Following our recent posts on Google Analytics, How to Evaluate Your Paid Listings in Five Minutes or Less, and How to Take Charge of Your Online Marketing Statistics, we presented two sessions on Google Analytics at the Professional Association of Innkeepers International (PAII) annual conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, in January, 2012.

The slide deck below is from the first session, Google Analytics – Beyond the Basics. Our other presentation, Measuring the Success of Your Online Marketing, was posted yesterday.

Below is the slide deck from the presentation. Below the deck is the link to the downloadable custom report (make sure you are logged in to your Google Analytics account, using the new GA, then click on the link and you should get the custom report in your list of Custom Reports. As mentioned at the presentation, the report assumes that your GA goal for Booking is Goal 1 (in Goalset 1) and your goal for Engagement is Goal 6 (the first goal in Goalset 2). You should modify the report to use your actual goals, if they are different.

If you only wanted the link to the custom report, called the Source Efficiency Analysis report, you will find it at http://goo.gl/Cx0VG.

Sometimes looking at your analytics data, you can get the information you need from just the referring source of the visitor to your website, or by using Advanced Segments to compare results from groups of referring sources. Sometimes you need more specific information than that will provide. Using Google Analytics, you can easily tag links to your website, so you can get different information about different sources, campaigns, etc., and learn more about what is working (and what is not!).

How can you get more specific information than the referral source?

The answer is to use the UTM variables available in Google Analtyics. Now, I can see your eyes glazing over, but don’t give up yet! We’ll see that it really can be quite a simple thing to do!

What are UTM variables?

UTM variables are put at the end of a URL, to give additional information to Google Analytics. For example, if we want to have a link from About the Inn to our Freeport Maine Bed & Breakfast, that identifies it as coming from this post, we could use the variable utm_source=AboutTheInnMarketingStats. The utm_source is the variable, telling Google Analytics to track the value we have created, “AboutTheInnMarketingStats” as a campaign (to GA, pretty much everything is a campaign).

If you use an email marketing service, like Constant Contact, MailChimp, or others, the links in your emails may be automatically tagged with information about that email (as a campaign). To find out, in GA, go to Traffic Sources -> Sources -> Campaigns. If you click on the Source/Medium link at the top of the list, you’ll see the sources and may find the email “campaigns” in that list.

There are several UTM variables available for us to use. The most common are utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign. You do not need to use all of them. You can use any of them you feel are helpful to identify how a visitor got to your website.

For example, suppose you send out two different emails in one month. One email goes to all prior guests, while the other goes only to guests who have stayed within the past year. You might use utm_medium=email for both mailings (to differentiate those visitors from others who come through other means), but use utm_source=allguests for the mailing to all guests, and utm_source=recentguests to identify the guests who have visited in the past year. If we mail to each of these groups every month, then we might also add to each of them utm_campaign=2012_January so we know they responded to the January 2012 email.

For another example, your analytics may show a number of visitors from Twitter (or Facebook, Pinterest, Foursquare, etc.). However, you ordinarily have no idea if the visitors came to you via the link in your profile, or from a link to your website in something you posted. To differentiate the link in your profile from other links from Twitter (or others), you can add utm_source=profile to the link in your profile.

OK, so how do we use these UTM variables?

You can type in the values yourself, which is not difficult at all, but Google has made it even easier, with a tool called URL Builder, which will set it up for you automatically.

We’ll show you first the manual way to use these variables, so you’ll be able to see what the URL should look like (and thereby be able to check for errors, typos, etc.). There are two versions – one where your link goes to a specific page, and one where you just link to a site (such as www.abouttheinn.com).

If you’re linking to a page, you add a question mark after the page address, then add your variables, with an ampersand (&) between each variable, like this:

http://www.brewsterhouse.com/facebook.html?utm_source=AboutTheInn&utm_medium=BlogPost&utm_campaign=MarketingStats

To link just to a site, you must end the domain name (the .com, .net, .org, etc.) with a forward slash (/) and then add the question mark, followed by the variables you want to use:

http://www.brewsterhouse.com/?utm_source=AboutTheInn&utm_medium=BlogPost&utm_campaign=MarketingStats

To build the same thing using Google’s URL Builder, we simply enter the page or site we want to link to, then add “AboutTheInn” in the Source field, add “BlogPost” to the Medium field, and “MarketingStats” to the Campaign Name field, and it generates the full URL for us, as the accompanying graphic shows.

When these links are inserted as links in a page, social media profile, or whatever, Google Analytics will track not only the referral source, but will identify the campaign, medium, or other variable that you include. The full list of UTM variables is provided in the Google Analytics help section on variables.

