The period between December and February is usually the peak tourist season in Queensland. Typically backpackers start to head north along the east coast of Australia as it gets closer to New Year. They usually stop in Byron Bay, the Gold Coast, Brisbane, and travel up through the Sunshine Coast and on to the Whitsundays, the Great Barrier Reef and Cairns. However, the period between December 2010 and February 2011 was a bit different.

Google Insights for Flood, in Australia

Tourism in Queensland’s Wild Weather

The Queensland floods (including parts of North Queensland, and the area around and including Toowoomba and Brisbane) and Tropical Cyclone Yasi affected the travel and tourism industry in Queensland. While the floods began in North Queensland in late December, affecting Rockhampton and the surrounding area, it was not until after the Brisbane River broke its banks on the 11th of January and started to hit Brisbane that the impact had a noticeable effect on sales and traffic.

With the state capital hit, media coverage and interest in the floods peaked. Google’s reported search volume for ‘flood’ and other related searches only really surged in that period too, and the same was seen on Greyhound.com.au, with organic traffic featuring ‘flood’ starting to be seen in volume.

Organic search including flood terms

Most flood-related queries were structured around destination, specific product and timetable or schedule terms. They were not a result of additional optimisation, as there was no targeted content or link development at the time targeting those searches. The flood related search traffic was the result of users adding flood terms to searches that the site would already appear for.

Site activity also changed during this period, with increased information gathering activity around travel times and availability for affected regions. With international media coverage and some countries issuing negative travel advice to their citizens, traffic volumes from overseas were also greatly reduced.

Skipping South East Queensland

With Brisbane affected by the floods, we found that a reasonable number of backpackers and tourists were avoiding South East Queensland, and rearranging their travel. Some flew straight to North Queensland destinations, like Cairns, while others headed south again. Destinations like Byron Bay started to receive unseasonal attention both in sales and in search.

Comparing 'Brisbane Byron Bay' searches

The above single phrase example compares the 2010-2011 period to 2009-2010 for terms including ‘Brisbane Byron Bay’, in that order. This was not the only abnormality observed in search referral during this period. In the aftermath of the floods, Tourism Queensland, along with a lot of other tourism reliant companies, started their ‘back in business’ campaigns as well, to combat the negative press. Whilst talk of floods, destruction and the political recriminations that followed might sell impressions, ratings and ultimately ad space, it does not do much for tours and travel.

Cyclone Yasi

Google Insights for Cyclone Yasi, in Australia

Threatening the parts of Queensland that largely avoided the floods, Category 5 Cyclone Yasi appeared off the coast of Far North Queensland – just in time for the backpackers and tourists who decided to skip South East Queensland in favour of the relative dry up there. Obviously the effect that  Yasi had on search, demand and sales in the north of Queensland was similar to the floods in the south a few weeks earlier.

Greyhound Australia and other transport companies responded to help with evacuations in the north, running services out of the path of the cyclone, including backpacker favourites Airlie Beach and Mission Beach. Regular services were also suspended in a number of places in advance of the cyclone.

After Cyclone Yasi the peak tourism season in Queensland was more or less over. There were still a lot of travellers in Queensland, but a lot of them were also coming to the end of their stay. This was a shame, because Cyclone Yasi did not cause too much damage to infrastructure and a lot of the local tour operators were ready for business soon after. Those that stayed almost certainly got to take advantage of some great deals.

Promoting Travel Against the Weather

The disasters in Queensland had a huge impact on the tourism industry, and it is an uphill battle to promote unaffected products when you are competing with non-stop coverage of floods and cyclones. Breaking through that kind of noise is hard, and would be prohibitively expensive to do through traditional media.

The Internet was no haven either. A lot of what made it ideal for coordinating and responding to the disasters for the people who were there also made it harder to talk about and promote tourism in those areas. The Internet does make it easy to provide deeper, more sophisticated content in a shareable form however.

Greyhound Australia’s response to the floods and cyclone in Queensland was done for two different purposes: informational and promotional. The Internet, both on the company’s main site, email and search engine marketing and through our social media touch points, was used to keep existing customers aware of changes to service availability, and in the case of Cyclone Yasi, evacuations. The same touch points were also used to promote travel deals and tour partners in Queensland.

Keeping Customers Updated

Service information is useless if it is out of date, so it is vital to ensure that only the most up-to-date information is findable, thus reducing the risk of customers finding and making decisions on incorrect information.

To achieve this, the majority of on-site and social media activity on Facebook and Twitter aimed to keep our customers informed was focused on directing them to the service update page on the main site. This ensured that the information they saw was current, something that is harder to do fast by repeating the information across multiple sites.

Additional links to the service update page were added to the main site on the front page and across a few product pages to ensure that customers could find the information easily, and to take the pressure off the call centre. An AdWords campaign was also run just before Cyclone Yasi cut services to various North Queensland towns to maximise bookings and make it easier for people to find a way to head south should they want to. PR also played a role in keeping customers informed through articles posted to a number of news and online travel news sites.

Debunking Queensland Armageddon

Queensland Back in Business

Promoting travel and tourism in Queensland between December 2010 and February 2011 was challenging. The biggest challenge was the perception that most of Queensland, an ‘area as large as France and Germany’ was a desolate wasteland of water, debris and disease. While a lot of the state was declared a disaster zone, not all of it was completely out of business.

Tourism Queensland took a lead on this issue, proactively engaging with tour operators and backpacker organisations to demonstrate that Queensland still looked nice. Greyhound Australia and a few of the tour partners also provided a number of specials to encourage travellers to start to move again.

Online the promotional effort was focused on using the main website and social media, in conjunction with existing search engine marketing. Greyhound Australia got a number of tour operators to  send in current imagery of customers using their products. These were both hosted on the main site and promoted through Facebook.

Tour Operators

Content generated by other organisations was also retweeted and promoted, and more was generated using Flickr’s search tools, to show recent crowdsourced content, proving the location (eg, Airlie Beach) was still ready for business.

Email marketing was used to promote tours with specials, as well as any travel specials Greyhound Australia had available at the time. Other material promoting Queensland was also disseminated in this way too.

In addition to Queensland, Byron Bay and other southern tour products were also promoted during this period. All locations were advertised in parallel, though the Bryon Bay and southern tour campaign was promoted mostly through social media.

Going Forward

In the wake of the earthquakes in both New Zealand and now in Japan (donate here) Queensland’s problems from the start of the year now look trivial. The floods and cyclone have affected thousands of people’s lives as well as the livelihoods of businesses and the tourism industry in Queensland, but at least the loss of life was minimal compared with the two earthquakes. From here the biggest challenge for the tourism industry is how Queensland is seen.

People make their travel decisions based on the experiences of others. Most of this information is not found through Twitter or Facebook. Travel blogs, travel forums and photo sharing sites account for the majority of this ongoing online travel conversation.

As long as the tourists in Australia right now have interesting and compelling stories to tell and engage with other travellers planing their trips, there is no reason that the backpackers and the travellers won’t be back next year.

Brisbane Roar Season Crowd Average

*Not counting rescheduled games played at Skilled Park.

Brisbane Roar is through to the Grand Final, and the tickets for this game are selling very well. The crowd numbers have not always looked so good this season though. I wrote a blog post near the start of the 2010 – 2011 A-League season, about Brisbane Roar, and their crowd numbers. Now that the regular season is over, I can compare the 2010 – 2011 season fairly to previous ones. The crowd figures from the season don’t flatter the team, especially considering their unbeaten record, and just how well they played.

Even ignoring the two games played at Skilled Park due to the floods, the average is less than other seasons that featured only mediocre performances on the field.

Roar Crowd Average by Team

But is it enough information to get an idea as to what will get people to come to the games? A quick look at the average attendance by opposing team and by day would suggest that Sunday games and games against the Gold Coast team bring in the best crowds.

Brisbane Roar Average Crowd by Day

Small Dataset Problems

Unfortunately the dataset is pretty small, and as it turns out, the higher averages for Sunday matches and Gold Coast United are both due to single games. There is only one game on Sunday from the regular season, and the crowd was above average. Gold Coast United was also the team with the single highest attended match of the season, at over double the average for the season. The only reason Saturday did not average higher than Sunday was because of a number of below average attendances for that day.

Average Crowd by Team and Day

A Rebound

The Brisbane Roar have certainly improved their crowd figures from the previous season, but have not yet been able to match the 2007 – 2008 crowd numbers. Considering that this is the club’s most successful season on the field in its short history, this is unfortunate.  With a higher percentage of home games being held on Saturday night this season, along with the team’s great performances on the pitch and a substantial reduction on ticket prices, the club seems to have started to rebuild match day attendances.

