The ACT government has four websites to spruik the capital, costing more than $600,000 over three years to develop, each encouraging interstate visitors to move to or visit the territory.

ACT General Arts, Business, Events, Sport and Recreation deputy director Gary Rake said each website served a different purpose and pulled in millions of pages views a year, as well as millions of dollars for the ACT government.

But a marketing expert said the strategy was unbefitting a "major brand".

Australian National University marketing expert Andrew Hughes said if you couldn't remember a website address off the top of your head, it wasn't working.

"If you have so many different websites, the market gets confused," he said.

"You start thinking what are these websites doing, which one do I go to?

"In this day and age people give up really quick. This is the Google generation where people get impatient by page three of a Google search."

Mr Hughes said Canberra was missing out on "brand recall" by having so many different websites and suggested a single, combined URL.

"If I say 'Brand Canberra' people will say 'what's that?' because there's no awareness of it, there's no buildup of a campaign. You have to wonder," he said.

Mr Hughes said the latest advertising campaign for Canberra, which was released by the government last month, should have been linked into a website but featured no link at the end of the movie.

Canberra design and marketing agency nFlame Creative director Damian Schroeter said it was important to focus on the usability of websites, saying multiple messages could be "counterproductive".

"Our expertise as a Google partner in Canberra is to really focus on how users consume information and how quickly we can deliver a result," he said.

"If we have a lot of websites that look beautiful but confuse a web user, any opportunity for a chance to be confused is a chance for them to leave the website."

But Mr Schroeter said multiple websites could still work for a brand, depending on their target audience and customer inquiries.

"The digital space is about responding to someone's search query and if the response doesn't react to the right query, you alienate that audience," he said.

Mr Rake said all four websites attracted millions of unique visits in 2013-14 and brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars in tourism and administrative savings.

He said each of the four websites had a specific purpose and a specific intended audience.

"The latest website, canberra.com.au, puts the whole Canberra story in one place incorporating the CBR branding," Mr Rake said.

"The website is designed to help shape people's perceptions about Canberra, acting as a gateway to other sites such as Visit Canberra and Study Canberra."

He said VisitCanberra's website was designed to promote Canberra as a leisure destination and while Canberra Your Future was launched as part of the ACT's migration program.

Mr Rake said the government had spent over $600,000 developing the websites since 2012, including $370,000 to redevelop visitcanberra.com.au and $92,356 to create canberrayourfuture.com.au.

Australian National University marketing expert Stephen Dann said the government's use of the four websites was a smart marketing strategy.

"If you look at Visit Canberra and Canberra Your Future, Visit is about where are the hotels, where's the weekend getaway, where are the restaurants ... whereas Create Your Future is a much more sober impression," he said.

Mr Dann said separating different user groups into different websites was best practice in the advertising industry.