If you are like other hoteliers, you might not be focused on your website. Between managing budgets and team members, keeping guests satisfied, and day-to-day operations, websites are often one of the last things on hoteliers’ minds. You may be seeing tens of thousands of dollars in revenue come through your website every month, but do you know whether or not the revenue you are seeing is good, bad, or an amount that is in line with what your competitors are seeing? Luckily, there are efficient ways to monitor your hotel website’s performance.
Website performance can be segmented into two main categories: traffic and behavior. On one hand, you would like to see a consistent, or increasing, amount of traffic to your site and be able to identify when and why traffic drops are occurring. On the other hand, you want to ensure website visitors are converting into guests when they do visit the site. These two components work hand in hand, with the end goal being total conversions.
Website Traffic
To measure traffic performance you will need some historical data (the more data the merrier). For websites that are older than a year, YOY (year-over-year) data should be the primary time frame you are comparing. Compare your YOY data in month-long segments, at the very least. Anything shorter than thirty days might not provide enough information to give a full picture.
Evaluating YOY data seems simple enough on the face value; for example, look at visits from September 2017 compared to September 2016. If 2017 has less visits, that means something is wrong…right? Not exactly. You will next need to segment this traffic by where it came from, commonly referred to as the traffic source. Perhaps traffic is down in paid sources due to a decreased ad spend in 2017 compared to 2016, but organic and direct traffic is up. This would indicate that there is nothing slacking on the website, but looking into increased ad spend would be warranted. As is always the case with data, you will want to consider it with context. What if the Olympics were held in your city last year, causing a big influx of traffic for nearly the entire summer? You would see a drop in traffic the next year, but not necessarily because of website performance. That might be an extreme example, but it goes to show that real life context does indeed matter when comparing website traffic.
