Incorporating specialized technology in the bus sector to connect with more travelers digitally allows access to the analysis of the generated data to delve into user behavior on your own online sales channels, thereby identifying opportunities to enhance competitiveness.
Having control over ticket sales on your own website and access to visitor behavior data in the sales funnel provides valuable insights for creating user acquisition strategies, improving the user experience, crafting personalized marketing campaigns, and optimizing routes and schedules to offer more travel options. Understanding this type of information and combining it with the right metrics tells you whether your efforts are meeting your business objectives.
However, in the land transport sector, online sales have been dominated by marketplaces that drive traffic to their websites and process purchases for multiple bus companies, making behavioral data and metrics unknown to bus companies now trying to regain control of sales on their own websites.
That’s why in this article, we share the metrics and key concepts you should be aware of to create better commercial strategies for online sales. Delving into this kind of information will allow you to make more informed decisions, optimize routes and schedules, and personalize the traveler’s experience.
Furthermore, it facilitates the identification of market trends and changes, allowing companies to remain competitive in a constantly evolving digital environment. By improving operational efficiency, reducing costs, and increasing revenue, this technology becomes a key accelerator for sustainable success in the land transport industry.
Hence the importance of understanding the main eCommerce concepts and making the most of the available information and data 24 hours a day. In this article, we will explore ten essential concepts and their relevance to the business.
Sales Funnel
The sales funnel represents the process a user follows from the moment they visit the website, show interest in a route and schedule, select it, and complete a purchase. Understanding this journey allows you to optimize the sales process.
Traffic
It is the number of users who interact with either the website or mobile application. This traffic represents the flow of potential travelers who explore route offerings, view schedules, and prices, and can become bus ticket buyers. High traffic is essential for the success of an eCommerce platform. Having access to key metrics allows you to create marketing campaigns that attract users who intend to travel, aiming to increase conversion rates.
Interest in Home
It is the homepage of the eCommerce platform. In this initial stage of the purchasing journey, it is possible to track various essential data to understand the origin and behavior of visitors. This includes information about the geolocation of users, tracking of marketing campaigns that attracted the user, identification of referring domains, the preferred search engine of users, and data at the country and regional levels. All of this data is crucial for analyzing and optimizing the performance of online user acquisition campaigns.
Search Engine
Allows visitors to select travel details such as origin and destination, travel date, ticket type, seat selection, passenger information, and payment method selection. There are different steps to complete a purchase depending on business rules. In this part, providing a good user experience is essential, streamlining the process between each step to avoid errors that may cause users to drop off.
Purchase Attempt
Displays options for schedules and service levels available on the selected route. Here, you can analyze when a user performs a search to determine the days of the week or periods of the month when searches are conducted. Additionally, it identifies the most popular days for return trips on a specific route and measures the average travel duration. By combining various reports and data, such as the most sought-after routes and days, you gain a deeper understanding of user behavior, enabling more informed and strategic decision-making.
Passengers Created
Refers to the moment when a user selects a schedule and proceeds to choose their seat during the purchase process. It allows tracking routes with the most purchase attempts in a specific period, as well as visualizing the days and hours when most purchases are made for a specific route. Additionally, it is possible to obtain information about future purchase attempts for a route during a specific time and hour. This provides the opportunity for more precise analysis and strategic planning of the bus fleet, as well as taking additional measures to attract more users if high demand is observed during a particular time.
Payment Attempt
Refers to the stage where users provide personal information such as name, last name, and email to create a passenger profile. This section allows for determining which routes travelers who frequently attempt to make purchases originate from. Calculating the number of passengers included in a single transaction is also possible. This metric can be segmented by route and schedule, providing detailed information about purchase attempts and the number of tickets in each, essential for demand analysis and strategic planning.
Purchase Completed
Indicates that the payment process has been successfully completed, and the traveler has acquired their digital tickets. This metric allows for evaluating demand on different routes and schedules. Additionally, it is possible to track the use of discount codes to determine how many have been redeemed in each purchase and on which specific routes. This facilitates tracking the impact of promotions. Moreover, it allows identifying how many tickets have been purchased for round trips compared to single tickets, which is valuable for encouraging round-trip ticket purchases and increasing the average ticket price per purchase.
Conversion
Refers to when a user successfully completes a transaction and acquires a bus ticket or another related service, such as booking a trip. Conversion is a key indicator of success in eCommerce since it represents the ultimate goal of the company: turning visitors into future travelers. Tracking and optimizing conversion rates are essential to improving the profitability and performance of an eCommerce platform.
Cohorts
Used to create groups of users with similar characteristics, such as repeat buyers, inactive users, and users who do not complete purchases, among others. These metrics help tailor marketing and remarketing strategies and foster traveler loyalty.
