Tour Conversion Rate Optimization Tips & Tricks

You’re getting traffic to your website. Maybe hundreds of people a day. How many of those people are actually booking? Are you missing out on a large chunk of revenue simply because your website and Fareharbor aren’t set up as best as possible?

Your business is amazing and everybody who joins you says your tours are amazing so why aren’t more people booking? Don’t they know what they’re missing out on? In this article I will discuss some of the ways I have doubled conversion rates in my business. If you’re looking for how to increase tour conversion rates and this article is for YOU.

I doubled our online bookings after making some simple changes to my website.

About the Author

I’m Byron Kay. I own Kona Honu Divers, Kona Snorkel Trips (this site), and Kona Freedivers. All of my businesses are top rated in their category with thousands of 5 star google reviews. I’ve made it my mission to help other tour operators improve their businesses with some of the things I’ve learned the hard way. I’ve struggled by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and years trying to figure out how to improve my business. You could waste your  money and time or you could push the easy button and do the things that I have found to work so can have more time and money to yourself.

Currently I work around 25-30 hours a week operating the 3 businesses from home. I live in Kona, Hawaii and like to travel with my fiancée Zoe. It brings me pleasure to get to know others and their businesses. I find it a fun challenge to figure out how I can help others improve their businesses. As a lifelong learner I enjoy the process of trying, failing, and then trying again until success is achieved.

In this guide:

• Why you need to do this now
• Do you even want this?
• Conversions: Turn up the Money Dial
• Simple changes you can make today
• Extra Juice

Why You Need to do this Now

You have people landing on your site every day. Let’s say 100 people go to your homepage. They spend some time looking around and then they move on. How many of those people ended up booking? 1,2,3? This is a conversion rate. If 100 people land on your site and 1 of them books you have a 1% conversion rate. This is the number we are focusing on today.

With the right setup you can have people booking online instead of calling. This means you spend less time on the phone and more time on your tours.

Do you even want this?

Focus

I’f you’re like most people who own businesses you’ll probably just gloss over this information because you have other things on your mind. Instead of being pro-active, you’re reactive, allowing everything around you to distract you away from what really matters. By tomorrow, you’ll have moved on to whatever pressing thing popped up in the moment. So instead of improving your business, you’re simply allowing your business to take your attention away from achieving success. Your business is meant to serve you. Don’t become a slave to your work.

Fear of Success

Most people are afraid to take risks because they are afraid to fail. Many of the greatest athletes allowed themselves the space to take risks and fail well. This is how they improved. If you never take the appropriate amount of risk you’ll never have psychological freedom. I encounter a lot of fearful business owners. They are small because they don’t want to change or try. They are afraid to fail.

Tragedy of a Business Owner

In a traditional tragedy a hero suffers or causes a series of terrible events. This is the typical business owner which allows themselves to be battered about by life. By making this change today you can take control of your business and make it serve you. Imagine if you had more than enough revenue coming from your business to where you could live the life you want.

Conversions: Turn up the Money Dial

Focus on the metric that matters

You’re a busy owner. You’ve got so much going on. One of the last things you want to spend time on is figuring out esoteric terms and web lingo. But if I told you that simply focusing on one important metric could make you 20-100% more revenue would you be interested? If you make $100,000 a month in revenue and you increase your conversion rate by only 20% you will now make $120,000 per month! How’s that?

How to track conversion rate

There are 2 kinds of conversion rates. One measuring your website as a whole and one that starts the measurement process after they click the ‘Book Now’ button which is specific to your booking software. We use Fareharbor because it’s the best, but there are many different solutions.

Tracking Conversions on Fareharbor

The best way to discover how your tours are converting after users click on the ‘Book Now’ button is to ask Fareharbor. You can e-mail them at support@fareharbor.com and your account manager should get back to you. Don’t know who your account manager is? Shame on you! Your account manager is your best friend and ally when it comes to optimizing your bookings. Mine is Sarah Ellis and she is amazing. They are your advocate, and they want you to be successful.

The conversion rate from Fareharbor can be viewed in the form of a conversion funnel. The funnel basically starts when the site visitor clicks ‘Book Now’ and ends when they make a purchase. If a user clicks ‘Book Now’ and then leaves, the funnel will shrink. Don’t worry this is normal, but there are ways we can get people from the beginning through to the end to get more bookings and thus increase revenue from the existing people already coming to our site. All without having to pick up the phone!

This funnel is ‘fatter’ meaning more people ended up purchasing. 15.5% of users purchased after clicking ‘Book Now’

This funnel is ‘skinnier’ meaning fewer people ended up purchasing. 14.1% of users purchased after clicking ‘Book Now’

As you can see from the 2 example funnels above, one is ‘smoother’ or ‘fatter’ than the other. The ‘skinnier’ or narrower the funnel the fewer site users are getting through to the finish line and making a purchase. This was due to the large drop-off from the users clicking ‘Book Now’ to clicking view the booking form. If you’re suffering from narrow funnel disease I can help.

