In our prior post on Measuring Social Media Impact we briefly mentioned Multi Channel Funnels and promised to discuss them soon. This post will discuss Multi Channel Funnels and what they can tell innkeepers about reservation sources.

What are Multi Channel Funnels?

Nevertheless, we in the B&B industry know that nearly all visitors make multiple visits to your website (as well as other sites) before booking. Google knows that, too, and, in August, 2011, released Multi Channel Funnels (sometimes known as MCF) to help identify the sources that contribute to a goal conversion. In the B&B industry, a product has existed to record these visits for quite some time: Intell-A-Keeper, from Acorn IS provides similar information about multiple sources contributing to a booking.

When discussing Multi-Channel Funnels, we speak of conversions (that is, a visitor having completed a goal you have set up), rather than bookings, because Multi-Channel Funnels are based on Goals (and you must have at least one goal set up in Google Analytics to use Multi-Channel Funnels). In addition to having a Goal for an online booking, Multi-Channel Funnels can also use Ecommerce Transactions as Goals.

What Can I Learn from MCF Reports?

There are five new reports that use MCF. To find them, use the left side navigation to go to Conversions -> Multi-Channel Funnels, where you’ll find:

1. Overview
2. Assisted Conversions
3. Top Conversion Paths
4. Time Lag
5. Path Length

The Overview page shows Total Conversions (including conversions that would not qualify as MCF conversions, because GA sees only one referral leading to the conversion), Assisted Conversions (where multiple sources produced visits leading to a conversion), and a “Conversion Visualizer” – a Venn diagram of overlapping circles, showing the separate conversion rates of different channels, and the overlap showing where there are assisted conversions.

The Assisted Conversions report groups channels in familiar GA groups – Organic search, Referral, Direct, etc.

The Top Conversion Paths report shows the sequence of channels leading to a conversion (from Organic to Direct, for example).

The Time Lag report shows the length of time from the first visit to the conversion (currently limited to 30 days – if the time span is longer, the report will not include earlier visits).

The Path Length report shows the number of visits from different channels leading to a conversion.

Putting MCF to Good Use

For smaller properties, as is often the case with GA reporting, there may not be enough traffic in the default time frame of one month to get meaningful information. The simple way to increase the amount of information is to select a longer time, by going to the top of your analytics and using the pull-down arrow to select a longer date range. You could try a year, or several months, for example.

One of the most useful reports for innkeepers will be the Assisted Conversions report. After selecting that report (Conversions -> Multi-Channel Funnels -> Assisted Conversions), click on the colored Referral line under Basic Channel Grouping. By default the resulting list is sorted by the number of assisted conversions participated in by each referral source. There are two other very interesting pieces of information here.

Recall that the number of Assisted Conversions for a referral source is the number of conversions this source participated in (where there were other referral sources also). The first additional piece of information is the number of Last Interaction Conversions. These are conversions where this source was the last referral source before the conversion. GA seems to consider these “closers” – sources that close the transaction.

The second piece of information is the last column on the right – the Assisted/Last Interaction Conversions. This column represents the ratio of Assisted Conversions to Last Interaction Conversions. This provides some interesting insights. If this ratio is less than 1, the referral source is a “closer” – one that is more often the Last Interaction source. If the ratio is greater than 1, the source is an awareness generator. A ratio of 1 indicates a source that plays both roles.

Armed with this information, we are in a much better position to consider whether a particular source (let’s say a B&B directory) is sending us visitors who book, than by simply using the number of visitors from that source in the All Traffic or Referrals reports, or by relying only on the Ecommerce or Goals data. We may find that a directory we thought wasn’t producing bookings is in fact acting as an awareness generator, even though other sources send the Last Interaction.

In a similar way, we can examine the Path Length report to see that, while (in this example) 43.7% of visitors convert (book) in one visit (but see below for qualification of this), but that means that 56.3% are coming from multiple sources on multiple visits. That, alone, should make us pause before we draw conclusions about the value of a referral source only from the number of visitors it sends.

Creating Custom Channel Groupings

The MCF reports also allow you to create your own custom channel groupings. We’ll post about that in the future. However, if you’re not happy with the default groupings, there are tutorials to create your own here and here.

Some Words of Caution

Because the reports we get from GA (or any other source) are only as good as the data they rely upon, they are necessarily imperfect. For some kinds of information, such as the reports discussed in this post, MCF reports are a great improvement over straight Referral or Goal Conversion (or even Ecommerce) reports. However, they remain imperfect.

For one thing, as mentioned above, the data is currently only considered if it is within the past 30 days. If a visitor books, but their first visit was 31 days (or more) earlier, that first visit (or visits) will not be included. For another, many people use multiple devices to search, so the cookies that GA relies on actually reside on more than one device, and GA has no way to identify which belong to the same visitor and aggregate them. To be fair, we know of no stats package that can successfully track a visitor who is using multiple devices, without requiring that the visitor sign in every time they visit the website.

Imperfect though the information from the MCF reports may be, in many ways it is a great improvement over simple referral and conversion information. It certainly adds more and valuable information to the decision to use, retain, or quit a particular referral source.

A month ago Google’s Analytics blog announced new social media reports in Google Analytics. Last week they discussed how to use them, and analytics experts have been posting similar articles ever since.

If you’re thinking this is the same “Social” report that measured “Engagement” and similar items (under the Audience tab in the new Google Analytics), it is not. This is an entirely new section, located under the Traffic Sources section, and has far more information (and more useful information) than the Social reports in the Audience section.

Social Impact on Conversions

Possibly the most valuable aspect of the new Social reports is the connection to conversions. In order to gain any useful information, you must have Goals set up (you can find the steps to set up Analytics Goals here). Once set up, and data is being gathered, you’ll be able to see three values:

1. Conversions (all conversions)
2. Assisted Social Conversions (conversions where a social source can be said to be partially responsible for the conversion
3. Last Interaction Social Conversions (where the last referral of the conversion came from a social source)

This is fundamentally an effort to use analytics to give monetary value to social referrals. It is similar to the Multi-Channel Funnels analysis in the Conversions report (more on that in a later post), in attempting to go beyond the historic limitation of Google Analytics in giving the “last click” referral source all credit for the conversion. We understand that our guests usually visit more than one site (directory, search engine, review site, social site, etc.) before booking, so this is Google’s attempt to reflect the contribution of multiple sites to a single conversion.

