Top 10 Reports for Hotels to run in Google Analytics
9 Comments
Many hotels are using Google Analytics, but it’s easy to get lost in numbers that you cannot act on. Here are the top ten reports I like to run for hotel websites – and how I use the information to improve their marketing:
Site overlay
What do people click on the most upon arrival? Identifying the most popular elements of your homepage is a crucial first step to website optimization.
Demographics
What type of people are most likely to visit your website? This can be useful in determining the types of promotions you run, and where you want to increase your visibility.
Visits by geographic region
Where do your visitors come from? Again, this helps with advertising planning. It also can help you determine if you should translate your content or provide localized versions of your information.
New vs. returning visitors
Getting people to come back to your site is usually important, and so watching this number trend over time can valuable.
But don’t take this recommendation without your own testing. Compare metrics like pages per visit, time on site, and most importantly, sales, across these two visitor types
If returning visitors generate more profits for you, optimize your website to keep people around longer. (More content, a blog, email subscriptions, etc)
Top content
What do people find most interesting? Can you publish more of it? Should you make your most popular content more prominent in the website design?
Top landing pages
Where do people enter your website? Are these pages optimized for sales – or whatever action you want the visitors to take?
Top exit pages
Why are people leaving these pages? Is there a flaw in the information, the way it’s presented…or is this page just a natural point for people to leave?
Top referring phrases and websites
What keywords are most important for you? Can you do further search optimization around these? How will this affect your internet advertising?
Again, what decisions can you make based on this information?
Mobile usage
What percentage of people access your site on a mobile device? Is the volume large enough to necessitate creating a dedicated mobile website?
Ecommerce tracking
Finally but most importantly, use the ecommerce functionality from Google to tie all these metrics to a specific monetary value. If you know which referring sites, for example, provide the greatest returns, you can optimize your ad spend.
You also need to know when and where potential guests are giving up in your booking system. If you have ecommerce tracking enabled in Analytics, you can configure funnels to see where people are dropping off. This information can be a goldmine – if you act on the information to fix the leaks.
What website analytics reports are you watching?
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Great article Josiah!
Best tip! Is your top landing page optimised for sales?
Cheers,
Richard
BluSky Marketing
At its core, social media’s value lies in community and relationship building — but man, I do love learning from metrics-based results
Richard — Agreed, that’s a great tip
Our landing page optimization is still/always a work in progress, and I’m excited to help Josiah apply more of these tips to Hotel Marketing Strategies, though any site that decides to “follow the numbers” should also be sure to stay true to their authentic vision and goals, don’t you think?
Thanks for stopping in!
Katie
Editor, HMS
Thanks Richard and Katie – great thoughts. It’s always important to balance the “soft” metrics like community building with more spreadsheet-style stats.
“What is measured gets managed” – right?
Bounce Rate is also a challenge – it’s often a surprise to see how many visit only one page then leave.
Exactly, Ken. Bounce rates are especially useful for measuring the quality of traffic sources. For example if you notice that 95% of people leave immediately after arriving from StumbleUpon.com (this happened to me), then maybe that’s not the best promotional channel for you.
It’s really a measure of audience quality.
Another great example of Insider Circle Only Information J
Personally, I love the free WordPress.com stats especially the Top Content.
If it is a blog post, then I try and publish more of it.
If it is a page, I make it more prominent in my menu or ask myself whether I should push other pages before it instead. A bit like the supermarket dilemma I suppose !
Cheers
Mihir
Absolutely….I think every blogger should install that WordPress.com stats plugin – very helpful to know what material is interesting to your readers.
Need to start digging deeper in your archives Josiah.
Good info here.
I use both Google Analytic and WordPress.com stats. These supplement each other really well. And I know that WordPress.com don’t catch all info either.
Though I tell my friends not to be to caught up in numbers game, Google Analytic and WordPress.com provide some valuable information.
Combine this with some great Listening outposts and you are able to respond properly.
Yeah, the Stumble bar is designed like some of the old fashion Traffic Exchange programs. These visitors traditionally don’t stay very long on your blog or website. I use Stumbleupon but it’s not a targeting market channel for me.
Cheers.. Are
I know of several small hotels and tour outfitters who have “reservation request” forms on their website that do not automatically produce the “e-commerce tracking” data for the Google analytics tab. Do you know of any solutions that support posting back the data produced by these reservation request forms that normally includes number of nights and price per night?
I’m looking for developers or vendors to recommend the service to our advertisers. Thanks for any suggestions.