You’ve probably heard the saying before, but it is worth repeating now. You can’t improve what you don’t measure. When it comes to digital marketing, there is no excuse not to measure the efforts put into your website, your email, or your other advertising.
That said, there is SO much data available, how do you know which metrics are most important in driving business decisions? That’s what we are going to answer here. We are going to take a look at a few large categories of marketing efforts, and break down the metrics that, if you have time for no other analysis, will give you the best bang for your buck.
Website Metrics For Hotels
Let’s start with the largest piece of the marketing pie – your website. All of the other pieces of the pie feed into this money-making machine, so we are going to tackle this one first.
First – if you take only one thing away from this post, let it be this: website traffic does not drive revenue.
Visits/unique visitors/page views should never be a goal for a hotel website. Why is this? It is qualified traffic that drives revenue.
Sending more traffic from an unqualified source does nothing to your bottom line. In fact, it can even hinder your performance in natural search rankings, if the search engines see visitors quickly bouncing from your site back to search again.
We are going to use the following metrics to determine qualified traffic:
1.) Conversion Rate:
This is the most important metric we can use to find the most qualified website visitors.
The formula to calculate the conversion rate = number of bookings/visits (or visitors).
In Google Analytics, this is a built in metric you can see in any of the Acquisition reports, which will give you a list of all the sources of traffic, with that eCommerce conversion rate.
In Adobe Analytics, you can view a built-in report of the purchase conversion funnel to see an overall conversion rate, and then segment that report by traffic source, or create a calculated metric that can be used in any ranked report, such as the Referring Domains report or Campaigns report.
In any tool, conversion rate should be looked at site-wide, as well as by source, allowing you to see the big picture of the site’s performance as well as each source of traffic as comparison points.
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