When it comes to hotel marketing, vanity metrics are numbers that make you look good, but don’t really say much or contribute to your bottom line. Common examples in online marketing include things like page views and number of followers.
The trouble with vanity metrics is they can be easily distorted and manipulated, making it seem like your hotel is performing better than it actually is. This can throw off your whole marketing strategy, leading you to overestimate the impact of certain strategies, and under-invest where attention is really needed.
We polled our web agency and digital marketing team for the most common vanity metrics found in hotel marketing, along with some “actionable alternatives” that hotels should be paying attention to instead.
Website Metrics
1. Vanity Metric: Percentage Bounce Rate
Bounce rates tell you the percentage of people that visited your website and left after visiting the first page they landed on. So high bounce rates would seem to be cause for concern—except that high bounce rates are not always a bad thing.
If a consumer “bounces” after the first page on your website, they might simply have found all the information they were looking for. Also, the page might be receiving irrelevant traffic (not a bad thing in itself) that could skew the figures. Likewise, low bounce rates might indicate people are browsing your site but not finding what they’re looking for.
Relying too heavily on this metric can lead you to draw false conclusions and miss the potentially more subtle user behavior going on.
Actionable Metric: Google’s Behavior Flow Report
In the interests of really understanding user behavior, Google’s Behavior Flow is a great option. It shows you how visitors navigate and engage with your website via a visualized report, giving you a deeper understanding of which elements of your website are engaging visitors, and which aren’t.
By seeing the friction points that might be losing you business, you can tinker (or completely overhaul) the specific areas of your site to improve user experience and increase conversions.
