As we begin to understand the value of endorsements and recommendations on the social web, it will be interesting to see how hotels incentive these.

One concept proposed at PhoCusWright@ITB 2011 townhall brainstorming: What if you offered a discount code that people could only receive by scanning a QR code with their mobile phones, opting in to receive updates via SMS text message, checking into the establishment using Gowalla or Foursquare, and notifying their friends via Facebook and Twitter?

How much of a discount would you provide to gain that level of permission and coverage on the social web? Would the discount be tied to influence scores like Klout?

Today we have Barbara Pezzi, Director of Analytics at Fairmont Raffles Hotel Group, joining us to explain how she uses analytics for decision making.

What does your day-to-day work involve?

The are three main areas. The first is to provide intelligence for business decisions. The second is the search optimization side of things: to keep abreast of all the latest innovations and developments that search engines are rolling out, and making sure our marketing team is trained and informed about them. The third is to liaise with the tech team on implementing the insights we find as well as any updates to our web analytics setup.

What is the general role analytics need to play in hotel marketing?

Analytics is definitely playing a bigger role now than it has in the past. Analytics was traditionally mainly used after the fact to simply report on outcomes or validate business decisions.

Web analytics should be a starting point for any online marketing decision: used at the beginning to get insight into what actions must be taken.

How do you know what data to collect?

People tend to focus on what’s changed, what’s trending. It’s up to you to keep digging and finding answers. Look for opportunities in specific countries, specific channels: are we missing out on a language or new website as a traffic source? Should we setup a new campaign?

You need to spend time in your analytics tool to gather answers to these questions. It also requires a keen business acumen to make sense of the data.

What key performance indicators (KPIs) are included on your metrics dashboard?

I don’t have a set of standard metrics to use in all situations. I like to personalize them based on unique business needs.

A hotel based in Sydney probably has very different needs than a hotel in Beijing. The Sydney hotel may want to want to attract guests from overseas, and needs information to support that goal. The Beijing hotel may have a lot of luxury rooms and need help selling reservations to the luxury traveler.

A loyalty program director might be wanting to run a special campaign, and needs insight on the best way to do that.

So it really varies from case to case.

What do you see as the limitations of website analytics?

Analytics can tell you what happened, but not why it happened.

If we have a page with a 80% bounce rate, we know 80% don’t like it – but we don’t know why.  To find that you must use business intuition along with testing.

For all our brand sites, we use a voice of the customer tool that syncs with analytics. And that gives us a little better idea of why things happen.

When it comes to social media communications, it’s complicated: how do you assign value to a Facebook Like or a Twitter follower? You can see traffic but you just don’t know what they thought when they read your post and went to your website.

What trends are you seeing in the area of analytics?

Analytics is becoming much more complex. More companies are increasing investment in this area.

There’s lots of integration going on. For example, Omniture has now a full integration with Twitter and Facebook in addition to a number of tools, from bid management to multivariate testing to voice of customer solutions. Google Analytics is integrated with Website Optimizer, Adwords PPC, and Google’s Webmater tools.

I’m seeing a lot of focus on attribution, and a number of tools are coming out with models to track this.

Any comments on the most important analytics you see for social communications?

My presentation at EyeForTravel in San Francisco next week is all about calculating ROI from social media.

My advice is to keep an open mind. But at the end of the day if you’re not blessed with a CEO or MD that’s social media savvy you’ll have to demonstrate ROI. Social media is not free. At some point it’s going to have to be justified.

I suggest all social media practitioners assign business goals to their activity. Whether it’s to generate sales leads, site traffic, or newsletter subscribers, have tracking systems in place to prove value.

Can you give us any examples of how you’ve used analytics at your company?

In our PPC campaigns, we’ve doubled the ROI in a few campaigns by analyzing the data of visitors from various countries, sources, and so on.

Our Director of Public Relations gets data on which social media posts drive the most traffic, engagement and conversion. He uses that information to determine what followers seem to enjoy and engage with – and this helps him make decisions in creating content.

Also, when we launched the new website, our analytics indicated the original layout didn’t resonate with visitors. So we changed it, and things improved.

