Making the most of Google Analytics
If you haven’t looked at integrating Google Analytics into your hotel internet marketing strategy, then you might be making a big mistake right now. Google Analytics can be an absolutely critical tool for hotel digital marketing, especially if your priority is building a high-converting website.
What is Google Analytics?
At its simplest, Google Analytics is a tool used to measure the health of your website. It’s a freemium service provided by Google to help website owners check in on traffic, including specific details about your site visitors. With Google Analytics, you can see how many people are visiting your website, when they visit, how much time they spend peeking around and what specific pages they’re looking at. You can also find out a lot about the visitors themselves, including what device they’re using and even where they live. Likewise, Google Analytics can also show you how your visitors are finding your site, such as through a search engine or via social media.
This treasure-trove of information can be extremely useful for planning and directing your hotel marketing strategies online. For example, generally speaking, you can expect to naturally get a lot of site visits purely through search engines, but over time your social media hits aught to snowball. If they don’t, then you can use Google Analytics to pinpoint the problem. Perhaps your Facebook page is driving a healthy amount of traffic, but maybe your Twitter game isn’t keeping pace. Or, maybe you might discover your website is getting plenty of traffic, but this isn’t being translated into bookings. In that case, you might need to focus on improving your website instead of prioritizing social media. Either way, the point is this: with Google Analytics, you can put your hotel internet marketing services under the microscope, and identify problem areas as they emerge.
Strategies to make the most of Google Analytics
Google Analytics is easy enough to pick up and play with but to really make the most of this useful tool you may want to consider integrating it into more advanced hotel marketing strategies. Here, we’re going to briefly look at two different advanced uses of Google Analytics.
E-Commerce Tracking
For this one, you’ll need to work with your booking engine provider to get an e-commerce tracking system set up. Don’t be intimidated though: this is a fairly easy process, and the only thing you’ll need to do is install Google’s e-commerce script into your booking engine. Once set up, you can use e-commerce tracking not only see how much revenue your site is generating, but also where your clients are coming from and how they’re accessing your site.
UTM Track and Tag
UTM links are extremely useful for tracking client activity, including pinpointing how they’re arriving at your website. Google has a great tool that makes it pretty easy to make your own UTM link that’s fully customizable. Using this tool, you can focus down the most profitable marketing channels, while ditching the under-performers.
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