Analyse your website statistics to track, tweak and improve your online hotel marketing strategy.
One of the most important steps in improving your online hotel marketing is to install web analytics tools and look at your statistics. This will help you optimise your hotel website and analyse campaign results. Google Analytics is one of the most popular and free analytics tools readily available on the internet. Here is a basic guide to Google Analytics tools and reports and how it can help your hotel marketing and give you the edge over your competition.
Traffic sources
By analysing your traffic sources, you can find out what keywords are most effective in driving traffic to your website and find out who are the highest referrers of traffic to your hotel website. Your traffic may be referred from organic Search Engine traffic, pay-per-click advertising, Social Media websites like Facebook and Twitter, email campaigns, links on partner websites and so forth.
How this can help your online hotel marketing: This can help you monitor your keyword strategy and adjust and tweak pages that are optimised for these keywords. For example, US visitors may use the word ‘vacation’ when searching for hotels while UK visitors may search using the word ‘holiday’.
You can also find out what websites or strategies bring you the most traffic in your link building activities and focus your efforts on those sites and/or strategies. You can also identify what components of your hotel marketing campaign are more successful in driving traffic to your website and help you allocate your marketing budget more effectively.
Visitor Analysis
By analysing your visitor data, you will be able to monitor the number of visitors to the hotel website and whether your traffic is increasing or decreasing, how long on average a visitor spends on your website, whether your visitors are new or returning back to the website, the visitor life cycle (are your visitors active in the morning and during business hours, or in the evenings in their free time) and what geographical locations they are from – very important to a hotel.
How this can help your online hotel marketing: By identifying the geographic locations of your visitors, you can target your pages accordingly and knowing when your users are online can help you in timing other marketing activities such as email campaigns and pay-per-click ads.
If the number of visitors is decreasing, it is important to find out the reasons behind the falling traffic. This not always a bad thing – if you are optimising your pages correctly, you may be delivering better targeted traffic at a smaller volume.
Content Analysis
Content analysis is very important for hotel marketers. Here you want to find out what is the most viewed content – the top landing pages, the most common exit pages and the pages with the highest bounce rate.* The Site Overlay Tool is particularly interesting for hotel website marketers as it provides graphical insights on which element on your site users click most often.
How this can help your online hotel marketing: Armed with this information, you will be able to make your web pages more interesting and useful for people visiting your website. You may want to redesign pages with a high bounce rate to keep users engaged so they spend more time on the website. You may find that certain packages or deals appeal to different regions or target markets.
Conversion Tracking
Google Analytics allows you to set up to 20 conversion goals for your hotel website. These goals may include a direct online hotel booking, an enquiry about a hotel room, downloading a brochure about wedding venues and so forth. Goals can also be set up for websites with an online booking system to track all purchases made on your site – including what keyword was the entry point for the sale, transaction value, etc.
Once a goal is set up – such as ‘online enquiry’, the Goal Report also allows you to see the ‘goal funnel’ – as in what percentage of users reached the 1st, 2nd… and final step of conversion.
How this can help your online hotel marketing: This report helps you troubleshoot any potential problems in the path to conversion and helps you retain customers. This can provide insights if there are any issues such as:
- too many steps to conversion
- too much information on the page
- it is unclear how customers book through the website.
- helps you to understand what keywords, products/packages/offers, marketing campaign (email, pay-per-click ad…) and so on generated most conversions.
Contact us if you would like to discuss optimising your website and installing Google Analytics on your hotel website. It’s crucial to have good quality and insightful data available to develop your hotel internet marketing strategy: you need to regularly review the data a minimum of once a week. Google Analytics provides great insights into where your site visitors come from, and what they are interested in – this provides major input in your online hotel marketing strategy!
* Web surfers leaving a hotel website within a few seconds (approx less than 10 seconds).
