Last month, we launched a post to help hotels diagnose traffic drops on their websites. We looked at how to pinpoint a drop in a traffic, isolate the channel(s) where the drop occurred, eliminate other possibilities for the drop, and diagnose ‘bad data’ in Google Analytics.
In the second of this two-post series, we’ll be showing you how to determine why your channels might have dropped in four key areas: organic traffic, paid search traffic, referral traffic, and social traffic.
While it isn’t an exhaustive list, the following guide can be used as an invaluable initial resource.
1. Organic traffic drops
From the organic channel, open the landing pages report to see exactly where the decline happened. Ensure you’ve chosen the year-over-year (YOY) data comparison and selected the relevant period of the drop.
This analysis will show which page received the biggest drop in traffic. Perhaps there was a specific blog post that received a huge amount of traffic last year, causing the drop in YOY visits. In this case, it shouldn’t be a big concern unless it was impacting bookings or other business metrics.
Often, a drop in organic landing page visits will be to your homepage. The reason for this is harder to pinpoint, but 90% of the time, the decrease in traffic to the homepage is due to a dip in searches for your hotel’s brand name. This is often symptomatic of a larger, underlying marketing or positioning issue.
A note on declines in branded searches for your hotel
Branded searches might drop because of a previous major event or marketing push. This may have led to an abnormal surge in people searching for your hotel name.
From Google Trends data, we saw that branded search volume for The Lowry Hotel rose to an unprecedented level in December of last year. In actual fact, the hotel was featured heavily in the news, as former Manchester United manager Jose Mourinho had been living in the hotel – and left his position at the football club. Future analytics data will likely always be down (at least in the visits/sessions metrics) when being comparing to this abnormal period.
Alternatively, it might be that an OTA or your own hotel started running paid search ads, bidding heavily on branded search terms and cannibalizing some of your organic traffic (which isn’t a bad thing — PPC ads are still essential for brand protection).
The most likely reason for a decline in branded searches is that a hotel’s position on an OTA such as Expedia, Booking.com, or even TripAdvisor has dropped.
2. Google Search Console
If you want to confirm where the drop occurred based on the keywords you’re using, your best tool is Google Search Console. Once you’ve opened up Google Search Console, navigate to the Property setup for your website and open the specific date range as required.
