Google Analytics is a free, hosted web analytics tool that can help your hotel create more effective sites and increase Return on Investment (ROI) on marketing campaigns. Analytics is a great tool to see traffic on your hotel website, your visitors, your referrals, where traffic is coming from, what people are doing on your website etc. Many hotels have Google Analytics in place but very few use them pro-actively to help grow their online bookings.
Here are some questions worth asking:
A: How do visitors find my website?
If you don’t know how people are finding your website, it is impossible to track marketing efforts. If you would like to see what pages visitors are viewing on your site (ie Google, Twitter, Website etc) and what search terms they use to find your website, you can track them with these simple steps
B: Are you creating effective content that leads to the behaviour output?
You are creating a website that will enable the visitor to do something whether it is to book your hotel, learn more about your hotel, how to contact your hotel etc. The information you will see in this report will help you analyze whether they are actually behaving according to the results that you expected to produce after visiting your website.
C: How does it affect your bottom-line?
How is your website impacting your bottom line ie conversions? You might be investing a lot of time, money and energy – be it online advertising, social media campaign or Ad words. You would be truly looking to analyse the results on these and can measure them using Google Analytics
So here is a 3 step process to kick start Google Analytics for your hotel:-
The Analytics process
Measure – You are going to measure and figure out what is happening/not happening on your website
Learn – On the basis of website analysis hotel need to try and learn from it. For example if you are wondering that you have been sending people to hotel website and nothing has been happening or the impact is very low.
Action – Based on the learning analysis, a hotel can take action to improve the results. It could be as simple moving a button or increasing the font size or increasing the number of pictures. This process of analysis can help you improve the effectiveness of your website.