HOTELS

Scott van Hartesvelt

Tracking Your Web site For Success
August 7, 2008

Accurate tracking is a critical element of any successful marketing campaign. Without it, marketers are unable to diagnose the true performance of their initiatives.

The ability to track the performance of a hotel Web site is no different. Hopefully you have gotten to the point of tracking the basics, i.e., total revenue, average rate, room nights and reservations. But is this really enough?

Does raw performance data give you enough information to fully understand your Web site customers and more effectively market to them?

Of course not, and as more marketing dollars shift to the Web, hoteliers should demand more transparency and more ROI analysis from their marketing partners.

The primary source for Web site performance information is usually your booking engine provider. Through my work at gCommerce, I have been able to work with most of the major booking engine providers currently on the market. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, but in all cases their reporting modules do not provide a complete picture.

For example, they lack the ability to capture data detailing how people got to the property’s Web site. Several of the providers have attempted to roll out new reports to better track that information, but in our review, we have found the tracking to be inconsistent and incomplete.

The point is that no single booking engine provider today can give you the full story on why your Web site is performing, or not performing. The information they provide needs to be combined with other data sources, and then it has to be effectively analyzed.

Before I go further, understand that I find great value in “subscription” reports like the STR Report and Hoteligence. They provide great insight that can’t be found through any other source. But there seems to be a tendency in the industry to work solely off canned reports, believing they will give people all the insight they need about the intricacies of their market.

Marketers should be naturally curious. They should strive to dig deeper, to find more meaningful ways to evaluate where their business is coming from. Marketing is about problem solving, and the information built into canned reports simply won’t give you the information you need to solve some of the more complex problems your Web site may face.

One interesting and potentially data-rich place to start is your Web site traffic reporting. Make sure Google Analytics, Omniture or one of the feature-rich Web site traffic logs is loaded on your site. Connect the tracking to your calls to action, allowing you to quickly diagnose how people are getting to your Web site, what they are doing when they get there and, in the end, who is buying.

Evaluate the effectiveness of new packages on a weekly or even daily basis. Evaluate the efficiency of your paid search spend or your online media buys. Just because they send traffic to your Web site doesn’t necessarily mean they are valuable.

Compare that data with reports from your PMS, booking engine provider, Smith Travel Research and others to develop a more comprehensive view. Once your data sources are in place, test new strategies and programs you think could drive results. Work to find new sources of information that could further instruct your actions, be it airport traffic data or data provided by your local CVB. 

Most important, assign someone creative to provide the analysis, and make sure they have time to do it properly.

When talking to a colleague about this blog post, he begged that I not mention the phrase “Measure what you Treasure” because it’s too overused. I believe the statement is not just overused, it’s outdated. In a world where information is at our fingertips, why would we only measure what we treasure? Instead try this:

Measure everything and treasure those people who can evaluate disparate sources of information and reach meaningful conclusions.

Posted by Scott van Hartesvelt on August 7, 2008 | Comments (3)