Knowing and analyzing these concepts provides a competitive advantage. With constant access to valuable data, any bus company can optimize its strategies and offer travelers a streamlined, simple, and secure purchasing experience.
Prepare to take your business to the next level in the digital world!
Discover the latest updates and features of the Competitor Monitor.
The Competitor Monitor is one of the most valuable tools our partners have for observing and analyzing market behavior, and consequently, creating differentiated strategies to boost competitiveness.
Due to the importance of this module, which is part of BrainPROS, our Revenue Management solution, our product and development teams consistently release updates to enhance the usability of this digital tool, ensuring your operational teams always have agile and effective technology at their disposal.
Here are the most recent updates to our Competitor Monitor:
Occupancy Trend: This is a new visualization within this module that shows you how occupancy has changed from the observation day up to 10 days ago. This way, you can monitor precisely how this factor is progressing in your market.
When filtering a route, the Competitor Monitor displays columns for Sales by provider and Occupancy by provider. A third column is now added, showing the Occupancy Trend for both your company and your monitored competitors.
Benefits:
Monitor the performance of different routes and schedules.
Analyze market behavior in greater detail.
Detect significant or critical occupancy changes and analyze possible reasons, such as fleet increases, discounts, promotions, price decreases, or variations.
Adjust strategies to maintain competitiveness based on this analysis.
Scheduled Downloads: Through this new feature, you can now configure the date, day, and time to automatically receive the reports you need in your email, without having to log into BrainPROS and generate the data manually.
Data downloads are the most frequently used feature by our partners within BrainPROS, as they work with the data generated by our Revenue Management tool for further market analysis and strategy performance assessment.
This functionality streamlines the download process and helps optimize your team’s time, allowing them to focus on analysis rather than manual tasks that we’ve already solved for you and your company.
Discover everything we can do to drive your bus company’s growth, enhance traveler satisfaction, and empower your operational teams.
Discover the enhancements we’ve developed for the success of this Ancillary.
Increasing revenue through Ancillaries, in addition to enhancing traveler loyalty and satisfaction by offering personalized options tailored to their needs, is a strategy that has represented a revenue increase of between 40% and 50% for airlines. In the bus sector, more and more companies are exploring the implementation of Ancillaries to amplify their impact in the bus transportation market.
At Reservamos SaaS, we are constantly searching for innovative opportunities that allow bus companies to better connect with travelers and also help boost revenue growth for their businesses.
One of these efforts is the activation of Ancillaries such as Pet-Friendly. Since February of this year, the Mexican bus line ETN-Turistar enabled the “Pets on Board” option, which provides its users with alternatives to include their pets on their bus journeys. What began on one route (CDMX – Querétaro) with two schedules, morning and afternoon, has now become an option available on various routes and schedules.
Part of the efforts of Reservamos SaaS’s technology and product team is to maintain an agile, simple, and secure digital browsing and purchasing experience for the users of our partner companies. In the case of ETN-Turistar, the team has been monitoring the performance of this Ancillary to identify opportunities for improvement in navigation, resulting in the following updates to the eCommerce platform:
Redesign of search filters in the “View Result” section to enhance the visualization, selection, and sorting of categories, schedules, travel options (such as direct and non-stop trips), as well as the availability of trips with pets on board. This allows for a smoother and more efficient experience.
Added search filters in the “Widget Search” to use tags configured by features, for example, for the Pet-Friendly ancillary, on the page https://etn.com.mx/mascotas-abordo.html to cater to users who want to travel with their pets.
Added a badge indicating routes with the service available in the “View Result.”
During the purchase process, an onboarding card was activated to provide guidance to users who have selected this option, offering information about routes that offer the Pet-Friendly service in the “View Result.”
A modal-type screen in the Seat Selection stage with detailed information on how to use seats designated as Pet-Friendly.
A button located at the top of the diagram that leads to the “Information for Traveling with Pets” section, for easy access to the modal window.
A card with details about the selected seats, indicating if they are eligible for traveling with pets.
In this way, we not only make the growth strategies of our partner bus companies a reality but also support the success of their implementation to ensure the achievement of their online objectives, ultimately elevating the preference and digital purchasing experience of travelers.
Since late 2022 and throughout this year, our product, Revenue Management, and development teams have focused on making BrainPROS a dynamic and user-friendly tool for our partners.
One of them is Roll&Bits, a 100% digital Mexican ground transportation company that has experienced significant growth in 2023. Each update we develop stems from constant and close monitoring that our experts carry out with every allied bus company. This allows us to identify opportunities that streamline various operational processes.
For Roll&Bits, the innovations made to BrainPROS have resulted in significant growth in their total revenue. But what are the different modules of BrainPROS and their updates all about?
