Internet surfers come to H.B. too

More than a million people visited Huntington Beach for the first time last year via the Internet.

"That's a lot of eyeballs on our website," said Doug Traub, chief executive and president of the Huntington Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau. The bureau logged 1,058,000 unique visitors to its website in 2006, compared to a scant 2,200 five years earlier. A unique visitor is someone who may access a website several times but is counted only once. Typically, it is the preferred method of measuring Internet traffic.

Neighboring cities are also tracking visitors to their bureaus' websites. In 2006, 1.66 million people visited the Anaheim/Orange County Visitor & Convention Bureau website, a 23% increase from 2005, according to the bureau's communications manager Nicky See. The bureau covers both Anaheim and the entire county.

Newport Beach Conference & Visitors Bureau received 2 million page views in 2006 but did not release the number of unique visitors.

Some may attribute the surge in Huntington Beach's popularity to the ongoing spat with Santa Cruz over which city is the real Surf City, USA.

The verbal salvos exchanged between the two cities have been covered by media all over the world. That might explain Santa Cruz getting about 1.3 million unique visitors to its conference and visitors bureau website that promotes the entire county.

Huntington Beach walked away with the trademark rights to Surf City, USA, which the bureau has systematically used in its promotion campaign.

This year, the bureau is planning an even bigger push to market the city by targeting specific audiences and using cost-saving measures.

"We had a slow migration from simply promoting Huntington Beach as a destination to branding it as Surf City, USA," Traub said.

That has meant establishing a style guide for the bureau's promotional materials, including its website and Web newsletters, visitors guide, rack brochure and its licensed products.

"All the materials are falling into a comparable look and feel; not a hodge-podge of 10 different looks and feel," Traub said.

Besides unifying the look, the bureau is planning to roll out several new initiatives.

Bird-lovers and naturalists are the hot new segment that the bureau aims to attract to the Bolsa Chica wetlands.