After setting up your links to use these variables, it may take a day or more, depending on how much traffic you receive from the sites you put the links on, to see results in your analytics. When they appear, you can view your Sources, Mediums, and Campaigns in most of the standard analytics reports, as well as in the Campaigns section, to identify how each campaign has performed, including how well they convert (using Goals and/or Ecommerce tracking).

When should you use UTM variables?

There is little value in using UTM variables to replace something you’re already getting. Consequently, replacing a referring source with utm_source=theSameSource will not provide new information.

Instead, use UTM variables to provide additional information – information you aren’t already getting. Two examples were given above (separating links from marketing emails by audience and date, and separating links from social media profiles from links in social media posts). If a B&B directory offers multiple links (perhaps an “Inn of the Month” link or a “Featured Inn” link) that can be different from the link in your general listing, a UTM variable (perhaps utm_medium) may be helpful to differentiate visits from that link.

Another use of UTM variables is to include them in the link built into a QR code. If you just use your home page as the URL in the QR code, you can not determine how many visitors came via the QR code. If you put utm_source=QRcode (or perhaps get even more detailed), you will have the ability to identify the source of those visitors.

Stopwatch by Casey Marshall

Segment Everything

Google Analytics ninja Avinash Kaushik points out the value of Advanced Segments, saying, “Segment everything.” This is great advice, and it is the approach we will use to clarify the results we see from our directories or paid listings. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Log in to your Google Analytics account, and click the Advanced Segments button near the top left.

2. To the bottom right of the new section which appears is a button reading “New Custom Segment” – click it.

3. Give the new segment a name that will help you identify it by filling in the Name field at the top.

4. Add the Source fields you want to include. This will be the domain names of the directories or paid listings you want to include. First set the green section to Source, then add the domain name to the directory to be included. Google Analytics will suggest domains from your existing Sources as you type.

5. Continue by adding “OR” statements, set the “dimension” (the green part) to Source for each additional Source directory you want to track.

6. If you want, you can test your segment by clicking the “Test Segment” button to see how many matches each of your conditions (sources, in this case) it matches.

7. Save the segment by clicking the Save button, and you’ll see your usual search results are now limited to only the sources listed in your new advanced segment. To turn it on or off, go to the Advanced Segments button and check (or un-check) the box next to the segment you want on or off.

If you want to create another segment for other paid listings, just create a new “Paid Listings” segment, and repeat the steps above.

Once you have the segments set, if you activate one or more, all your Standard reports will show the segmented information, so you’ll be able to see referrals from the paid listings and compare them to each other directly. You can also compare goal conversions and ecommerce data from one paid listing to another. Great information!

For more information, Google’s Help Center can provide more details on Advanced Segments and other topics of interest.

A few of you may have noticed that we seem to have taken a bit of a hiatus over the past several weeks. In fact, our Freeport Maine Bed & Breakfast had a very busy summer, and there wasn’t much time for About the Inn writing. Now that our busy summer and fall foliage seasons are behind us, it appears things will be back on a more even keel, and we hope to be able to publish more regularly.

How do you attract B&B guests? In the past several years, most smaller lodging properties have become aware of the importance of attracting guests through an online presence (oddly, though, some still seem to question the need – or maybe they question the long-term viability – of an internet presence). Gone, or nearly gone, are the days of buying print or television ads in huge volume, in hopes that a few visitors will be enticed to become guests.

For the smaller properties, in particular, this is a good thing, as few can afford the high prices charged for print advertising, let alone the several additional orders of magnitude for television campaigns – all for ads for which there is little hope of tracking their success, and for which industry analysts say the return on investment (ROI) is very small indeed.

So, then, all a small business needs to do is find a way to slap up a small website, and all the marketing is done, right? Unfortunately, many small properties seem to have adopted exactly that strategy, and are beginning to pay the price in reduced occupancy.

Print media (with the exception, to some degree, of direct mail), and for that matter television, tries to sell by sending an uninvited message to a large, but generally arbitrary, audience. The primary reason online marketing is more effective, is because the prospective guest is looking for you. They are, by definition, part of your target market. They are seeking exactly what you are offering: some type of lodging for a temporary purpose.

How do you reach the prospective guest?

It seems like an over simplification, but in order to get the prospective guest, seeking lodging like yours, to connect with your property and make a booking, you need to be found where they are looking. Which means that you need to know where they are looking, and be found there.

Where are they looking?

We usually begin by assuming that the guest has decided to come to your area, and needs to find lodging. This is because there are many, many different ways the prospective guest may decide to come to a region. However, you can play a role in this, by getting information about the area in front of the guest – either by more traditional means such as print or television, or by having that type of information on your web site.