So improvement with analytics is always iterative process?

That’s right.

Thanks, Barbara!

—

Barbara will be presenting in San Francisco next week at the EyeForTravel Social Media Strategies for Travel 2011 conference.

In conversations I’ve had with hotel managers, there seems to be a recurring question about hotel reputation analysis:

How many online guest reviews is sufficient?

What review volume should be considered successful? 10, 50, 150 per month?

What if I have 5 rooms? 1,000 rooms?

Since this varies so widely from property to property, let’s use a new metric:

Reservations-to-review conversion rate

Take your monthly review volume, divide by the number of reservations a property has each month, and calculate the conversion rate.

Take steps to encourage more reviews, and track your progress over time.

What do you think?

—

[Update 2/20/2011: Thank you, Alistar and Marc, for your advice in calculating this number]

Try saying that five times quickly! Social media presents a number of ways to speed up your sales cycle. It provides you the opportunity to communicate information, personality, and social proof. Additionally….

• Social media can help you get in front of the right decision makers.
• Through online conversations you can gather deeper insight into the customer’s situation, helping you come up with a customized solution faster.
• You can empower your prospects to sell ideas throughout their organizations.
• Optimizing your social media presence can make you more findable in search, getting you involved in their buying process faster.
• It increases your visibility, getting more people to call you… instead of you having to call them.

While all of this is true, the real reason I wanted to write this post was to give you numbers you can use to track your own sales process.

Test this out to see if this really works in your situation. Here’s some metrics to measure and track regarding your sales process:

Number of sales leads

Are you closing social media messaging with a call to action, and generating sales leads for yourself?

Cost per lead

Are you able to drive this lower as a result of new media? Or does the time investment make it not worth your while?

Sales closing ratio

Are your sales people able to close more deals faster…because you’ve built a reputation that precedes you?

Channel conversion rate

A little more sophisticated than the number above, this lets you compare effectiveness between your blog, Twitter, etc. What is most effective for you?

Sales cycle length (time to closing)

Is it shorter now….because prospects begin the conversation with a deep understanding of what you offer?

Guillaume shared this video with us in This Week in Hotels. Spending 21 minutes to watch it could turn you into a much more successful web marketer:

Barbara Pezzi, Director Web Marketing for Swisshotel & Fairmont, explains to an audience how she used segmentation to change different things on the Swisshotel website and also launched a successful PPC campaign for a specific property. Barbara also discovers that Facebook visitors are more entitled to be customers of her hotels than Twitter based on what she saw on Google Analytics.

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?

Josiah’s note: The following comes from a conversation I recently had with Tom McCallum. In this article, Tom discusses the travel booking process, and how it takes place today.

As John Wanamaker famously said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

I blogged on this a while ago – it’s becoming increasingly difficult for marketers to track their campaigns. I’ve noticed that as I deal with conventional tourism marketing – they’re not so familiar with online media. Their methods of tracking in all cases — not just online marketing metrics –but off-line: what’s the value of print, what’s the value of TV, what’s the value of radio? All of these conventional media buying metrics in which the old-school media buyers have so much experience… they find very difficult to track new media.

Travel Booking Isn’t Linear

There’s no straight line from ad campaign to purchase in travel marketing anymore. There’s just so many factors that go into purchasing travel.

If you take Expedia as an example – their numbers are down in a number of areas. People are using them as the Amazon.com of travel, they research there first, but increasingly Expedia and other Online Travel Agents are finding it more difficult to give people reasons to book there. As I was recently reviewing a survey done for luxury hotels and brands, it was quite stunning to see the stats on how people are booking directly through the hotels.

So there are no easy answers.I think it comes down to that really scientific thing: gut feel!

I feel a little bit like a Steve Jobs of travel marketing sometimes — “To hell with the research! This is what we need to do.” And I think hotel marketing is really in a state of flux right now. We have all the people that we’ve been dealing with for years — ad buyers, media agencies — but they really don’t understand online behavior enough yet.

It’s a Branding Issue

And then when you look at social media brand building, for example, like Gary Vaynerchuk has been doing. It’s the whole personal brand thing, and is so applicable to hotels – especially independent hotels.

