The SA Tourism Web site has been rebuilt from scratch, at the cost of R2.5 million, with the intent to better meet the needs of its key audiences: consumers, business tourism, media, and stakeholders.
So says William Price, global manager of e-marketing at SA Tourism, who adds the focus was to rebuild according to three objectives: “To be the authority on South African travel information, to focus on the consumer first, and to meet the needs of the first-time English-speaking visitor.
“We released the first version last year on 8 May at Indaba, the biggest trade show in Africa.” He says the Web site has since been rebuilt from scratch, taking five months at a cost of R2.5 million.
“The previous version of southafrica.net had a focus on business-to-business activities, missing the opportunity to deliver information on SA to consumers and travellers in the country.”
Price says the site was developed with its ad agency, Ogilvy, and its development partner, Cambrient. “We're now going into the second phase of the Web site life cycle and we're excited about the challenges and additions we have planned.
Meeting objectives
“We have seen dramatic growth to the site, and have had to upgrade both bandwidth and server capacity more than once.”
Prince states current monthly visits reach more than 250 000, compared to 30 000 at the beginning of the year.
“We are very pleased with the performance, feedback and results the site has been able to deliver,” he says. “We've had more than the one million unique visitors that we aimed for.”
He explains the site uses Google Analytics and SiteCatalyst to monitor site performance and user behaviour. “We have seen a 20% return and an average of more than four pages viewed per user. We're aiming for a lot more going forward this year.
“We target a global audience, with the ultimate goal of increasing tourism in SA. The largest traffic sources are the US, UK, France, Germany, and India.”
Prince highlights the traffic sources: “Approximately 61% from search engines, 22% from direct access, 12% from referring Web sites, and 4% from other.”
Development stack
“We're hosting in the US with Rackspace, and make use of a mix of platforms and technologies that deliver the southafrica.net experience. We're using Cambrient Content Suite as the content management system. It uses a Postgres, or object-relational database management system, and Apache Tomcat services.”
He says it's a Java environment with some Flash elements in the front-end. “We love open source and prefer South African service providers to work with us on our e-marketing initiatives.
“Advertising southafrica.net runs along a number of online campaigns and we have a robust marketing strategy, which we designed before rebuilding the site. Twitter is one of the many channels we use.”
He says a lot of traffic is being pushed to the Web site through its global pay per click (PPC) efforts, which are focused on the US and UK markets.
“This fiscal, we'll expand the reach of the PPC activities to include many of our other core markets globally. We are also scoring high search engine optimisation points, given we are ranked number one for 'South Africa' on Google. This is a massive achievement for us, given our online objectives,” concludes Prince.
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