We live in an age where we know more about our hospitality customers than ever before.
The question is, how well are you actually using the data available to offer proper incentives to your customers? How often have you seen offers for a hotel you were interested in booking, but found that none of the offers were actually relevant to you?
Google Analytics is, of course, a great data source and can provide a wealth of knowledge, if you are able to navigate the information correctly. Marketing teams should work with their digital partners to become extremely familiar with the personas, behaviors and booking trends of their guests.
Top Three Analytics Reports to Start Getting to Know Your Guests
1. Transactions Reports
Found under Conversions > Ecommerce, your transaction history can be the most informative data to improve your current conversion rates.
While most hospitality marketers are already monitoring bookings, there are properties that continue to promote packages that don’t align with what the data is telling them.
We’ve seen specific instances where a 30% off a stay of 7 nights or more, advertised by PPC efforts, was prominently displayed across a site. If your Analytics tracking is properly set up, the Transaction report can tell you how many nights each booking was for. When looking deeper into the rooms nights, in this case, we saw that only three guests stayed long enough to be eligible for this package.
Using the data we had readily available, we were able to inform the client, make the necessary adjustments and optimize the campaigns and site for their specific guests.
2. Audience Reports
Perhaps Google Analytics most informative reports are its Audience reports. These reports include demographics, like age and gender, interest categories, location and much more. Smart marketers won’t stop at the surface level data, though.