Once the decision is made to come to an area, the question of lodging must arise.

According to WIHP, a hotel marketing firm, there are four distinct steps in the process of deciding on a lodging property: discovery or stimulus (where the guest learns of a hotel and gets interested), zero moment of truth (the guest begins to research the hotel), first moment of truth (guest finds the hotel website and begins to determine if this is what they want), and second moment of truth (guest arrives at the property and is either happy or disappointed). There is little doubt that these steps apply more or less exactly for smaller properties, as well.

Let’s look a bit more closely at these four steps:

1. Discovery or Stimulus

How does the prospective guest find out about a lodging property they may want to consider? WIHP’s data indicates that the most likely source of information is friends or family, followed by online travel agents (known as OTAs, including Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Booking.com, and the like), then TripAdvisor, and then, to a much lesser degree, other sources like Facebook, Travel Agents, Magazines, etc.

Because we’re interested in the smaller lodging properties, we would suggest that bed and breakfast directories could be included with the OTAs, at least for the guest who is interested in considering bed and breakfast lodging.

2. Zero Moment of Truth

How does the guest research the lodging property he/she is interested in? The data from WIHP indicates that nearly 73% will use search engines to find the hotel. Did you pick up on that? Most of our search engine optimization is around industry-specific keywords, but most of our prospective guests are searching by the name of the hotel!

Of the remaining 27% or so, guests will search map pages (9.6%), review sites (7.3%), travel guides (3.0%) and social media sites (0.8%) to find the lodging property.

3. First Moment of Truth

Once the guest arrives on the property’s website, you have between 3 and 7 seconds to help them decide to stay at the property. The average visitor will have looked at 10 other property websites, read reviews, checked rates, and verified the location on a map.

WIHP says the guest wants to know:

• will this save me money?
• will this save me time?
• will this make my life better?

For the property, this translates to:

• Is this the best value I can get?
• Is this located near the points I am interested in?
• Is the comfort going to live up to my standards?

How your website stacks up in answering these questions for the guest determines whether or not they will book.

4. Second Moment of Truth

When the guest arrives they will either be pleased with their selection of your property, or they will be disappointed. In either case, the results are likely to be posted on social media and review sites, and shared with friends and family. In exceptional cases, they may even appear in blog posts.

When you consider the likelihood of these results, whether positive or negative, being shared with friends and family, as well as the review sites and social media connections, you can see that these results will also become part of the Discovery or Stimulus phase of someone else’s search for lodging property. That makes it imperative that the experience be a positive one.

WIHP has provided a video infographic to illustrate these points clearly and concisely. The YouTube version is below.

In upcoming articles we’ll be looking at the ways we can reach the prospective guest in each of the decision-making phases of the booking process.

The Maine Innkeepers Association Educational Seminar for April, 2011, was held on April, 28, 2011, and the subject was Social Media – Beyond the Basics. We gave a brief presentation on Facebook: Beyond the Basics, emphasizing engagement and mentioning, to a lesser extent, optimization and measurement. Here is the video (transcript below):

Transcript:

Hello, this is Scott from AboutTheInn.com. This is a short presentation from on using Facebook, that’s beyond the basics from an event on Social Media put on by the Maine Innkeepers Association that was held on April 27, 2011.

So as we move beyond the basics of Facebook, we’ll be focusing on three areas. The areas will be engagement, to some extent optimization and measurement of the progress, but primarily we’ll be focusing on engagement. We’ll do mostly Facebook, a little bit on Twitter, and to some extent these things all apply to LinkedIn. They also apply to other things where you may find your customers, but most of the principles are uniform – there are some differences and we’ll talk about those as we go along.

So first of all we need to consider just what the goal is. Often times we get absorbed in Facebook or Twitter, or whatever your platform of choice may be, and we think about how we’re going to do it, and how we’re going to find time to do it all, and we really don’t think about what we’re really trying to accomplish. So much as I hate the terminology ‘heads in beds’, that is the bottom line, because when we sell rooms, for lodging properties, that’s how we pay the bills, no matter how we want to characterize it. So we need to consider whether or not we have a plan, and the plan should include engaging guests and then some measurable objectives, as well.

So as we consider those things, the first thing to consider is “Where are our guests?” We know that by sheer numbers, they’re on Facebook, they’re on Twitter, they may be following our Blog, they may be on LinkedIn, they may be on a number of others, including FourSquare, Orcut, Gowalla, or any of a number of others. Certainly you need to focus on any networks where the majority of your guests can be found, and if there are other networks where you think there are a significant number of potential guests, then certainly you need to be present there, as well.

