Digital Degrees of Success Analytics Strategies
Google Analytics is free. It’s simple to install and simple to use. You can even set up dashboards that pull all of the complex metrics together into one spot for ease of use. Not using Google Analytics or another analytics program to understand how visitors are reaching your website is a big mistake. In most cases Hotels receive 80-90% of their ‘new visitors’ from search engines.
That means that you should know exactly which keywords are being searched when customers arrive to your website. Furthermore, you should know which pages they arrive to and, you should also know if visitors are spending time on the site or bouncing off. These are all important factors because they can help you understand if your site is optimized for the right keywords and, more importantly, if the content and experience meets their needs as customers.
Solution
Spend a few days reading through Avinash Kaushik’s website, he is Google’s Analytics evangelist. He has excellent posts about basic analytics, but also includes some pretty technical tricks to get the right data that you’re looking for out of Google Analytics. Once you’ve done that and have a good understanding of the type of metrics that you can get in Google Analytics – back out your priorities. If you care about the amount of money being generated through non-branded organic traffic, you can create a custom report in Google Analytics to show you this information on a monthly or weekly basis.