A case study on the analysis of online tourist behavior in the context of visual attention

The aim of the study is to analyze the behavior of tourists who visited the websites of hotels by examining the clicks generated by the mouse cursor within the context of visual interest. In this way, hotels will obtain meaningful and relevant information from customer behaviors visiting their website and will be able to use them in service production and marketing processes. The method used in the thesis is one of the new methods used to analyze the visual interest. The introduction of this method to the national tourism literature, which is frequently used in the international literature, is an indication that the thesis is innovative. For the purpose of the thesis, the data of the visitors who visited the main page of the website of a national hotel group which has 13 hotels (4 in Belek, 4 in Side, 3 in Kemer, 1 in Bodrum, 1 in Cappadocia) within a year was evaluated. The data examined are not perceptual and all are real data. The number of samples in the study is 97891 people (56210 Turkish homepage visitors, 12132 Russian homepage visitors, 2603 German homepage visitors, 26946 English homepage visitors). In this study, which can be defined as a case study, the data were collected by an analytical program called Yandex.Metrica and the click maps obtained by using the features of the same service were segmented and filtered. These segments are grouped as age, gender, visitor frequency, language, visitor resource. Thus, the behavior of the site visitors according to the mentioned variables were examined. When the general visual attention orientations of the visitors are examined, it is seen that the behaviors of the visitors who visit Turkish and Russian homepage are more similar than the other visitors. This determination is based on real data and it is important for those producing tourism products and services. It has been found that age groups with low purchasing power (eg, under 18) have less visual attention to the booking button and users who visit the website more than once have more visual interest in purchasing actions. In addition, it was determined that the visitors who came to the website with search engines have more visual interest to the sub-pages and to the booking button than those who came from other sources. Finally, in the context of the results of our study, important clues about tourist behavior were presented to the practitioners and researchers.