What Do Social Visitors Do?

The Social Sources report shows you traffic volume by date (in the usual graph at the top of the report), plus each social referrer and the number of referrals.

In addition, the small icon of a network (two small circles, connected to a larger circle) is being used to show that the source is part of a Social Data Hub, allowing more information, including actual comments and shares of your content on social networks.

Social Plugins

The Social Plugins report is designed to show you how many people are clicking your social sharing buttons (your Facebook “Like” button, Google+ share or +1 buttons, Tweet buttons, etc.).

Some observations

Businesses, seeking to determine the value of social media (if any), as well as analytics experts, have been clamoring for a way to measure the impact of social media for several years. While these reports are a big improvement over the previous Audience > Social reports, they are new, and are likely to be tweaked and improved over time.

For large sites, especially sites with a lot of social sharing, these reports will be very gratefully received. For smaller sites, with fewer active sharers, the primary value lies in the conversion reports and the referral source reports, rather than the social plugins.

We are certainly glad to see these improvements, and strongly suggest that, if you have not set up Goals in your Analytics, that you do so immediately, so you can take advantage of these new social reports.

Should your website or blog have a privacy policy? Why would you want to have one? Are there any laws that require a privacy policy? Do small businesses (like bed and breakfast inns) need a privacy policy? What should my privacy policy include?

Having a privacy policy is not something most small businesses think about when they think about content for their website. But should they? The short answer is yes.

Why have a privacy policy?

Image courtesy http://www.flickr.com/photos/mynetx/

1. US Efforts to Regulate Internet Content.

In the US legal arena, the federal government continues its efforts to regulate internet usage in a variety of ways. As these efforts continue to change, it would not be surprising to find that they result in either mandatory privacy policies, or provide additional protection for sites with privacy policies. If that should happen, having a reasonable and appropriate policy in place will be a very good thing.

2. Efforts to Regulate Internet Content by Other Countries.

Since many (perhaps most) B&B’s serve guests from other countries, and their websites are seen in other countries, the laws of those regions or countries may come into play if you collect data (including booking information) from citizens of those countries.

3. Privacy Expectations of Visitors.

Despite study after study showing that the majority of people using websites are concerned about their privacy to some degree, many websites do not have a privacy policy. Studies of the “Top 100 Websites” show as many as 97% having privacy policies, but larger studies of webistes conclude that as few as 2% have privacy policies.

Contrary to the statements of then 26-year old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that privacy is no longer a social norm, many disagree, and the survey information above sides with them – people do care about privacy.

Because of that, your privacy policy is a statement that gives people a reason to trust your company, trust your website, and trust you.

4. Agreements with Other Companies May Require a Privacy Policy

Even if none of the reasons above make you feel that a privacy policy is something you should have, your other business arrangements may compel you to have one. For example, Google’s Adsense terms of service require you to have a privacy policy. Others may have similar requirements.

In addition, some SEO consultants have stated that there is search engine value in having a privacy policy. One spoke of a client who removed their privacy policy falling noticeably in the search results, and climbing back up when the policy was restored.

If you need more persuading, simply search Why Have A Privacy Policy. In addition to lots of examples of real privacy policies, you’ll find dozens of articles giving many more reasons to have a privacy policy. You’ll find some of the best here, here and here.

Preparing Your Privacy Policy

Once again, search is your friend. There are many resources telling what items to include in your privacy policy, and even sites that will auto-generate a standard policy for you. Before completing your privacy policy, be sure to make sure it really applies to what you do on your website. Don’t just take the standard language and copy-and-paste it without changing anything.

Disclaimer: Although I was a lawyer for nearly 20 years, I am no longer practicing law, and am no longer a licensed attorney. Consequently, I am not attempting to provide legal advice to anyone in this (or any other) article. This article contains information I have located by my own search of the internet, and my only intent is to share the results of that research, and some of my own thoughts about it, with readers of this blog.

Recently we posted about a very significant decline in the amount of referral traffic we had observed coming from BBOnline.com. Several innkeepers posted in the comments, some noticing similar drops. Some, like ours, have been enormous, while others have been “only” 40-50% (during a time when referrals from most other directories have increased!). We have not heard from anyone who has observed anything other than a significant drop in referrals.

As we had mentioned, we had written to BBOnline to ask if they were aware of this, and if they were doing anything to rectify it. Since the article appeared we have received a reply, which scares us all the more.

Our original email to them was simply a report of our Analytics, showing the huge dropoff in referrals dating from the time of their website update (December 7, 2011), and asking if they were aware of it, and asking for assurance that they were working on a solution. Disappointingly, the reply was more notable for corporate sales-speak than for content.

BBOnline’s Response, Point-by-Point

1. We have taken many steps to improve the SEO of the site.

BBOnline states that their “brand new features”, constant changes of the way listings appear, and tracking of user behavior has improved the SEO. Wow, where do you start? It is true that many articles on SEO best practices will talk about keeping your content fresh, but other than that, where is the genuine SEO work? Are title and meta tags being optimized? Is there an effort at building quality inbound links? A quick search of “SEO best practices” or even “Getting started with SEO” reveals a huge resource of articles on steps to be taken other than “brand new features” and “constant changes”.

If BBOnline was a significant referral source for your property in the past, make sure you are not logged in to any Google service, then do a search for “bed and breakfast your area” and see where BBOnline.com comes up today. In the past, for our area, at least, they were usually right behind BedAndBreakfast.com. For us, they now come up after most of the individual properties, near the bottom of the first page.