We’ve got a great example of this with what Joie de Vivre hotels has been doing: building almost a personal brand of each individual property.

We get far too hung up on metrics. I think you get buried in numbers and put off by numbers. So I’m sounding a bit like an ad rep — saying not to worry about the numbers, and just buy my ads. But I think with regard to online metrics, I’m really just interested in how many unique site visitors I have, how many new visitors I’m getting, where they’re coming from, and what type of search they used to find us. Not just direct referrals – but the phrases that people are using to find us online.

And that’s the disconnect. If you find that 40% of people are finding you by typing your hotel name into a search engine — you’ve completely lost connection to your metrics. Where are they coming from? It could be a print ad, it could be completely residual, it could be they saw a special promotion and the price is right.

This is the way I see people coming to my client’s sites. People don’t bookmark websites anymore – they simply type it into Google. For example, if I don’t know the name of your blog, I would just type in “hotel marketing blog” — and arrive at your site. People just do that for everything.

Focus on Website Optimization

The important thing is website optimization. Let’s concentrate on website efficiency. Get people onto the site in the first place, and that’s where you can begin creating some good metrics.Monitor their path through your website, and adjust for sales efficiency.

Obviously for hotels, the question is: are we making it possible for them to book a reservation in the way they want at any stage? You want to make sure there’s a widget on every single page that allows anyone to commence the booking process at any time.

So do everything you can that you think would be effective in bringing people to your website and then focus on converting those visitors to bookings.

Read more…

Understanding and using web analytics can unlock marketing strategies that can produce large profits for your hotel when acted on. Some of the top insights you can get:

1. Know what visitors like and don’t like about your website
2. Determine the most important pages on your site
3. Watch the impact of adding new features or content
4. You will know which campaigns worked, and which did not
5. Discover the most important keywords for your hotel
6. Track which sites are sending you the most traffic
7. Learn which types of visitors are most likely to buy from you
8. Find errors and glitches on your website
9. Identify upselling opportunities on your website
10. Quantify the contribution of online marketing to your overall business
11. Which content keeps your visitors coming back
12. Which countries you’re most effective in
13. What time your website is most active: hour, day, week, month
14. Develop a deeper understanding of your guests

Analytics is a form of feedback, and usually very accurate. By recording and observing how people interact with your web sites, you can learn what they really think about what you are providing.

It takes the guesswork out of internet marketing.

How are you using website metrics to direct your marketing?

Omniture’s 2009 Online Conversion Benchmark Survey – conducted in July and released last Tuesday – reveals some startling facts:

• 80% of online marketers do not serve personalized content, and do not use performance metrics to promote content
• Less than 30% frequently test their content
• 70% of content decisions are unsupported by data

That’s scary. Especially if you depend on your website to generate sales.

Since I often talk about ‘scientific marketing’ it’s good to have some solid numbers on the state of the industry. More and more, I’m emphasizing the importance of conversion tracking, testing, and optimizing in the campaigns I manage. This process is fundamentally at the heart of internet marketing, and it would be a waste if we didn’t fully exploit it.

Tracking

Tracking is gathering the data as it is now. The process is quick and easy through tools such as Google Analytics. By adding once piece of code to your website, you can have access to hundreds of detailed reports.

Testing

Testing is letting the market vote on your marketing ideas. After tracking systems are in place, you can perform split testing to determine the best mix of your website elements. Testing replaces guesswork with pragmatism in the marketing process.

Optimization

Optimization is acting on the information you discover. Once you have data, you must use it. Few website owners continue through all the way to this step. It’s essential your site development is guided by the insights you’ve collected.

This 3-step system is the only proven way to achieve outstanding internet marketing results.

Are you investing enough into this process?

[photo credit: faith goble]

On this blog, I often emphasize the importance of developing and using metrics to measure the performance of your hotel marketing.

But sometimes, measuring your marketing limits its effectiveness.

David Meerman Scott has released an excellent free ebook, Lose Control of Your Marketing.

I recommend you download and read it immediately.