Having an accurate conversion rate and understanding of your website traffic is important for all e-commerce businesses, including hotels.
NB: This is an article from Hotelchamp
For many hotels, their team use the website to check information or updates. In some cases, this can have a significant impact on the accuracy of the actual website conversion rate and your reporting. A simple fix for this is to exclude the hotel office IP address from your hotel’s Google Analytics.
Why is it important to exclude your hotel office IP address?
- So that your internal website traffic isn’t impacting your conversion rate.
- Properly understand how long visitors spend on the website and where visitors are leaving the funnel.
- An accurate conversion rate means you can make better decisions for improving the messaging and offers on your website.
- The hotel team can feel like they can check the website without influencing the hotel results.
- Not everyone understands that their internal use of the website has an impact on the hotel reporting (including the reporting on Hotelchamp tool click-through and conversion rates).
How to exclude your hotel’s IP address from your Google Analytics
To follow these simple steps, you will need to have edit access for the ‘View’ that you would like to make a change to.
1. Go to ‘Admin’ settings in GA.
2. Select ‘Filters’ in the ‘View’ column (if you don’t have the right access, this won’t be accessible to you).
3. Click the ‘+ADD FILTER’ button.
4. Give your filter a clear name. For example, ‘IP Address Exclusion’.
5. Select the following options under ‘Filter Type’.
- ‘Predefined’ (this will automatically be highlighted)
- Filter type ‘Excludes’
- Select source or destination ‘traffic from the IP addresses’
- Select expression ‘that are equal to’
6. Add the IP Address into the ‘IP Address’ field that appears.
7. Save your new IP Address filter. Once you click ‘Save’ this filter will be applied to your Google Analytics View.
⚠️ It’s important to know that changes like this aren’t retroactive—they will only apply to the new data from the point that you make the change. When you are looking at your reporting going forward, you may notice a difference in traffic and sessions because of the new filter applied.
Having accurate data is an important part of making good decisions when it comes to your e-commerce and hotel marketing. Excluding your hotel office IP address is a good way to ensure that your own website data reflects what is actually happening on your website.
