It has been a record-breaking year for Cornwall’s destination website, VisitCornwall.com, achieving over three million visits since January 2014 – smashing an initial target of 2.5 million visits by December end.
Since January, the website has received over 3,065,741 visits, compared to 2,105,004 in 2013 (January – December) increasing visits by almost 1 million, an upsurge of 45% on the previous year.
The initial target for the year had been a growth of 20%, so this has already been well beaten – with December stats still to come.
The website has also passed another impressive milestone by reaching over 2 million unique visitors in 2014 (2,071,376), an increase of 50% on the previous year.
Visit Cornwall’s digital marketing manager, Lauren Hogan, said: “The world has completely changed in terms of how customers interact with technology and how they use it to research and book travel, holidays and leisure.
“Many destination marketing organisations are reporting a decline in the volume of traffic to their websites as a result of increased digital competition. For Visit Cornwall to buck this trend and increase website visits from two million to three million in the space of a year is a real achievement.
“The increase in visits can be attributed to the success of our integrated marketing campaigns, which include search engine marketing, email marketing and social media as well as more traditional media and marketing that we deliver in partnership with VisitEngland.”
Lord St Levan, chair of the Visit Cornwall Partnership, added: “The internet has revolutionised tourism marketing and what’s impressive about Visit Cornwall is how successfully it has moved and adapted to that revolution.
“These results pay testament to the hard work of the Visit Cornwall team, a great partnership with Cornwall’s tourism industry and the success of the Cornwall brand.”