2. We have asked numerous Bed and Breakfast Associations for suggestions.

I hope so, and I hope they have received good advice, and take it. During their “beta” for the new site design, last November, we received an email asking us to try the new owner’s management tools, and provide feedback. We tested things out, noted areas that were broken, and sent a lengthy and detailed email complimenting the good things and suggesting changes. We did not even receive the courtesy of an acknowledgement that the email had been received. We did not get the impression that feedback was welcomed.

3. Listing URL’s have changed, so statistics are inaccurate.

Wait, what? There are multiple problems with this comment. First, my (or your) Google Analytics report doesn’t care what URL on the BBOnline site sent the visitor – it just counts BBOnline.com as the source. So, while internal statistics on the new site may not be valid when compared to the old URLs, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the referrals we see on our sites. The biggest problem is that the URLs have changed, at all.

There is a good reason that one of the cardinal rules of updating a website is that you do not change the page URL unless it is absolutely necessary. Every page that has been indexed carries with it some measure of page authority. Although Google discourages using it today, Google Page Rank is a common and quick way of approximating the authority of a page. If you change the URL for a listing, any authority (Page Rank) of the old page vanishes and the new listing starts life with a page rank of zero. If you must change it, you should redirect the search engines to the new page in a way that preserves the page authority – usually with a 301 response code to tell the search engines the page has moved permanently to its new URL.

Did BBOnline put 301 redirects in place for all of its old URLs? Who knows? Unless you know the old URL for your listing, type it in your browser and watch to see that it is redirected to the new URL, you can’t verify whether there is a redirect in place or not.

4. You can add more content to your listing

Finally, the writer suggests we build the value of our listing page by adding more content. That is certainly a good suggestion. We will do so, and we suggest that anyone else dealing with this issue do so as well. However, adding good content to a page deep within the BBOnline architecture is not the solution to their visibility problem.

One Bright Shining Hope

Checking BBOnline in Compete (a search marketing competitive analysis tool) shows a significant uptick in traffic to BBOnline in the past month. While that is not yet matched by an increase in our GA referrals, which remain dismally low, perhaps there is a ray of hope here, since the uptick seems to be stronger for BBOnline than for its competing directories, indicating that this is more than just a seasonal improvement.

Let’s hope they are getting back on the right track, for the benefit of all their customers.

Some years ago we had a conversation with a BBOnline staffer who indicated that a website redesign was being planned, but it could be quite some time before it was completed. At the time, BBOnline was one of the most significant sources of traffic referrals to our Freeport Maine Bed & Breakfast, so we were anxious to see the site updated, and also to see some more modern features added, such as innkeepers uploading their own photos, changing their own text, etc. Be careful what you wish for.

A New Website

Last fall we received an email indicating that the site redesign was nearly complete, and inviting us to try out the “beta” version and provide feedback. Pleased that this was finally looking like a reality, we uploaded photos, changed text, and generally did most of the things other directories have allowed for years. There seemed to be a number of quirky features, and broken items, so we dutifully made a list and emailed it off, in hopes that the items could be corrected when the site was released.

The first clue that all was not well at BBOnline was when there was no response to our feedback email. Not even a “Thanks, we got your email.” Nothing. Oh, and when the site rolled out, most of the glitches we had identified were still there. Now that gives you a special feeling, doesn’t it?

Regular readers will know that we’re a bit committed to analytics (OK, obsessed, then!), so it will come as no surprise that we checked our analtyics about a month after receiving the December 7, 2011 email from BBOnline announcing that the new site had been rolled out, to see how the new site was doing. That was an eye-opener!

We were looking at maybe 5 referrals from BBOnline in a month. Now for some directories that has been the norm, but BBOnline has always been up near the top of our directories, with at least 10 times that many referrals in the off-season, and much more in the busy summer months.

So we took a look at some comparisons. First, we looked at the year to date (January, 2012 through March, 2012) compared to the same period of the year before. BBOnline’s referrals had dropped by 96%! Then we checked the past 12 months (April, 2011 – March, 2012) compared to the prior year. BBOnline had dropped only about 1%. In fact, looking at the calendar year 2011 compared with 2010, BBOnline’s referrals were up 20%.

Is the 1% drop OK?

Without knowing more, you might assume that a 1% drop is no big deal. In this case, at least, you would be wrong. According to the announcement from BBOnline, the website went live about December 7, 2011. That means that the loss of traffic in the last 3 weeks of the year was enough to drop the annual traffic by 1% over the year before.

Let’s put that in perspective. How did other directories do? Looking at the calendar year 2011, and comparing it to 2010, referral traffic from B&B directories, as a whole, was up nearly 80% in 2011 over 2010. BBOnline was up only 20%. Now, granted, if all directories went up 80%, some were higher and some were lower. But 20% is way behind the curve here.

It gets worse

What about 2012? For 2012 year to date (Jan 1, 2012 – April 8, 2012) compared to the same period a year ago, all the B&B directories were up 8.8%. BBOnline was down – by 95%!

Recalling that BBOnline announced the new site design on December 7, 2011, we checked the analytics from September, 2011, through early April, 2012. Since our season winds down in late October, we expect a significant decline as we move into November and December, and that is what we find. What we don’t expect is that at December 7 we hit bottom and stay there! But that is exactly what happened. While other directories picked up again after the first of the year, here we are in April and BBOnline is still floundering at the bottom, sending only a few visitors a month.

To be certain this wasn’t something only affecting our B&B, we checked and found that several other innkeepers had complained of the same symptoms. We have attempted to contact BBOnline to see what can be done, but have not yet received a response. Other innkeepers have contacted them, have found them responsive, but no information or solution has yet been seen.

What could be causing this?

Without access to information behind the scenes at BBOnline, it is difficult to identify the cause (or causes). However, there are some observations that may provide clues. First, the pages of the new site seem to load quite slowly. That was our perception, and we verified it by running the site through a page speed analysis site. Trying several options, we found that the pages consistently took over 4 seconds to load, and sometimes as many as 6 seconds. By contrast, Google, the foremost advocate of improved page loading time, considers load times greater than 1.5 seconds to be slow.

