When it comes to hotel internet marketing, accurate website tracking is one of the key tools in the internet marketer’s toolbox. Intelligent tracking gives your marketing team essential data about what visitors are doing on your site and feedback on how your marketing is affecting your hotel website usage and revenue. Notoriously difficult to get right on hotel websites and booking engines, planning out your data collection strategy in advance can bring big rewards in gleaning useful, actionable business data.
So, how hard could it be to set up Google Analytics on your hotel website? In this two part series we look at four Analytics traps and how to avoid them.
The Big Pass Off
Many hotels pass their traffic to their booking engine site to check availability and make the booking. Without proper cross domain tracking this can falsely inflate your website visits and strip the Google Analytics conversions of valuable attribution data. In a nutshell, if this isn’t set up correctly, visitors moving from your hotel website to your booking engine are like visitors leaving and re-joining your website. Your traffic goes up, your conversion rate goes down and all your booking appear to be attributed to a “referral” from your own domain.
Fix it:
- Your first step is to ensure that you have linking set up correctly in your Google Analytics. The “Allow Linker” option should be set to true in your tracking code, or set to active in you GA tag in Google Tag Manager.
- The second step is to make sure your IBE has this setting activated as well.
- Finally, add both your domain and your IBE domain to the referrer exclusion list in GA. If you still see all your IBE traffic from self-referrals check that the URL when you move from your site to the IBE is “decorated” that is it has “ga=” and a number included. If it does, check with your IBE to ensure that their part is set up correctly.
Goals as Events
It’s easy to set goals in Google Analytics, but not everything should be a goal. Goals should align with your business goals and would match what you measure as success on your site. For example, completing a contact form on your hotel website site is a goal, the site has had success in winning a customer contact. Joining a loyalty program and signing up for a newsletter could also be goals. On the other hand, in most cases, viewing a video on your site isn’t a goal. It’s not the aim or purpose of the site. It is useful however, to know how much of a share that video took in influencing your sales.
Fix it:
Make good use of Google Analytics Events. These Events are grouped in Categories, Actions and have a label. How you use these categories are up to you, but it’s good to group similar actions together. You may categorise a video as “Site Usage”, with the action of “View a Video” and the label being the video name. Downloading pdfs and clicks out to partner hotels are all good examples of events which should be recorded in your Google Analytics.
Starter Goals & Events
Use these events and goals to start a conversation with your team as to what you should be recording on your hotel website.
Examples of Goals
- Ecommerce (Revenue)
- Contact Form Submission
- Wedding Form Submission
Examples of Events
- View a Video
- Download a Menu
- Start a Virtual Tour
Plan out a list of business goals your website must support. They may include bookings, contact forms and tap-to call actions. These will become your goals. Then plan out things that can happen on your website which could be part of a visitor’s journey. Group these together into logical sections where the categories are similar, such as a “Wedding Lead” category, or a “Discovering the Hotel” category. This will help you segment your actions in a way that is logical and usable.
Getting your website analytics right can take time and patience, but it’s certainly worth the work. Planning as a team what you will record, why, and how ensures that you have the business intelligence you need to monitor the success of your Hotel Internet Marketing.
As part of our Hotel Internet Marketing service Up can help you track the data from your hotel website and interpret it in a logical and useful way. Contact our team of experts to start getting actionable audience data for your property.
