Imagine for a moment your hotel website is not getting the amount of reservations you expect. You and your staff need more guests to come in and there are fewer reservations being created by your website. Maybe your website gets plenty of traffic, but if it is not generating reservations, then it is not doing its job.
Many clients, both new and old, are constantly wondering what can be done to their website to generate more bookings. The solution is a full scale improvement of your website called conversion optimization.
What is Conversion Optimization?
Conversion optimization is taking a look at your site as a whole as well as the individual pages and using every opportunity to make a visitor complete your desired goal, like make a room reservation.
The use of analytics and data is key to any conversion optimization task. To figure out how to generate more bookings you need to use analytics and make sure you are tracking how visitors move throughout your site. Lines of code embedded into links on your pages allow you to classify a variety of identifying features onto these links. Is it an internal link? External? Is it a PDF file or a new page? Is the guest booking a room? All of these questions can be answered with properly implemented analytics codes and can shape your future decisions.
With this data you are not worrying nearly as much about where your guests are coming from, but what they are doing on your site. With this knowledge you learn what actions are most common on your pages, what pages are helping you achieve your goals, and which pages require more work.
Using Your Data
Some pages should be expected to generate a large number of bookings, while others may be expected to generate very few. For example, your rooms page should have a high rate of conversions (bookings), while a page about a nearby local attraction will probably have relatively few. You should have different expectations for each page; however, they can be broken down into categories to make these goals easier to organize. As you look at individual pages and consider what actions you want users to take, consider how these actions contribute to your overall goal of reserving more rooms.
Some ideas you will want to consider as goals for your page can (and should) include:
