For those of you that were at Snowcial and stuck around for the lightning round, you learned the extend of my nerdiness when I revealed one of my favorite words: context. I love taking some piece of unique data, giving it some background and surroundings so it paints a full picture of what it means. That’s the point behind the social media dashboard’s ranking, industry average, and TAP numbers. Instead of a raw number, you get a number that has meaning because you know how that number compares to other, similar resorts.

This can be accomplished easily with social media because so many of these statistics are public. The roadblock we run into, however, is when we want to give our own, private website metrics some context. This is data like:

• Conversion rate
• Traffic
• Other metrics (time, pages, etc.)
• Search, mobile, etc.

You can use data from Compete and Alexa to get extimates on traffic, but in the end they are just that, estimates of one metric that is just one piece of the puzzle. Without context you simply don’t know how well your site is performing.

Mark My Words…
Pardon the pun, but the solution may be something called “Mark” that Troy Thompson over at Travel2Dot0 has created. According to the site:

The idea is simple. Destinations pool their data, mark runs anonymous reports with your data benchmarked against a group of similar destinations.

Mark acts as sort of a middleman. Each resort would grant access to their analytics, Troy would compile the data and anonymously label each one as “Peer 1” or “Peer 2” and the resorts would get a report back that instantly gives once solitary data a boat-load of powerful context.

In short, Mark lets you truly answer the question: “how well are we REALLY doing?”

“And That’s Not All…”
It may sound like I am trying to sell you on the idea of Mark. I am. I think Troy’s product is brilliant and makes me wish I would have thought of it myself.  I almost did because, aside from the data, you also get personal insight and analysis on what you can do better. No bull, no bias, just honest opinions from a deep pool of talent on how to improve. Years ago I offered something similar (monthly website checkups / coaching for small businesses) and was blown away by the response. Troy has made this sort of analysis infinitely better by giving you the actual data that shows how well you are doing.

Marketing has plenty of opinion and intuition-based marketing decisions. Let data take some of the guesswork out of things.

The Secret
So, technically, Mark is designed primarily for DMOs and CVBs, not necessarily ski resorts. When I was chatting with Troy on the phone a few weeks ago I said, “Troy, I know this is designed for DMOs, but would I put you in a bind if I shared this on SlopeFillers as something resorts could get in on?” Obviously, Troy said that wouldn’t be a problem (who doesn’t want more business), but moreover, Mark is designed to work with more than just CVBs and ski resorts would work awesome.

So, enough rambling, head over to the site and take a gander. Maybe you’ll love it, maybe you won’t, but personally, I think Mark is a simple way to put a gauge on your website efforts and shine a light on what you can optimize.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.