Some have expressed the impression that users may find that searching for properties on the BBOnline site is confusing and difficult, and perhaps guests are simply moving on to another directory. That certainly seems like a possible explanation for some of the decline. Trying to search like a consumer, the first steps were simple and straightforward, but changing the location to a nearby area, not listed by BBOnline as a nearby area, proved to be quite difficult without returning to the home page to start over.

Another possibility is that they didn’t take precautions with the new site design to make sure to minimize the SEO impact of the changes.

There are also technical issues that could be preventing us from seeing visits from BBOnline in our analytics reports. While that seems unlikely, we can’t rule it out without information from inside BBOnline.

Whatever the cause, we certainly hope that BBOnline will be able to resolve this, and quickly!

At the Google Analytics sessions at the PAII conference in Little Rock this year, as well as in some online discussions on the PAII Forum (and elsewhere), innkeepers have occasionally commented that they feel they “have to” use Google Analytics, but they really don’t want to use it. This post reviews some of the complaints and gives (sometimes tongue-in-cheek) thoughts about them. Throughout the post, we’ll be looking only at the “New” Google Analytics interface (the one with the orange bar running across the top of the page, below the Google Analtyics logo.

Here, in no particular order, are some reasons not to use Google Analytics (GA):

1. The older, simpler tools, give me all I need

The inherent inaccuracy of hit counters led to widespread use of statistics programs such as Webalyzer and Awestats, getting their information from the web server’s log files, instead of counting each page load. These provided a good deal more information on where people had come to the site from (the referer – spelled incorrectly with only one “f” for historical reasons), the number of visitors from a particular source, etc.

While these programs provided much more information, and more useful information, than a hit counter, they were notoriously inaccurate (if you ever tried comparing the results from one such program to another, you’ll know what I mean). Some folks just wanted more reliable information, others wanted more details and flexibility, as well. From a desire to fulfill these requirements, today’s analytics programs were born, using more sophisticated techniques to capture the actions of visitors on a site. They’re not perfectly accurate, either, but they are much more accurate than the log-based programs, and are far more powerful and flexible, as well.

So, while you may feel that you get all you need from log-based stats programs, you should know that your information can be more accurate and more complete. In other words, you can get more reliable information than that. Why wouldn’t you want more reliable information? Of course, there are other analytics programs in addition to Google Analytics, but since GA is free, readily available, and gets data directly from Google, it is a pretty reasonable choice.

2. Google Analytics is difficult to set up

Since there is no setup (for you – though there is setup for your web hosting company) for log-based stats programs, there is a little more for Google Analytics (GA), but not much more. Here are the steps from the Google Analytics Help documents:

1. Sign up for an Analytics Account (if you already have an account, you’re one step ahead)
2. Add your web property to the account
3. Set up at least one profile for the web property
4. Optionally, add additional users to the profile
5. Add the Analytics tracking code to the pages that make up your web property

The only step that should take more than just a couple of minutes is the last one. If you have access to your web pages, you can just cut-and-paste the code GA provides into every page you want to track. If you don’t have access to your pages, whoever does host or design your pages can cut-and-paste for you.

Of course, if you want to take advantage of some features, like ecommerce tracking, or tracking a user through to your booking engine, you may need to tweak the GA code a bit. The GA Help pages make it fairly easy, but some may need a bit of help with that part.

3. The GA interface is confusing

OK, you’ve got me there. By making GA extremely powerful, Google has also made it less intuitive than a simpler program would be. But why give up, just because the interface is a bit intimidating? We’ve all encountered new software at some point, and surely some of it wasn’t easy to use, at first.

Here’s a simple primer. Once you select the Profile and website for which you’d like to see the information, across the orange bar you’ll see Home, Standard Reporting, and Custom Reports. Home tends to give “overview” types of information. Standard Reporting, as its name indicates, gives standard reports that Google thinks will be helpful to you (though you can now customize the Standard reports if you like). Custom Reports are, as you would guess, not standard, and they are either reports you create, or reports you have imported from someone else (for example, the custom report we supplied with the earlier post, Google Analytics – Beyond the Basics.

In each of the three sections (Home, Standard Reports and, Custom Reports), you can navigate further using the links on the left side. In the Home section, you can see Real Time (currently a beta feature) where you can see people actually on your web site, the pages they are looking at, where they came from (both geographically and by referer), etc., Intelligence Events, where GA identifies events that are outside the norm for your site – higher or lower numbers of pages or visitors, time on site, etc., and Dashboards. More about Dashboards below.

In the Standard Reports section, think of the navigation along the left side as dealing, in a general way, with three concepts: Acquisition (how the visitor came to your site), Behavior (what they did while visiting your site) and Conclusions (this could be conversions, if you have Goals or Ecommerce set up, but could also be social shares, or other events). In a general sense, the Advertising (if you use advertising) and Traffic Sources show you the Acquisition information, the Content section shows Behavior, and the Conversions section shows Conclusions. Still, every report has features you can use that will make that report show information from each concept (Acquisition, Behavior, Conclusions), but that just makes GA more powerful.

In the Custom Reports section, the left navigation simply lets you select a custom report to view.

4. I don’t understand the GA terminology

There is no question that not understanding terminology can be a real barrier to using software. On the other hand, since GA is such a powerful tool, a good number of its users are industry professionals, who expect it to use the proper terminology.

The easiest way to learn the terminology is the play with your GA reports – explore them! When you find a term you’re uncertain about, go to the bottom of the left column where you’ll find a link to the Help Center, and below it a search box. Enter the term in that search box, and the area will be filled with links to articles dealing with that term. A glance through them will help you understand the terms. For example, if you’re uncertain about the meaning of the column in many reports called “Bounce Rate” enter “Bounce Rate” in the search box. The first item is a link to “Bounce Rate”. Clicking it brings up a new window with a definition and explanation of Bounce Rate.

