every tag on every page. Tag auditing improves results of marketing technologies deployed within the ever-increasing ecosystem of tag-based marketing solutions.

The research report is available for download at Lima Consulting's Infographics Page.

About Lima Consulting Group
Founded in 2004, Lima Consulting Group helps organizations develop, deploy and measure effective digital marketing strategies. LCG uses proven methodologies and best-practices to optimize acquisition, conversion, retention and engagement and maximize our clients' return on marketing technologies. LCG uses a multi-disciplinary approach with experts in strategy, data science, business intelligence, digital marketing and technology while providing these services in the languages spoken throughout the Americas.  With regional offices in Philadelphia and Sao Paulo, Brazil, LCG provides local services with world-class expertise.

About ObservePoint
Based in Orem, Utah, ObservePoint is the leader in web tag auditing – a critical element of web analytics. Audited web reporting resolves significant flaws in ROI analysis and executive data. ObservePoint uses a unique method of simulating network traffic at a speed and scale unparalleled in the industry to identify web analytic tag errors.

SOURCE ObservePoint