Travel Web sites can engage visitors by using destination pictures

A research article conducted by Antonio Hyder and colleagues at the marketing department of the University of Valencia, Spain, received the award for best travel marketing research at the Academy of Marketing annual conference, celebrated at Liverpool University in the UK. The research concludes that travel Web sites should use full screen pictures as these have the capability of engaging online visitors. The research demonstrate how pictures lead to engagement and engagement leads to purchase intention, non-switch intention to competitor Web sites, return intention and to an increased virtual branding potential.

The survey also demonstrates that engagement can only be measured by surveying people and not with habitual clickstream measures used by online companies such as clicks or pages views. This conclusion of the research opens a new way of understanding consumer behaviour in online settings.

The study was conducted through a Web site simulating an online travel agency capable of remotely recording people’s eye movement and online behaviour with a precision of a milisecond.

The results of the study reveal that businesses are misguided regarding what to measure despite they keep pouring money into purchasing clickstream-based online advertising which does not necessarily lead to profitability.