Destinations Council Destiny Awards > Destination Website

Mammoth Lakes Tourism

Visitmammoth.com

About This Entry:

Leading up to the redesign of Mammoth Lakes Tourism’s website, our digital presence was scattered across a small website, a mobile app, a growing blog and a niche site for endurance athletes. This was causing headaches from a resource standpoint, with multiple content management systems, and was creating a rift in the destination’s branding and communication strategies.

There was an overwhelming desire to bring all of the sites under one domain and a unified brand platform. Along the way, we also wanted to ensure that we improved content display for more robust storytelling and traveler inspiration, made the site faster, increased engagement and drove more conversions for KPIs like visitor guide orders. To ensure a level of future-proofing, we also wanted to incorporate capabilities such as personalization and other technologies where possible.

The objectives were to create a website that provided better inspiration for travelers by showcasing the year-round offerings, improve engagement with individual users through more robust, rich-media content and stronger inter-relation of content, improve user experience by improving page load and server response times, and increase organic traffic through improved page optimization and new content development. Our target audience includes active, outdoor enthusiasts who enjoy adventurous vacations. They are primarily located in California and Nevada, but include national and international visitors as well.

Campaign Strategy:

To ensure the best possible outcome, we engaged in a variety of tactics during discovery and development to solicit feedback from stakeholders, analyze available data and identify needs for content. Post-launch, we continued to optimize various aspects of the site to strengthen results. Third-party usability research was conducted by Destination Analysts.

• To solicit feedback and perspectives on the website, discovery meetings included an internal discovery meeting, a collaborative meeting with industry stakeholders and a public meeting with the local community. There was also a digital survey sent to community members and stakeholders who were unable to attend meetings. Input from these sessions was distilled into priorities for site elements and goals.
• To facilitate the evolution of site content, we conducted a robust content audit of the existing site and blog. Analysis of the existing content assets provided guidance on strengths, weaknesses and needs that would shape priorities for content migration and ongoing production.
• To maintain and grow organic traffic to the new website, we reviewed SEO practices and the site and conducted further analysis via data from Google Analytics and Bright Edge. This helped shape redirect strategies, page optimization and more on the new site.
• To maximize the effectiveness of personalization technology, we combined visitor profile research with data from Google Analytics to create a set of audience segments that would provide the best possible results after launch. Personalization was further refined and optimized according to data post-launch as well.
• To identify opportunities for improvement after launch, we conducted independent, third-party usability research to provide feedback on navigation, content quality and overall user sentiment.

Results:

571% Visitor Guide order post-launch increase
Produced more than 600,000 organic visits during the first year (+3% YOY), rather than a typical drop in organic following a rebuild and consolidation of multiple domains.
225% In time on page for blog posts after redesign
50% Improvement in page load & server response times, providing a faster, more user-friendly experience
60% Increase in average session duration
30% Increase in pages per session
26% Reduction in bounce rate

Cost: $195,000
($150,000 web build; $45,000 usability testing, additional site migrations and other post-launch activities)

Why This Is A Finalist: 

This campaign has very well-articulated challenges, and provides meaningful solutions. The destination brand really comes through, and hits all the right notes. Users seem to respond well to the optimizations. We thought Mammoth Lakes did an excellent job developing their unified website and brand by clearly integrating the needs of their target audiences. From the content to the visual cues, everything points back to an authentic destination brand with very clear experiences to offer consumers. The homepage in particular makes you feel like you’ve just jumped into an exciting outdoor adventure vacation.