5. GA is too complicated

The appearance of being complicated comes from the high number of “moving parts” in GA – the number of drop-down menus, unfamiliar terminology (see above), and ways to make small, but often important, changes to reports to get different results.

6. It’s hard to know which GA report(s) to look at

Resolving this issue is just like the one above – the easiest way to approach it is the work through the Standard Reports, and see what they can do. As you become familiar with them, especially if you think of them as providing information about Acquisition, Behavior and Conclusions, you’ll begin to know where to look for something specific that you’re interested in finding. If you are looking for some specific measurements that are generic (that is, things like average time on a page) rather than industry-specific (like visits from a particular directory), you can also enter it in the search box at the bottom left to try to locate specific information on it.

7. GA shows too much information

The complaint of too much information is an interesting one – this is, after all, one of the reasons analytics programs were developed – the previous types of statistics programs didn’t provide enough information.

In any event, you can filter the volume of information in several different ways. First, once you identify the reports that are of interest to you, you can simply go to those and ignore the others until you need them. Second, you can create a Custom Report that has only what you need, and simply rely on it. Third, you can set up your own Dashboard to reflect summaries of information in widgets with graphs, pie charts, and data, so you get an “at-a-glance” view of the information.

8. It takes too long to read through all the GA reports

Of course, you’ll recognize that this is simply a variation of items 7 and 8, above. Once you become familiar with the reports, you can focus on the ones you really care about, or you can simplify it in a Dashboard (you can even have multiple Dashboards for different information sets) so you can quickly see what you need.

9. All I care about is which directories send me traffic

You do know that getting traffic from a directory doesn’t always mean you are getting bookings from them, right?

What you want is “qualified” traffic from a directory – that is, visitors who book, and when they don’t book, at least they are spending significant time on your site, and viewing both a reasonable number of pages, and the right pages (you want them looking over your rooms, your breakfast, etc., rather than glancing at your “things to do in the area” page and going on to somewhere else).

Your old fashioned stats program can’t tell you those things.

10. I don’t want to know if something on my website isn’t working

Truth be told, no one has actually said that, but not using an analytics program like GA is tantamount to making that choice.

Here’s an example – a couple of years ago, just before our busy season when there are usually a lot of visitors on our website, our GA Traffic Sources stats showed a big drop in traffic. What was going on? GA to the rescue! By digging through the reports we realized that our traffic from Google Local had dropped to nothing. We checked our Local listing and found that Google had removed it (erroneously thinking there was a problem with it). We contacted Google Local and advised them of the problem. It took a couple of weeks, but the problem was fixed, and the traffic returned to normal.

If we hadn’t had an analytics program, we would almost certainly have noticed the decline in bookings, but would have had no idea why it was happening. We would not have been able to get a good idea of which source which had declined for weeks, or even months. The damage would have been far greater than it actually was.

In a similar way, the Keywords and Landing Pages reports can show how effective your SEO efforts are being. You can not only get before-and-after snapshots of traffic, but the Landing Pages, Search and Content Drilldown reports can help you see where visitors go on your site. Another fascinating report showing this information a bit more graphically is the new Visitors Flow report in the Audience area. Note that you can also use Advanced Segments or other metrics to change the results.

11. Bonus reason: I don’t want to know why my online visitors aren’t booking

Once again, not a real comment, but the result of not using a good, modern analytics program is that you will not be able to determine with any real confidence why you get visitors but few make reservations.

Your analytics program allows you to set up Goals (such as completed bookings), then to specify the steps in the “funnel” (the path a visitor must take to complete a booking). If you see that a large number of visitors enter the “funnel” but only a few book, you need to determine the step at which they are abandoning the funnel, and see if you can find out what there is about that step that causes them to leave. You can test different strategies and see what is most effective.

Any other reasons you wouldn’t want to use Google Analytics (or pay for something similar)?

We recently saw an innkeeper commenting that they were overwhelmed by all the things to look at in Google Analytics – too many choices, and no clear idea of which were the important things for them. When you can’t devote the day to studying the data, what do you really need to know, and how can you focus on that quickly and easily?

Google Analytics is a powerful tool – no question about it. However, everyone doesn’t have time to poke through its details on a regular basis, export all the info to spreadheets and then slice-and-dice the information. Today we’ll look at the essentials – the things that will give you an idea of how your website is performing, and suggest some ways to simplify your time with GA, by setting these things up, then simply checking them periodically.

1. What do we want to know?

What are we trying to learn from GA? Avinash Kaushik, author of two books on GA, and Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google, suggests you consider three elements: Acquisition, Behavior and Outcomes. Acquisition is the way the visitor came to your website. Behavior is what the visitor did after arriving at your website. Outcomes are the conversions, or other ultimate result of the visits.

• Acquisition: referral sources, search (organic vs. paid), campaigns, landing pages, cost of acquisition
• Behavior: time on the site, bounce rate, pages visited, path through the site, time on pages, checkout abandonment rate
• Outcomes: conversions (goals, ecommerce)

We’re going to use analytics for all three categories, but the shortcut will apply to the second (Behavior) and third (Outcomes), while we’ll need a bit more for the most important part of Acquisition (though we don’t need to do it too frequently).

For Acquisition you can obsess over referral rates from one directory or another, or whether a review site is sending visitors who bounce, and all of that is useful data, but without more information, we’re just guessing about their value. While you may want to keep an eye on such things, we’ll need a spreadsheet to get the additional information we need on Acquisition. Consequently, we’ll look first at Behavior, then Outcomes, then wrap up with Acquisition.

2. Behavior of Visitors

It is useful sometimes to see how page views have increased (or not) over time, or how time on site has changed over time, but neither of those, without more information, tells you what guests are doing. After all, they could open your site, walk away to answer the phone, and close the browser 10 minutes later without reading a line!

Instead, let’s look at Bounce Rate (visitors who never get past the first page) and Checkout Abandonment Rate (people who start into the booking process, only to leave without booking).