We’ve created this infographic to guide you through BrainPROS and the process Roll&Bits followed to optimize its operation and increase its revenue. Additionally, you can click on it to read the complete success story.
According to Statista, Mexico has more than 96 million online users, and the number of digital buyers in the country exceeds 60 million. An analysis published by Google on Latin American digital travelers indicated that 93% of users search Google for something related to travel, and 84% have seen ads on this topic.
This growing trend motivated Roll&Bits, a Mexican intercity transportation company, to design a business model that has revolutionized land transportation in the country. Roll&Bits started in 2019 as a service that connects with its travelers 100% online. This digital business model has allowed them to understand the travel trends and purchasing experiences that users are looking for to adapt and satisfy the needs of digital travelers.
Their business model has 3 axes of innovation:
Departure and arrival points: Roll&Bits has easily accessible urban boarding points, such as plazas, hotels, centers, and public buildings.
Time and speed: Roll&Bits provides the service in sprinter-type units, which speed up the transfer time. In addition, the vehicles have everything necessary, are tracked in real time, and have trained drivers.
Dynamic prices: They offer more competitive prices, according to the behavior of travelers and the market.
Currently, Roll&Bits makes trips to CDMX, Guadalajara, León, and Querétaro and transports about +186k passengers per year. Furthermore, unlike other companies on the market, the Roll&Bits digital sales channel provides the opportunity to engage with its users like no other company in the sector.
But what were the main challenges?
Incentivize among travelers the routes, schedules, and departure points corresponding to this new brand.
Provide an offer adapted to the flow of the market and with intelligent prices.
Generate a sense of trust, security, and loyalty among travelers.
Effectively communicate the promotions in your schedules, demand attraction, and customer maintenance.
Data technology to increase income and optimize costs
Reservamos SaaS technology was present from the research process until the start of the project. It gave Roll&Bits an advantage by reducing its expenses on technology tools from the beginning and optimizing work so that the different operational teams could focus on the company’s innovation.
The Reservamos SaaS eCommerce platform made it possible to guarantee a friction-free purchase process and a simple, efficient, and secure experience. With all the payment methods and an electronic ticket at the end of the transaction to speed up boarding. And by generating optimal digital experiences, the Roll&Bits Marketing team was able to deeply understand the needs of its users, analyze consumer trends and market behavior, and build a bridge of trust with digital travelers through the different communication channels.
To encourage demand, the Roll&Bits operations team took advantage of BrainPROS, the Reservamos SaaS Revenue Management solution, to design strategies for opening routes and also analyze the different user profiles to identify those who were attracted by the price and those who prioritized the quality of the service.
In this way, Roll&Bits has deepened its understanding of travelers’ behavior to design price strategies that have increased the volume of passengers and their income.
BrainPROS has allowed Roll&Bits to offer the right price at the right time, and adapt its prices according to reservation history, traveler behavior, the market, seasonality, occupancy, and, mainly, encourage purchase anticipation.
We are convinced that the sector’s future is technology. It has allowed us to understand the traveler and offer them a personalized offer according to their needs.
– Alexandier Meza, General Manager Roll&Bits.
A business model adapted to the new traveler
Roll&Bits has designed diverse strategies together with Reservamos SaaS for the success of your business:
Special rates to generate demand on the new routes and schedules: tickets offer and an advertising campaign in its different communication channels to generate curiosity among travelers.
Early purchase incentive: Lower prices for long early purchases and higher prices on short early purchases. In this way, Roll&Bits can plan its fleets and increase the efficiency of its operation.
Increased occupancy to increase the profitability of each trip: This strategy made it possible to reach the different segments of travelers and cover all their needs, from more attractive prices, guaranteeing differentiated services, and serving travelers who already trust the brand.
The dynamic pricing system has helped us encourage purchase anticipation, increase the occupancy of our services and maintain the company’s competitiveness.
– Alexandier Meza, General Manager Roll&Bits.
A company that does not stop growing
Since 2019, Roll&Bits has maintained a sustained upward trend in its sales. It has one of the largest purchase anticipations in the industry, with an average of between 7 and 8 days, even with more than 30 days of purchase anticipation.
Also, all its routes have more than 90% of average occupancy. During 2022 they have been able to increase the average price from the beginning of the year to date by 12%.
Today, to guarantee the growth of a bus company, it is essential to have the right technology, which enables it to strengthen its work areas, optimize its processes, broaden its vision of the market, maintain better control over its operation, and focus efforts on innovation.
Reservamos SaaS has developed a technological infrastructure that drives the growth of bus companies and allows them to maintain a direct and constant connection with their digital travelers.