Fill out this Form to Get set up to Track your metrics

Tracking Conversions on Google Analytics

If you’ve set up google analytics you can look at conversion rate there. If you haven’t set it up you can simply do so by following this Fareharbor article. Once it’s set up properly we can look at your conversion rate and see when it changes.

If you’re not using the new GA4 (Google Analytics 4) yet it’s time to swap from the old analytics because it won’t be supported past July 2023.

Here’s an example of a report from google analytics showing conversion rate

This is a GA4 report showing conversion rates from different sources

Simple Changes You can Make Today

Now that you are measuring your conversions it’s time to kick it up a notch! There are lots of ways to improve the performance of your site. Think of your site as a virtual retail shop. When you walk into your favorite retail shop what is it you like about it? Think about this. Is it the smell? The music? The friendly staff? Your website has none of this. It’s all visual. Did you know that when we communicate with others only 7% of what we say is communicated to others? The rest of our communication is tonality 38% and body language 55%. Your website is much the same. You can write the best text and still no-one will want to buy. So how do you increase the ‘non-verbal’ part of your website?

Nudging & Pre-Suasion

Humans are the same today as they were many thousands of years ago. We are animals that make decisions based on feelings and proven social cues. This is where we can tap into our nature and use it to get those bookings we deserve.

Social Proof

Humans have been talking for thousands of years. Language developed to help us communicate between each other. So you’d think we’d use it to be more productive right? Wrong! It’s shown that people actually use language mostly to gossip about each other. This is why talking in front of groups is humans biggest fear. Even larger than the fear of death! People are afraid of looking bad in front of others because in the past others would talk about us, and if the tribe decided we were bad they would kick you out!

Let’s use this ancient power to our benefit. By using the nudge of social proof we can show site visitors that we are indeed worth getting to know because so many other people like us and use our products.

Enable Google Ratings

As you can see we at Kona Snorkel Trips have enabled google ratings on out tours through Fareharbor’s settings. By doing this you are taking advantage of the social proof provided by Google Reviews. Fortunately Kona Snorkel Trips has thousands of 5 star google reviews so we have a perfect 5 star rating and plenty of proof that people love our tours.

Of course before you do this I recommend you have lot’s of good reviews and a higher star rating than your competitors. Ideally a 4.9 star rating or above. Need more reviews? Fill out this form and I will get back with you on a good time to figure out how you can do this for your business. What’s the catch? Nothing, I will do this for free.

Add a Review Widget to your site

This site (created by Fareharbor) is using an Elfsight Widget. If you visit one of our tour pages you will see our google reviews displayed in the lower lefthand corner. We have also added a larger review widget to some of our landing pages like the example below. Use this link to receive 15% off of Elfsight.

By displaying your reviews in real-time, people can see how awesome your business truly is and why people like your tours or product. This social proof will drive people to trust your business and encourage them to buy right away.

Pre-suasion

Do you know of Robert Cialdini? He wrote 2 bestselling books on the science of how to Influence and Pre-suade people into acting. Using research from the field of social physiology he was able to discover ways to convince people to act in ways that you want them to simply by saying or doing things before asking them to act.

Using simple tricks or techniques we can make people see the benefits of our tours or prime them to be more likely to buy now. One simple trick is to ask users Are you an adventurous person? Simply by stating that phrase it was shown that conversions can be nearly doubled. Why does this work? People who were asked this question are likely to think about this in their head. If they think of themselves as an adventurous person they will be more likely to click through and book. Do you see the are you an adventurous person text above?

So I ask you. Are you an adventurous person? Fill out this form so I can get to know you and your business to get it performing at its best. If you give me your address I will send you a free copy of the book PRE-SUASION.

Extra juice: Supercharge Your Website

Have you tried using some of the latest AI tools available? Did you know you can leverage the power of AI on your website to get more people to book without lifting a finger? Machine learning has been around for some time now, but it’s only recently become available for every day business owners like you and me. I started working with a machine learning startup in October of 2022. Since then the software has learned about the users who visit my site. It now knows how and when to serve up the right nudge so that users will be more likely to book while browsing the site. This has boosted conversions and helped fill our tours to capacity even during the slower times of the year.

Fill out this form

and I can get this software learning on your site today for free. If you like the results you can subscribe to continue using it. If you don’t like it then stop and it costs you nothing. It’s a no-brainer! You’d have to be stupid not to try it. You have nothing to lose except all the extra money you could be making from the business you already have coming in. The process takes a few minutes and you will start seeing results right away with improvements over time as the machines learn more about your visitors. Quit wasting your precious revenue on google ads. This is the future and few people even know this exists yet. Get ahead of the competition and capture the business you deserve.