A. Bounce Rate

The Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page. Something caused them to decide that you were not the answer to their question. We’ll want to keep an eye on this figure, and use our keywords to see what keywords are bouncing, what landing pages have the highest bounce rate, etc.

B. Checkout Abandonment Rate

Google Analytics doesn’t calculate this for you automatically, but another free took, Paditrack, does. Create a free account, and authorize Paditrack to connect to your GA account, then create a conversion funnel that matches your checkout/booking path. If you’re not sure what that is, create a fictitious reservation, writing down the address of every page along the way, then enter those pages, one by one, into a funnel in Paditrack. Paditrack also allows you to quickly create reports by segments (using your GA segments), so for example you can see the conversion rates by directory or other referral source.

So what is the Checkout Abandonment Rate? The ratio of the number of people who entered the checkout process but didn’t complete it, to the total who entered the checkout process. In numbers, take the number of completed bookings and divide by the number who entered the booking process, and convert to a percent.

Paditrack makes that easy, by showing the conversion percent, so you can subtract that number from 100% to get the Checkout Abandonment Rate. There is no rule of thumb, but a 50% abandonment rate would be fairly common, and rates as high as 70% are not unusual.

3. Outcomes

Fundamentally, a small lodging property is about bookings, not about mailing list subscriptions and lead generation. Consequently, the main thing is the online booking. Set up a Goal for your booking, and set up ecommerce tracking (including both on your booking engine, as well). Then check your Ecommerce Overview page and either Paditrack or your Goals Overview page to keep an eye on the outcomes.

4. Acquisition Cost

As mentioned above, this one is a bit more complicated, just because GA doesn’t provide all the info we need. But once you set it up and save the spreadsheet file, you can repeat it as needed

Here’s the process to set it up:

1. In GA, go to your Traffic Sources -> Sources -> All Traffic report, then click on Ecommerce under the Explorer tab near the top.
2. Select the number of rows you want to display (10-25 is probably adequate, but see what that gets you, and if it doesn’t include referral sources that are important to you, increase the number to get them).
3. At the top of the page, click Export, and select the type of file you want to export (choose CSV if you’re not sure)
4. Save the file, then import it into a spreadsheet. Add a column for Cost, and then two more, one for Cost per Click and one for Cost per Acquisition
5. For any paid items, enter the cost in the Cost column. For items you don’t pay for, add a value for your time to manage them
6. In the Cost per Click column, enter a formula to divide the Cost by the number of Visits
7. In the Cost per Acquisition column, enter a formula to divide the Cost by the number of Transactions

Now you can see at a glance how much it is costing you to get a booking from any particular source. Keep in mind that this method is not 100% foolproof, as it doesn’t take into account phone or other reservation methods, and it is not taking into account booking sources that are not tracked by Google Analytics (for this purpose, GA usually tracks just the last referral source, so any prior referral sources are not included).

Mainstream news and social media blogs have been filled with articles on Facebook’s new Timeline for Brands (available now, but mandatory by the end of March, 2012). So why another article? This post is designed to provide a simple guide to the steps you need to take to get ready, and to do a good job of it, without getting bogged down with all the “nice to have” extras, or full feature lists, that others have reviewed. Let’s just keep it simple and do a nice, clean job of it. OK? Along the way we’ll provide occasional links to other posts with details you might like to try, but we won’t re-invent them here.

Getting Started

You can preview, and experiment a bit with the new timeline by clicking Preview when the opportunity comes up (when you log in as your Brand). Changes you make there will be visible to administrators, but not to anyone else (yet).

1. Cover Photo

The first thing to do is to add a “Cover Photo”, but before you do, there are a couple of “gotchas” to be aware of. You can upload a photo directly (but don’t do that until you read the rest of this paragraph). Most articles get excited about the dimensions of the cover photo (850×315 pixels), but frankly, Facebook will resize it for you, and you can move it around so it is cropped the way you want, so if it looks the way you want, that should take care of size. The more important thing is to NOT upload the photo right away. To get a better looking photo, upload it to one of your photo albums and be sure to mark that it is a high-res image, so you’ll get a better quality image. Then when you go to set your Cover Photo, select the new image from your photo album.

Facebook has rules about Cover Photos (don’t infringe copyrights, don’t advertise, don’t send people to your website). These are found on the Learn More page.

2. Links to your website

Previously links to your website were in the Info section or the Description box on the left of your Wall or in your Profile. Now the About box shows below the Cover Photo, and usually shows your business category, street address, city and phone numbers. Be careful, however, as a click on the business category or city will send the visitor to a City page, where they may well discover links to your competition. To some extent, this can be altered by removing the city (but not the street address or postal code) from your “Basic Information”. Note that there is no link to your website unless the visitor clicks on the About link.

On personal pages with the new timeline you can edit the About section and put your web address in the description. However, on a business page’s new timeline, you are limited to the information Facebook selects (business type, address, etc.). You can delete your phone number, which will result in the website appearing in the About section. That isn’t a very satisfactory solution, but it is clear that Facebook wants to keep visitors on the Facebook site, and not let them go to your website.

3. Changed App Appearance

Instead of a list of apps down the left side of the page, they are now smaller images below the Cover Photo, and to the right of the About section. The Photos app will not change, but you can control which of the other apps appear, and change their appearance, as well. To replace one app with another, click the down arrow next to the number (10 in the image at right), to see all the apps on your timeline. Click the Edit button and you can replace one of the existing apps with the one you select, so the apps you want to see displayed are actually displayed (after all, how often will visitors expand the apps to see what else you have for them to use?).

Be aware that if you display the Likes app, anyone(!) can click on it and see a portion of your insights for the page.

The new timeline does look significantly different than the old page. Consequently, if you have older apps (not built for the new timeline), you may not want to display them until they have been modified. First of all, they usually have buttons that will appear unattractive under your Cover Photo. Second, they are designed to fit a different size of page than is now available. While you can change the icon or button by clicking edit, then Change next to the image, and uploading your own image, the page size must be modified by the app developer.

