'Web 2.0 was very much the buzzword of 2006' - or as our good friend Kevin May, editor of Travolution said “Blink and you missed the revolution”.

Web 2.0 benefits your online marketing the way social marketing increases your footprint and word of mouth. Amongst the hype some very basic web analytics have been much overlooked and the focus will return to getting conversions from your Web 2.0 projects.

With any new technology there are some things that cannot be predicted and can only be answered by testing. For example, how many people will use your mapping mashup? However this does not apply to web analytics. Web analytics is the measurement of the behaviour of visitors on a website. In the travel industry web analytics can measure how different aspects of the website work towards a customer booking a holiday online. For example, which landing pages had the best conversions?

An early measurement of the success of websites was its stickiness (the number of pages viewed per user session). It is generally believed that the longer customers spend on your site, the more likely they are to convert. Sites with difficult navigation may require some customers to click deeper into the site but more will be put off and leave the site.

In the travel industry there is one large exception to the convention of increasing the stickiness of your site. Once the customer has found the holiday they want, the number of steps to complete the booking (or make a quote request if your site does not have online booking) should be kept to a minimum.

Sites that include Web 2.0 have changed these rules. New features such as customer reviews and videos mean that people spend longer on these sites. At LeadGenerators we suggest that once you have the basics right, think long and hard as to why someone would come back to your site. Then test this theory and use web analytics to support your theory.

Another measurement obtained through web analytics is the page conversion rate. Which pages and the content, imagery and functionality are important to your customers? For example, a recent study found that web users will stop using a trusted shopping site if the site loses or makes errors with their basket more than twice.

The basis to web analytics is to understand your customers. Travelcare found that their online customers have a similar pattern to those in their 320 network shops. Some wanted a website that gave them inspiration and ideas and some just wanted a quote on a specific itinerary.

Web 2.0 has brought us a number of tools and interactivity that allows customers to get deeper information faster. With Ajax, customers do not need to go through as many steps as more data can be loaded interactively. Ajax can load a search form on a single page that starts with one million holidays and narrows down to only a few options (such as showing 3 star all inclusive beach holidays in Los Cristianos, Tenerife). If the servers could handle it the prices and availability could all be done at the same time.

Customers have more information up front and by clicking on example prices they can skip parts of the booking process. A good example of this is skyscanner.net which has flight prices displayed on interactive google maps. If you click on the price the customer goes straight into the specific booking for that flight.

Web 2.0 may give you a funky tool but are consumers that use it more likely to turn into customers? LeadGenerators suggests that you not only look at the page conversion but the overall site conversion for people who used the tool compared to those that did not. Was the tool instrumental in capturing people attention and did it result in more bookings?

The future is going to see more Web 2.0 in travel websites but the ones that rise above the rest will be those who use Web 2.0 to affect their click to sale bottom line rather than to create hype and funky websites.