Queensland State Government

Over the last few weeks, Queensland has been hit with a number of serious floods. These floods have affected locations in Queensland from Rockhampton down to the New South Wales border and even across it. The flood waters are only just now starting to go down in my city, Brisbane, and there are still more places at risk.

The value of the work of the government, emergency services and all of the volunteers who took it upon themselves to pitch in and help out any way that they could is obvious, and deserves recognition. I am not the best person to talk about their work; that has been done far better elsewhere. But I did notice a few ways in which the local internet community and social media platforms have helped a lot of people, especially those not immersed in the social media and internet marketing echo chamber.

1. The Queensland Police Media Service’s Facebook page
   • Managed brilliantly with regular updates, a great series of mythbusting posts dealing with the more common rumours going around Brisbane and live streaming of the government’s press conferences. All of this was available through their Facebook page. They also have a twitter account: @QPSmedia
2. Facebook
   • Quite simply, the size of Facebook’s audience made it the go-to platform for many people wanting to reach their friends quickly. The social media platform was used for communication and sharing information, such as photos and status updates for those in the affected areas. I have seen a few Facebook events started to help out those who lost their houses and more within my circle of friends, and I expect that this is far from uncommon.
3. Greg Lexiphanic hosting flood maps
   • A Brisbane-based Community Manager took it upon himself to host Brisbane flood maps as the official sites started to go down under the weight of traffic they received. Thanks to massive retweets, phrase matched copy and a few links from media websites, the page quickly reached the third spot in Google (fourth if you count the news insert) for ‘Brisbane flood maps’ and reached a large audience of people who have never posted a tweet through direct links and search traffic.

I think these are the sites and platforms that helped the most people during the last few days, aside from sites hosted by a government or a media organisation. Twitter deserves a mention as an information source, and it along with other sites and applications like Twitpic, yfrog, Flickr, instagr.am, YouTube and so on all provided a richer picture of the situation than what would have been possible a decade ago. However, most of these are not as accessible, and don’t provide the kind of information or have the audience in Australia just yet to have as broad an impact as the ones listed above.

Queensland Flood Search Engine Result Page

It is also worth mentioning this page that Google put together, as well as their recent alteration of the result pages for flood related queries with important phone numbers and links listed at the top.

If you are from a flood-affected area, what did you see used by those around you? From overseas, where did you get the best information?

Want to help? Donate here: http://www.qld.gov.au/floods/donate.html

In Australia, we expect to transition Yahoo!7′s organic search results (the non-paid listings found on the main body of the page) to Microsoft during January 2011.

The change in their paid listings is coming later in the year:

The transition of your paid search account to Microsoft technology is scheduled to take place in the second half of 2011.

For months now both Yahoo! and Microsoft’s blogs have been discussing the change and how to switch over for the USA and Canada. In those markets, the deadline for transitioning from Yahoo! to Microsoft Adcenter was today.

Here in Australia, we should be able to expect the same level of information during the transition period, as outlined in today’s email:

Approximately three months prior to the transition of your paid search account, we will begin sharing more detailed information with you, to help you prepare for the changes to come. Until then, please continue to manage your Yahoo! Search Marketing account as usual.

There will be one important difference between the switch in the states and here in Australia; Microsoft Adcenter is not active locally. To date Bing’s paid listings have been driven by Yahoo! Search Marketing. Personally I expect to see Microsoft Adcenter introduced into Australia well before the changeover date, to allow Yahoo!’s current Search Engine Marketing customers to migrate their campaigns across.

Other than a change of interface, there will not be any real change in how the SEM marketplace operates in Australia. Unlike in other markets, where they have gone from three to two SEM products, Australia has only had Yahoo! Search Marketing and Adwords. This deal does mean the final end to the SEM product that Overture (Previously Goto) spawned, and that, at least, is significant.

Currently, the Australian government plans to implement mandatory ISP level filtering to block URLs displaying RC material. There is a long list of objections to this open ended plan to censor the internet, ranging from the technical through to the philosophical. Almost all of these points have been explained in detail elsewhere.

There is one point that does deserve more attention:  are broadcast media standards relevant online?

Assuming for a moment that the filter does not impact user experience, only blocks RC content and cannot be circumvented, it would still a very bad idea.

The problem is in what content can be RC, how people actually use the internet and how content can be shared, and aggregated. Laws regarding classification were made for a world where media could not spread easily. When ‘The Art of Shoplifting’ was published it could not be posted to a blog, copied onto publicly visible personal spaces, distributed via RSS to multiple aggregators or appear listed on http://digg.com/ or http://www.stumbleupon.com/.

