Even after you have worked hard on search engine optimisation (SEO) at your hotel, you must run periodic analysis to track improvements. But with so much data available when analysing your hotel’s website statistics, it’s easy to focus too much on just conversion rates and hotel sales figures.
Understanding the importance of each data set can be challenging when you’re trying to gain valuable insight. To help with this task, here are some important metrics – that are sometimes overlooked – to give you crucial information about your website performance.
Hotel website conversion metric #1
Track your high traffic web pages
A good first step is to find out what your most popular website landing pages are – first impressions last! You want the highest ranking pages to be as attractive as possible, with relevant content for your prospective hotel guests and a clear call to action.
Think of your landing pages as your first job interview. If it’s interesting enough guests will check out other pages, if not you’ll lose them right there and then. If one of your most visited landing pages is your home page, make sure you provide enough information about your property such as star rating, location, property images, services offered, options to book now, and anything else that can showcase your hotel.
Hotel website conversion metric #2
Acquire actionable data from exit pages
As important as understanding where your traffic lands on your website is, you must know at what point you’re losing traffic too. Exit page statistics are very useful in finding key areas of improvement on your website.
For instance, it’s a bad sign if travellers are exiting from a page that’s involved in the your hotel’s booking process. Your website should be easy to navigate and give your guests flexibility to explore, it should also give them clear instruction and call to actions throughout your pages – leave no room for doubt.
Make sure your high ranking exit page has this covered. If the content is irrelevant or if you have any technical issues, such as broken links, review the overall online experience for this page and adjust what is necessary.
Hotel website conversion metric #3
Maximise engagement on your website
When it comes to online traffic, focus on quality over quantity. ‘Bounce Rate’ is an essential metric to analyse your traffic quality and engagement levels.
You can measure the percentage of visits in which the user had no interaction with the page and left the website. A number of factors can affect your bounce rates, so take some time to analyse where the traffic is coming from.
If you find you’re running a hotel marketing campaign with high bounce rates, check that the landing page has relevance to your campaign, and that your audience segmentation is correct, as you may be delivering paid advertising or emails to the wrong people.
Hotel website conversion metric #4
Zero in on your hotel’s target markets
One of the most useful pieces of information when analysing your website statistics is your ‘Audience Geographic Localisation’ report, which takes into consideration your visitors’ IP addresses.
Cross-checking this data with other metrics will give you powerful insights and could identify potential new markets to invest marketing dollars in.
Try to identify untapped markets with higher conversion rates and lower traffic rates, and target this market during your hotel’s next online campaign.
Also check for areas of your website with higher traffic and below average conversion or high bounce rates and investigate areas for improvement in this region, for example; content translation.
Now you have more tools to master your website SEO. Be conscious about the necessity of constantly analysing your data in order to improve your overall website quality. Dedicate time to frequently review the metrics and reports and to make updates when necessary.
