Boost Your Direct Booking Strategy With Google Analytics

Applying this information to your direct booking strategy is important for improving hotel revenue.

Interpreting the browsing established by the traffic that you receive on your website will help you understand user behavior and how they interact with your hotel’s online reputation. Google Analytics is an infinite source of information: with the proper analysis, it can serve as a system that allows you to interpret user browsing, how they “consume” your information, as well as to evaluate the relevance of your value proposal established among them. You can obtain a very interesting depiction of your hotel’s direct booking strategy and how it evolves by cross-checking information between browsing and conversions.

By losing the fear of working with Google Analytics and using its full potential to improve the revenue strategy would be the most coherent decision. Especially when you have access to a substantial and very segmented amount of information. Filtering data and translating it into information that is manageable and comprehensible to different departments, such as Marketing or Sales, can be a very interesting choice for decision making.

In order to determine some of the data that you must collect and how you should interpret it, we at BEONx will discuss the 5 main metrics that we consider most significant for most hotels:

• Page views or impressions. This concept is associated with the number of pages viewed by a user. Theory says, the greater the number of page views, the higher the percentage of conversion, although this will depend on the structure of the website or the content offered. The length of stay in the web also increases possibilities of conversion. Establishing a full engagement increases the traveler’s interest, therefore strengthening the relationship with the client. It’s important that your hotel’s website have an events calendar or a blog in order to keep visitors on your pages longer and make the traveler feel more comfortable on your website.

• Sessions. It’s the period of time a user is active on a digital platform. It lasts a maximum of 30 minutes by default, but the length can be modified to increase or reduce it. This metric only takes into account active users, thus allowing to accurately measure the users who interact with your website. By tracking the number of pages viewed per session, you can obtain an indicator related to the ease with which visitors browse the contents. Moreover, the most important one is related to the booking process.

The ideal number of pages per session will depend on how many pages it takes to complete a conversion. On average, a process is completed between 3 or 4 different pages from the moment the user clicks on an availability check until the payment is finalized.

• New Sessions. The percentage of new sessions shows a comparative relation between returning visitors and first-time visitors. This data is important in two ways: it indicates the number of new visitors that visit your site, as well as the ability to increase the recurrence rate of users who are already familiar with your website. An increase in the number of new sessions along with the implementation of a new campaign, you can calculate the relation it allows to calculate the relations between how much “fresh” traffic has been captured in comparison to more recurrent traffic, which is generated more naturally.

• Goals. This small tool within Google Analytics shows an intuitive way of tracking conversion rates. This metric allows you to show in Analytics something important that has happened on your website. You could then accurately track, for instance, how many booking conversions have been made on the website or how many users have subscribed to your newsletter online. Moreover, it’s possible to know which pages travelers have visited before completing their reservation. This tell you which pages or content are most effective in terms of booking incentive.
  

• Bounce Rate. The single-page visit rate, i.e., the number of visits in which the user has left the landing page without interacting with it. If a hotel’s website has a high exit rate, this could reveal problems with the booking process, meaning that it may be too complicated or confusing for guests. To reduce the exit rate on a website, you can include links to related pages complementary to the needs of the traveler. By rearranging the browsing process into a system o
  f fluid and coherent pages, you’ll help the traveler make a reservation.

In addition to what was previously mentioned, Google Analytics is a very useful tool for improving your hotel’s SEO strategy or optimizing your online marketing strategy. And best of all, Google Analytics is free and available to anyone with a Google account. Therefore, you have no excuse to enhance your revenue and direct booking strategy by using the information provided by Google Analytics.