If your hotel website is an important component of your marketing strategy, then website analysis is necessary for you. If you see your virtual presence as a great avenue to attract guests to your resort, then you should invest time in analysing your website to deliver your desired results. Website analytics tools can be used to spot potential growth, determine needed improvements for efficiency, draw attention to potential website problems, and point out what went wrong. 
To market your website successfully you have to constantly refine and optimise your Internet marketing approach, website navigation, and page content (of course you have to develop your offline marketing and communications approach). Failing to do so will weaken your return on investment (ROI) and your brand. Still, it is necessary for you to know what and why a web feature is performing poorly. You have to figure out if the targeting of your marketing campaign is inadequate, why there are poor review, or how your website’s ability to convert once a visitor arrives is ineffective. Web analytics can help you with answering these questions and more. It provides you with the tools for gathering this information and enables you to aim your desired effects.
How Web Analytics Helps You Understand Your Web Traffic
Understanding your web traffic will aid your hotel to grow your business, improve efficiency, and reduce costs. Even though at first viewing 100-plus analytics reports can be very overwhelming – there is tons of information to consume in just one sitting. Although all of this information is relevant, there are some that is more relevant for your hotels’ business/marketing model. Evaluating your website using analytics software provides numerous amount of data for your business such as visitor volumes, top referrers, the time online visitors go to the site and depth on site to conversion rates, page stickiness, visitor inactivity, frequency, revenue, and geographic distribution.
As soon as there are online visitors at your hotel website, you will want to learn the reasons why those visitors are at your website. To aid you in filtering the visitor info you want, you can set-up Google Analytics to report on your desired data. So, it is vital to identify your goals even before you start constructing your website or at least before you redesign your website or your marketing plan. This way you can define or redefine your success.
Regarding your goal conversions as specific, timely, measurable actions that you want your web visitors to achieve before they leave your hotels’ website. For instance, just like any aim of a tourism e-commerce website is the conclusion of transaction or simply put: reservation. Although not every visitor will end up booking your resort, another goal of e-commerce that might be significant is to count the number of online visitors who begin the reservation process.
So you don’t have to wait until the end of the month to review your web analytics report. Otherwise, you may end up loosing your chances on converting your potential clients to hotel guests and waste your paid-search ads. Through regular monitoring and evaluating your web analytics you can acquire full potential of this effective tool.
Web Analytics Can Help You Make Informed Decisions
Knowledge without action is meaningless. Web analytics was designed to provide you with the know-how to help you decide what to do when you want to change your online strategy. It can help you with, for example, determining if your blog visitors have a tendency to link to it making a positive impact on your web reach and conversions, which online marketing strategy work best and to what extent can it be enhanced, whether the site search is a valuable investment or not, or if overseas visitors can be pulled with localised content or not.
Change is inevitable even in web analytics. Even if you know what to change but did not do anything about it - it’s all for naught. At this point, redesigning your website’ functionalities or your marketing strategy is a vital strategic change. Theoretically it sounds easy, though particularly for large organisations implementing changes such as these would require a lot of labour that it becomes a project in itself. In view of that, it would be beneficial to ensure that you have buy-in from the start or else you’ll end up frustrated with your wasted efforts.
The ROI of Web Analytics
Also, the return on investment (ROI) of web analytics will help you know how much time and effort to spend in web analytics, without disregarding your business objectives. By focusing on metrics for your website you can understand your web traffic, implement a tailored marketing strategy and respond to the needs of your guests. Not only that, web analytics can be integrated to your organisation, this way measuring organisational performance is on the same stream.
Remember that web analytics are merely tools and not the ultimate ends. The analytics can’t tell you why online visitors behave the way they do or what changes you should implement to upgrade your homepage. And to backup analytics’ results, try to use voice-of-customer tools such as blog comments, social network mentions, surveys, client ratings, and feedback.
