Google Analytics is a tool that’s often spoken about in digital marketing, and worth being in the know about for any hotelier who wants to build a high-converting website. In this article we break it down for hoteliers interested in learning the basics of Google Analytics.
What Is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a freemium service provided by Google to allow website owners to track the performance of their website. The software includes metrics and graphs to visually represent the health of your website. Some metrics you can track include visitors, language of visitors, geographic location, system type (e.g. Mac vs PC vs Android) and device type (e.g. desktop vs. mobile).
For casual users, the most relevant data is available in your dashboard. This includes things such as number of new vs. returning visitors, bounce rate, and average session duration.
But what do all these really mean? And how can they be used to better understand the performance of your hotel website?
Let’s go through what each dashboard metric in more detail.
The Main Metrics
Sessions:
A session is a period of time where someone is actively engaged on your website on any given platform. A session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity, or at the end of the day. Sessions as a metric by itself, will not reveal much of how your business is doing, but it will tell you how well your website is reaching people (a higher number is always better, because it means your site is being found). Sessions is also a great number to compare against other numbers, like users for instance, where you can figure out how many times on average you users are accessing your site within a given time frame.
The sessions number can be segmented based on where visitors came from (e.g. a Facebook post, organic search, or direct traffic). This more detailed information can be found under the “Acquisition” tab.
By knowing where your customers are coming from, you can ascertain which platforms your digital marketing efforts are working best to drive traffic to your website.
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