The Impact of Organic Traffic of Crowdsourcing Platforms on Airlines’ Website Traffic and User Engagement

Damianos P. Sakas and Dimitrios P. Reklitis
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Damianos P. Sakas: Department of Agribusiness and Supply Chain Management, School of Applied Economics and Social Sciences, Agricultural University of Athens, 1st km Old National Road Thiva–Eleusis, 32200 Thiva, Greece
Dimitrios P. Reklitis: Department of Agribusiness and Supply Chain Management, School of Applied Economics and Social Sciences, Agricultural University of Athens, 1st km Old National Road Thiva–Eleusis, 32200 Thiva, Greece

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 16, 1-22

Abstract: With airline companies increasingly relying on crowdsourcing websites to deploy their digital marketing strategies, marketeers and strategists seek to acquire an understanding of the factors affecting airlines’ organic traffic and user engagement. Such an understanding is acquired through the consideration of variables that influence a company’s organic traffic and user engagement and their correlation to each other. A three-stage data-driven analysis is used to examine the correlation between the foregoing variables and to consider strategies that can be implemented to optimize organic traffic and user engagement. The first section gathers data from five airline companies’ websites and five crowdsourcing websites over an interval of 180 days. The second stage creates an exploratory diagnostic model, through Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping, to visually illustrate the cause-and-effect correlations between the examined metrics. Finally, a predictive micro-level agent-based model simulates optimization strategies that can be used to improve organic traffic and user engagement. The results of this study, reveal that crowdsourcing organic traffic increases airline websites’ user engagement through paid campaigns, while a limited correlation was found to exist between the average duration of a user to organic traffic. The results of this study provide tangible digital marketing strategies which can be used by airline companies to improve the influence of their digital marketing strategies on their users.

Keywords: crowdsourcing; big data; web analytics; SEM; strategy; user engagement; crowd branding; airlines; web traffic; digital marketing; brand name (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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