The Power of Search Engine Ranking for Tourist Destinations

Kong Polytechnic University while the author spent his sabbatical. Sincerely thanks go to Kathleen Janech and Melinda Patience in the College of Charleston for thorough copyediting. 1 Preprint, to Cite: Pan, B. (2015). The power of search engine ranking for tourist destinations. Tourism Management, 47: 79-87. doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2014.08.015 Most online travelers in the United States use search engines to seek out travel information. Thus, Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) need to attract clicks through returned results on search engines. We model clickthrough rates (CTRs) of several published search engine reports and investigate the CTRs of a Destination Marketing Organization's webpage on different ranks of different properties of a search engine(web, image, and mobile searches). The results validate the power-law distribution of CTRs on different ranks on web search: the top results attract high CTRs but the rates decrease precipitously when the ranks go down. However, top ranks are a necessary condition but not a sufficient one: many top ranked results have low CTRs. Image search and mobile search have different CTR curves based on ranks, providing different opportunities for tourism destinations and businesses