Google Analytics is a powerful and easy-to-use service that provides valuable insights and data on your website’s traffic patterns. Wouldn’t it be great to know visitor statistics, user activity, and the top searched keywords in your comp set? It’s all in Google Analytics.
Here are five Google Analytics metrics you should track to better understand your website visitors and maximize your hotel’s bookings.
Page Views
Page views (also known as ‘impressions’) refer to each individual page viewed on your website by a single visitor. Generally speaking, you want your website visitors to look at multiple pages per visit. But the ideal number of page views will depend on the purpose of your website.
For your hotel’s website, page views are a good sign of engagement. A higher number of page views indicate that the content on your site is capturing your visitors’ attention, and offering valuable information to them. Tracking your page views is also a great way to discover your most popular pieces of content if you have a hotel blog or news section on your website, and are actively sharing these posts on social media.
Sessions
In Google Analytics, a session is a group of hits (or a user’s interactions with your website) recorded in a given time frame. Basically, one session encompasses everything a user does on your website, from browsing your rooms to making a booking, before leaving. This metric only takes into account ‘active’ users, and therefore allows you to accurately gauge how visitors are interacting with your hotel’s website. By tracking the number of pages viewed per session, you can get a good indication of how easily visitors flow from your content pages, for instance, to your booking page.
Your ideal number of pages per session would depend on how many pages it takes to complete a conversion. Say a potential guest lands on your homepage (1). They then click your easy-to-find ‘BOOK NOW’ button which takes them to your booking page (2). From there, they select their preferred room type and click ‘CONFIRM BOOKING’, this takes them to a payment page (3) where they enter their details and VOILA! A room is secured and they land on a confirmation page (4) that thanks them for their booking. In this example, that’s a minimum of 4 pages per session that a user must visit for a successful conversion.
