Why Install Analytics on Your Hotel Website

SEO, PPC, Banners… the list of activities that you conduct to drive traffic to your hotel and attain maximum occupancy levels are endless. After investing so much time and money, do you know what type return on your investment you have achieved? Do you know which activity drives quality to your website or your visitor-to-guest ratio? Do you know visitor’s footfall patterns - pages viewed, time spend on your website and pages that prompted their exit? These are important answers to have, if you want to get the maximum out of your online marketing programs and your hotel website.

The simplest way to answer the above questions is with an Analytics Software.

What is Analytics Software?
Analytics software is an information gathering and analyzing tool. It measures information such as how many people visited your website; how many of those visitors were unique visitors; how did they locate your website through a SEM program - banners, PPC campaigns, third party referrals followed link, etc. or were they direct visitors; how long they spend on each page; what links they clicked on; which page leads to the most conversion; and which page leads to the most exits.

How it works?
All you need to do is embed a JavaScript code into each page on your website. This embed code will collect data from visitors - how people entered your website (i.e. a banner ad, an article, or the search engines), what pages they visited, how long they spent on your site, what pages they exited on, what percentage of people left your website quickly (bounce rate), what content and keywords are most successful, and much more.

How is Analytics beneficial?
Tracking, gathering and analyzing information for individual activities and on your website may sound complex and time-consuming but it can provide you with a clear idea on which of your marketing activities are profitable and which are not performing and needs to be modified or culled. Here are few reasons ‘why’ it is important to track, gather and analyze visitor’s patterns with an Analytics Software:

• An Analytics Software can be used to monitor whether or not there are any problems with your website. Tracking allows you to monitor and analyze visitor behavior on your website.  It will provide you information such as - the most popular pages on your website, average time spent per page, which pages causes the most exits, the number of visitors who left without looking at any other pages or clicking on any other links. The information gathered can help determine which areas of your website are popular and profitable and which are problematic and need to be fixed. You can use the information collected to revamp and enhance problematic (low traffic) areas and give your guests a better overall experience.

• When you launch a marketing or advertising campaign, you have certain goals in mind. If you don’t track your campaigns, you will never know if they are effective, you have achieved set goals or received a satisfactory return on investment.

• You can also determine whether guests are having difficulty using your reservation engine by embedding an analytics code in your booking engine. The statistics collected will provide you will a clear idea of how many visitors abandon the reservation mid-process and which page cause the most departures. You can use it to determine whether there is a problem with the reservation engine and resolve the same.
  
  
• Multiple marketing programs - search engine optimization strategy, PPC campaign, banner ads etc mean that visitors arrive to your website from different mediums. If you do not track your marketing programs, then you will not know which program is driving ‘quality’ traffic to your website. An Analytics Software can show you exactly where your traffic came from. Armed with this knowledge, you can increase your efforts on productive programs, determine why others are non-productive and modify or cull the same.  

• Knowledge is power. Analytics will help you identify your visitors – which countries they are from, what languages they speak, when are they most active online. You can use this information to careful reconstruct your marketing campaigns to target your core audience more effectively. For example, if your hotel is located in India but a majority of your audience is located Russia, you can have a bi-lingual website to make it easier for your Russian guests to make reservations.
  
  
• Given the popularity of search engines, keyword optimization is a vital marketing effort. By tracking keywords, you can learn which keywords drive the most traffic to your website and which ones lead to the highest amount of conversions. The information collected will enable you to invest more in profit generating keywords while reducing spend on less effective keywords.

To summarize, it is vital to use an Analytics Software to track, gather and analyze your website and any campaign as it will give you a clear idea about which website pages and internet marketing activities are profitable and which are not performing and needs to be modified or culled. The information collected can also be used to attract and convert more visitors and reduce marketing spend while increasing per customer spend.