The conversation generated by the article is also now visible, where in the past it would not have been noticed, or searchable. Not only is interpersonal discussion now visible and spread through multiple forums, it can also take multiple formats, from text, to images, audio and even video.

Publication is synonymous with conversation online, and it now takes advantage of all the new accessible tools. Video,
images and audio are as much a part of interpersonal communication online as the written word. The very nature of conversation has fundamentally changed since those laws were penned.

Now that it is visible online, does this mean that discussions on euthanasia will now be subject to an ISP level banstick? How about religion – will this involve anti-vilification laws simply because it happened on Twitter rather than at the pub or via SMS?

People will always be people, even when they are online. Actually, people will be people especially when they are online and assume a certain level of anonymity. Under Australian law, exactly how much of this activity will be potentially liable to legal sanction? Once the infrastructure is in place to remove URLs from an Australian internet, I fear we will find out, and some people may be rather surprised.

What you don’t get is people in the same field as you to bounce ideas off. This is why there is a Brisbane Online Marketing Meetup. Getting people in the same field together for an informal meetup is a great way to exchange ideas, gossip and come away with some new things to try.

Adcenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing

The merging of two Pay Per Click market places will increase internal competition. With more participants in the market and a reduction in available inventory, the cost of traffic will increase. Account management will be more efficient with this consolidation, and the volume of available traffic will increase too.

However, we won’t see this locally, as bidding for Australian traffic through Bing and Yahoo! is done via Yahoo! Search Marketing (Formally Overture, formally Goto, etc). What we will get instead, based on information to date, is an eventual change in the platform we use.

Why People will care more about rank in Bing

With Microsoft powering Yahoo!’s search results a good rank in Bing will mean even more traffic. Most decisions on how to allocate SEO resources are influenced by reported search queries and Google’s domminance within this metric. As a result, a lot of SEO activity online is focused on building for Google. It is seen as the only engine worth building for, as it will return the most for the investment of resources. With a ranking in Bing about to appear for more queries, and the deal generating more awareness, this may drive more interest and activity.

Still more to come

There has been a lot written, and some very in-depth, on this deal over the last week. There are going to be even more blog posts and press releases to follow. The fate of Yahoo!’s other search products has not been revealed yet, and there are other areas that still need to be clarified. One thing that can be taken for granted now is that a lot of people are going to be auditing the size of their brand and industry’s query space, and the rankings of their sites in Bing.

Interest in Bing

On another domain I have noticed that terms related to Bing and Bing.com.au have produced a little traffic. This is only to be expected due to the increased interest in the search engine.

SERP reshuffle

One thing that I noticed that is worth watching are changes in the order of sites on the Search Engine Results Pages. For a few of the terms that I have been watching, the top three or four results have remained fairly fixed since lauch. However there has been a bit of movement amoungst the mid-page results. This was even evident on terms where the level of SEO activity can be assumed to be low, and with static sites.

Bing and the Search takeaway

It is simple; there is a lot to be learned right now in how the Search Engine Results Pages have been changing for low competition terms. For now, the changes on these kinds of SERPs are more likely the result of spider and algorithmic activity rather than general updates or targeted optimisation.

Dear Mr Swan,

There has been a lot said in regards to the clean feed, and the reasons that I oppose this have been stated better by others, but I would like to draw your attention to a few that stand out for me. The issues can be neatly divided into two categories, technical and ethical.

The technology being trialed is flawed:
- It will not succeed in its stated aims, while imposing an unacceptable price in performance loss, monetary cost, and over-filtering.
- There are already ISPs that have built their business models on providing a clean feed to those that want them, rendering a Government-imposed clean feed redundant.

The project is also highly unethical:
- The internet is built on interaction; in essence this policy is aimed at censoring conversation.
- The definition offered for what constitutes ‘illegal’ content is very vague; in a country where there is no formal protection of freedom of speech this is very sinister.
- Discussion on censoring information relating to certain lifestyles (eg, anorexia), no matter how unacceptable they may be, is not acceptable in any free democracy where there is open discourse on ideas.

There are a number of other issues with this policy, but they are discussed more fully here: http://www.nocleanfeed.com/

While I voted for you and the Labor Party last time, I feel strongly enough about this issue that my vote will be directed elsewhere in future.

Regards

Anthony Contoleon