So, you’ve just launched a new website for your hotel. It looks good, it’s search engine optimised and everything is quick to load. The next step to take is analysing your website traffic!
Why do I need to do this?
Analysing your website traffic is beneficial for a handful of reasons. It will tell you who visited your website, how they arrived and which web pages they looked at (and for how long).
And with this information, you can learn more about your audience, improve weak areas of your website, identify your most engaging content and more - helping you to further increase traffic and drive more direct bookings.
But don’t fret if you’re a beginner. Down below is everything you need to give it a go.
Understanding Website Metrics
Before you set up an analytics tool on your website, it’s important to understand a few of the key metrics to look at.
Traffic
Traffic is an “umbrella” metric which, of course, shows how much overall traffic your website is getting. It goes without saying that you’ll want to see this data on a constant rise.
Users, Sessions, Pageviews
Users are the number of website visitors. Sessions are the duration of a user’s visit. And page views are the total number of visits (or clicks) a user makes to any given web page. Aside from general traffic, these metrics represent visitor engagement.
Conversion Rate
When a user completes an action that you want them to take, such as subscribing to your email list or making a booking, that’s a conversion. The higher your conversion rate, the better!
Bounce Rate
When a user visits your website and leaves within a short time, it's known as a bounce. In general, a high bounce rate means your website isn’t performing too well.
Google Analytics
Now that you know a few important metrics, here’s how you can set up analytics on your hotel website.
Google Analytics is the most popular website analytics tool around. It’s free and also ideal for hoteliers looking to analyse website traffic for the first time.
To set it up, it’s a matter of creating a Google Analytics account, adding a property (your website) from the Admin page, clicking data stream, then copying and pasting the Analytics tag (a small piece of code) into the HTML of any web page you want to analyse.
From the Admin page, you will be able to see the above metrics and more.
Analyse Your Website to Improve Your Website
Once you’ve set an analytics tool like Google Analytics, you can then start to monitor your website’s performance.
You can check your metrics daily or weekly, create goals or collect your data in spreadsheets, making note of your user demographics, underperforming web pages, bounce rates, conversions and more.
The main takeaway here is that once you know your website’s weak points, you can then take the right steps to adjust and improve them.
Do you analyse your hotel’s website traffic? Let us know in the comments below!
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