This raises some doubt about the value of businesses who try to get you to use their app in order to attract your paying business for your website. Every time Facebook makes a change, like the new Timeline (or before that, removing the tabs that were once at the top of the pages), the app must be redesigned to work with the new Facebook layout.

4. Fill Out Your Timeline

The timeline allows you to put in information like “Started Business” or “Opened” along with narrative and a photo. Do it. Put in other milestones as well (you will not be able to add anything older than your “Opened” or “Started” date, so choose it wisely). To add milestones that are before the current date, create a post, preferably with a photo, and use the new Change Date feature to backdate the post. Repeat for all significant dates (See Ford Motor Company’s timeline, which goes back to 1903!).

5. Pinning and Highlighting

Taking a leaf from the Pinterest book, the new timeline allows you to Pin a post to the top of your timeline. Some have suggested using it to put a link to your website there, but we think you would be better off using it for special announcements. Highlighting a post causes it to stretch across the full width of both columns of the new timeline. Both of these features are activated by clicking the star in the upper right of a post and selecting the appropriate action.

6. Adding a Link to Your Website

The easiest way to add a link, if you have an old app on your page that you either aren’t using, or no longer need to use, is to edit it. Simply go to the new Admin Panel, then Manage Page and Edit Page, then Apps, find the app, and Go To App, then enter a link to your website (the proper HTML link, such as <a href=”http://www.brewsterhouse.com”>Visit our website</a> will do it. Save the app, and change the picture to something you like. It will be like the Visit our Website app on the image above.

If you don’t have an app available that you can use for this, you can always try adding an app, such as the Static HTML app, and putting your website link in that.

7. Other New Features

There are other new features, of course, but we started by saying this is a minimalist guide. Certainly there is the new messaging feature, or the fact that posts from apps are aggregated, and you may want them separated (see here for tips on how to do that). Mashable also has a guide that provides a number of links to other resources.

Overall, we think that many aspects of the new timeline for brands are good and useful. Like any tool, it takes some time to become familiar with it. Like anything from Facebook, so it seems, you should always expect it to change, and not always for the better.

As mentioned above, Facebook seems to have, as its objective, to keep your visitors inside the confines of its system. Consequently, you should both try to use that to your own advantage, by providing the information the visitor needs on your page, but also be aware that it may be challenging to get the visitor to leave Facebook for your website, even though you think it is very important to get them to do so.

If you’ve experimented with Google Analytics, you probably know you can set up and track Goals with it, but two things can make it challenging – (1) how to track goals from your site through the booking process, which usually takes place on a website managed by your booking software company, and (2) how to set up your goals so they are useful. Just to add to the confusion, Google has recently updated Analytics, changing the way you track from your site to the booking engine.

In this post, we’ll look at the way to install the Google Analytics (GA) code, and how to set up your goals to track your bookings.

Overview of Tracking from Your Site to the Booking Engine

If you don’t care how it works, you can just skip to the next section to begin putting it together.

In order to track the visitor through your site, to the booking system (and potentially back to your site again), you must set up the tracking code to allow the booking engine to be considered as if it was part of your site, and read the cookie even though it is technically another site.

Setting Up Tracking to Include Your Booking Engine

Previously Google had recommended using a line of code to tell GA to consider the two sites (yours and the booking engine) to both have access to the tracking cookie by setting the domain to “none”. GA has changed this, so that setting the domain name to “none” will now prevent a sub-domain (if the primary domain is www.abouttheinn.com, an example of a subdomain would be blog.abouttheinn.com) from accessing the cookie from the primary domain, unless you explicitly permit it. Consequently, you’ll want to use the newer approach.

1. Modify the GA code for your website

Basic GA tracking code for your website will look something like this (with the XXXXX-X section changed to reflect your GA ID):

<script type="text/javascript">

</script>

Don’t worry about the details, but if you’re interested a full explanation is in the GA Help documents.

In order to track the cookie from your site over to the booking engine site, you’ll want to modify a portion of your tracking code on your website to look like:

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'YOURWEBSITE.com']);
_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);


Then wherever you link to your booking engine, it needs the link code:

<a href="https://www.BOOKINGENGINE.com/AVAILABILITY.html"
onclick="_gaq.push(['_link', 'https://www.BOOKINGENGINE.com/AVAILABILITY.html']); return false;">Book Now</a>

There are basically two things you are changing. First, after the setAccount line, you add a line (setDomainName) to specify the domain name as your site, then add another line (setAllowLinker) to permit linking to another site. Second, wherever you link to the other site, you add the “onclick” JavaScript to pass the cookie to the site named (BOOKINGENGINE.com).

The first part gives permission to pass the cookie with a link. The second actually does it.

2. Modify the code on your booking engine

Some booking engines (notably the RezOvation GT booking engine, ResNexus, and probably others) will have made the changes for you, or will make them if you so request. Others, like Webervations, will provide a text field in a setup form where you can paste in your code. However it is done, the resulting code on the booking engines should look like this:

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'none']);
_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);

Actually, the key sections are setAccount, which must be set to your domain’s GA ID, and setAllowLinker, when set to “true” will allow you to track clicks back to your site. This code will allow the booking engine to use your tracking cookie for your transactions, but not for transactions by another lodging property. If your booking engine page has a link back to your site, the link should include the linker code:

<a href="www.YOURWEBSITE.com"
onclick="_gaq.push(['_link', 'www.YOURWEBSITE.com']); return false;">Return to Our Site</a>

Now that the website and booking engine tracking code is set up properly, we need to set up our goals.

