Visit London has undergone a digital revolution by making analytics and data-driven insights the core of their marketing department. This allowed them to move away from relying on gut instincts and luck to basing decisions on facts and evidence from tracking website and campaign performance. As a result, they have seen record levels of traffic from search engines and social media, as well as increased engagement from marketing campaigns. Looking ahead, Visit London plans to further leverage analytics to gain a single customer view, test campaigns, and better understand mobile users to continue improving engagement and conversion rates.

1. VISIT LONDON: THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION Analytics 5th May 2010 The Hospital Club

2. The Background Visit London is the official visitor organisation for the capital. We promote London as the world's most exciting city by marketing to domestic and overseas leisure and business visitors, as well as to Londoners. MSN – UK Search Executive. Responsible for KPIs and insight to Bing.com Visit London (since 2007) – Digital Business Analyst. Responsible for web analytics, reporting, KPIs, digital marketing and insight for all digital aspects of the business.

3. You Say You Want A Revolution Analytical, cultural and creative revolution To get there we have had to do a lot of work and refocus towards new objectives But it is the future that is really exciting

4. You Say You Got A Real Solution Yes I did have a solution and that was to make analytics the heart of the department This might strike fear into the heart of any creative agency or Art Director, but I see an analyst as a creative person’s best friend Tracking allows us to see exactly what is going on, unlike other mediums Analytics can unshackle the restraints, prove and improve ROI and help educate A good analyst will be the difference between a brilliant and good website, a winning or losing pitch

5. You Say You Got A New Solution So VL did something that agencies really didn’t like, we banned all third party tags and other analytics We got rid of Google Analytics and didn't allow any dart tags. What we did do was spend a lot of time and effort on getting one set of analytics right By gaining trust in analytics we started to say goodbye to pot luck and gut instinct and hello to analysis and evidence We are now allowing third party tags back on the site on a case by case basis

6. You Ask Me For A Contribution……. I opened up and shared everything with everyone…..well to a point And with this came the education What we are doing What we could do What we should do

7. You Tell Me That It's Evolution Because of the new understanding of what was possible to report on we started to thinking differently about what we should aim for And we changed targets and measured different KPI’s For the first time we now have engagement targets for all our our marketing campaigns And we look more closely at sources of traffic and how they can work together to improve conversion and engagement

8. Don't You Know It's Gonna Be All Right

9. Don't You Know It's Gonna Be All Right In the last year we have seen; Record amounts of SEM traffic Record amounts of SEO traffic Engagement from marketing campaigns increase Social media milestones met and broken

10. The Future A Single Customer View Attribution Models MVT and A/B Testing Mobile Continued push into social media

11. Conclusion Visit London has gone through a process of change in the way we analyze our digital business Using numbers and facts as a base for decisions doesn’t stop the creative juices flowing It enabled us to encourage a new culture where measurements were trusted and used to empower campaigns Engagement is now our main priority as well as how different channels can work together and we have had great results The future is bright, very, very bright. With better analytics and testing we will understand our users even more and meet our targets in increasing engagement and conversion