Setting Up Your Completed Booking as a Goal

In your GA account (we’re using the “new” GA here, Google Analytics 5), click the little “gear” icon in the upper right, then click on the Goals tab. Next,

• Click on “Goal+” to add a new Goal.
• Give the goal a descriptive name, such as “Bookings”
• select URL Destination as the type.
• In the Goal URL box, enter the URL for the page you want to be the ultimate goal. For your booking engine, this should be the final page the visitor sees when the booking is complete. It may be a “Thank You” page, a Confirmation page, or something of that order. Do not include the domain, just the path to the final page. For example, we use the RezOvationGT Booking Engine, so our Goal URL is “/Reservations/ResConfirmation.aspx”. To find your Goal URL, try creating a test booking, and write down the URL’s of every page in the process.
• Optionally put in a Goal Value (this is not the same as ecommerce tracking, but lets you assign a value to the goal – so if you feel a booking is worth $200, then entering that here will give you an idea of the value of the booking goal, and allows you to approximate the value of a referral source, for example.
• The use of a Goal Funnel is optional, but we recommend using it. To do so, you need the URL’s you captured earlier, while making a test booking. Enter each one, one per line, as Steps in the Funnel. Do not make them Required, unless they actually are mandatory.
• Save your Goal, and wait for results (usually 24 hours)

Once you have data from your goals, you’ll be able to see the referral sources that have sent them, and other data that may be helpful to you.

Would you know if your site had been hacked? Could you restore it if it had been hacked? These three steps will help you prepare for the worst.

If you follow technology news, it seems that high-visibility websites are being compromised (hacked) with astonishing frequency. Even to the point where at least one hacker group is using the threat of its hacking as a political weapon.

You might think that big sites, like major corporate sites or government sites, are so well protected that they can’t be hacked. You would be wrong. But what about the little businesses? If anything, they are less likely to be secured against threats, both because the business lacks the resources, and because the hosting company controls the security of the site. So, what is a business to do to protect itself?

Photo credit: renaissancechambara on Flickr

Here are three steps you can take today to make it more likely that, whatever the cause of website troubles, you can reduce the pain of having to restore the site.

1. Preparation: Make sure your host has regular backups

It seems like a no-brainer, really, but check with your hosting company. Are they doing daily (nightly) backups? Most hosting companies use what are known as “virtual web servers” – several (many) websites are hosted on the same physical machine and actually have the same IP address (the numeric address used to find a site on the internet). If any one of the sites on that machine is compromised, the other sites are also at risk.

If they have to restore the websites from a backup, will it be restored as of the previous day? Or will it be from a week (or more) ago? If your site is updated regularly (which is a good thing!), a backup from more than one day ago may miss significant changes to your content.

2. Monitoring: Automatically monitor your website for changes

If you do nothing to monitor your website, you won’t know there is a problem until either you come across it, or (more likely) your potential guests spot it and mention it when they call. That could be quite some time after the problem occurs.

The solution is to create a way of having your site automatically monitored, so you can just check it daily to see if there have been changes made without your knowledge. One way to do that is to use a tool like Page2RSS. Put your website’s address (or any other page you would like to monitor) into the search box and click “To RSS”. Then take the resulting URL and add it to your favorite feed reader (if you don’t have one, either Google “feed readers” or just use Google Reader). Check the reader daily, and whenever there are any changes to your website, they will appear there. If you didn’t make the changes, you’ll know that someone else did!

3. Protection: Make your own backups

(a) Windows or Linux

Even though your web hosting company may be backing up your site regularly, when they restore the site from a backup, things can go wrong. You can guard against this by making your own backups and storing them on your computer, on an external storage site like DropBox, or whatever.

If you’re using Windows, the easiest way to backup your website is to use the free utility, Wget (Wget is usually included in most Linux distributions, or can be easily installed with your package manager). Detailed instructions on how to download your full website with Wget are here, and full documentation for Wget is here, but the simple version is, after installing Wget, open a terminal (command) window by typing “cmd” (without the quotes) into the Run or Search box in your Start menu (depending on your Windows version), then run:

wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.6.872.0 Safari/535.2 UNTRUSTED/1.0 3gpp-gba UNTRUSTED/1.0" -m -k -K -E http://www.yoursite.com

This will make Wget tell the webserver that it is a Chrome browser (some sites block Wget), create a “mirror” or full backup of your site (m), convert internal links so you can view the pages locally (k), backup pages where the links have been converted (K), and add “html” file extensions to any files that don’t already have them (E). Adjust these options to your own preferences, of course.

Store that in a safe place, and set up your Windows Task Scheduler (or Linux cron) to do this daily. By default Wget will download newer files, adding a number to the filename to avoid overwriting older versions of the file. If you want it to overwrite them (so you always keep the newest version), add -N to the list of letters before your website URL.

(b) Mac

On a Mac you can use Wget if you are willing to compile it yourself. If you don’t know what that means, you are probably better off using a different backup tool. There are several listed on CNet and on Softpedia. Not having a Mac, we haven’t tested them, but they do appear to perform functions similar to Wget on other platforms.

(c) Backing up sites powered by a database

If your site is powered by a database (like most content management systems, such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.), you will need to take some extra steps. Using Wget (or one of the Mac programs), you’ll be actually downloading all the content of your site, and converting it to html pages. That will make your site completely portable, but it doesn’t allow you to restore it directly back to the server.

First, you’ll need to be able to backup your database. If your web host offers a database tool like PHPMyAdmin, you can simply use it to download (export) a complete backup of your database and save it locally. You restore it using the import function fo PHPMyAdmin. If not, you will need to locate and install a MySQL tool (or the comparable tool for any other database you are using) such as MySQL Workbench, that will allow you to remotely access and export the database to your machine.

Second, you’ll need to download not just the page content (which is what Wget was doing), but the actual files that make up the engine behind your website. To do that you’ll need FTP (or equivalent) access to your webserver. Then, find an FTP program that allows for automatic downloading, and install it. Set up the program to autmatically download all the files under your website’s directory on the server (usually this is a directory called “public_html” or “www” or “httpdocs” or similar. Store that in a safe place and automate the backup for a nightly function.

Now, if things change on your site, and they weren’t meant to change, you are in a position to know it quickly, and to be able to restore the site from your own backup if your web host can’t.

Sleep easier.