So remember that what we’re really trying to do is to create relationships. You’re trying to use social media to make friends for your lodging property. We’re not talking about just selling, or the hard sell, but we’re looking at creating relationships in the places where the guests are.

The first step, from a Facebook point of view, is to create engagement through your custom welcome page. You can create a custom welcome page – one that is very attractive – usually modeled on your web site, and with attractive graphics and text that draws the user in, and also, as in the example here, you can offer specials and extras for those who ‘Like’ you – things that are not available to everyone. This builds a relationship and makes the user feel that they have an opportunity for something special.

Next add photos and videos – things that tell a story. We had an interesting thing happen at a recent innkeeping show, where one of the keynote speakers mentioned that he was going to use one of our posts as an illustration of telling a story. In this case it was in less than 140 characters. We were in the habit of tweeting our breakfast menu. People liked it, and when we stopped doing it, they got in touch and asked, “What’s for breakfast?” One day we had a young couple get engaged at the inn, so at breakfast we tweeted that the “Cute young couple got engaged last night” and what they were having for breakfast. Story told. People were engaged with it, and passed that tweet around more widely than would have otherwise happened.

Another way to do it is to ask questions. Now, in Twitter you can ask questions and sometimes you get no response other than the echo of your own voice. In Facebook you can ask questions, in the conventional sense, but you also have the ability to use a Facebook Question, which allows you to create a multiple choice question, and you can limit the responses to those you define, or you can allow others to suggest new answers. We’ve done a number of things with this. Sometimes we’re earnestly trying to get feedback from our guests, which is certainly a good thing. For example, we asked them if they preferred sweet dishes for breakfast or savory dishes, and we got some interesting information from that. We also asked them what kind of sweet dishes they like: pancakes or waffles or more involved things, or just what they like. We allowed them to add their own choices and we saw answers that included things we hadn’t even considered. You learn a lot of interesting things by asking questions.

Another thing you can do to create some interaction is to feed your blog to your page, because a lot of your Facebook followers are not necessarily following your blog – unless you feed it to the Facebook page, and Facebook, as a page, is like a big, hungry animal, just waiting to be served. So post your blog to your Facebook group so they can all keep up with your news. And, to encourage interaction, even in your blog you may choose to ask questions or try to get feedback directly, there.

You can also offer specials just to Facebook followers, as was alluded to when we discussed the custom welcome page. You can also sell gift certificates directly from your Facebook page, there is an application that will allow you to do that, or you can create an application, depending on your booking engine, to allow bookings directly from your Facebook page.

From the point of view of optimization, you definitely want to optimize your Facebook page, both your profile information and the business description information available to you. Facebook is its own search engine, so you want to use terminology that your guest or potential guests will be using as they try to find lodging in your area. So just as you would do this on a web page, you not only want to create your vanity URL, but you also want to think of profile attributes as something people might search on.

You’ll also want to be create when you select the name of your page. Think about branded names, like the name of your property, but also non-branded or descriptive names. For a hardware related page, called “Black & Decker”, and that would be interesting if you’re into tools, but a site called “Women with Tools” might get more attention.

Similarly, Siteman Cancer Center started with only a couple of hundred fans, and is now up to a couple of thousand, but compare that to the page “Cancer Sucks”, with 48,000 fans and lots of engagement. Both are basically information and support pages, but there is a big difference. That isn’t a recommendation that you copy this approach, but that you consider the concept of an edgy name that people can identify with. Something to think about.

Be non-commercial in your commercial approach. What I mean is, don’t just try to sell things. It’s been said many times, and I certainly wholeheartedly agree, that, in many ways, social media is like a cocktail party, or a conversation among friends. You carry on a conversation, you don’t just try to sell stuff. You know perfectly well that if you go to a party and you meet, to pick on an industry, an insurance salesman, and his entire conversation at the party is to try to get you to make an appointment or to buy insurance, you aren’t going to enjoy his company unless you desperately need insurance. But if that same salesman makes witty, interesting conversation, perhaps even giving you some helpful information, you may end up making that appointment. That’s the point of view that most people expect in the social media world, so it becomes an important thing.

So think of things to talk about that appeal to large segments of people. In our industry you might say, I need a vacation – well, who doesn’t? Or maybe it’s coffee… Whatever, but keep it on topic. Remember, our focus is heads in beds, but by building relationships. Now there’s nothing wrong with the occasional personal reflection, story or comment, if you’ve established your credibility by being a helpful, knowledgeable, source. People find that interesting and genuine. The problem comes when you show that you aren’t able to separate your personal “persona” from your business accounts. People don’t want to follow you.

Measure your results. In the Facebook world this isn’t just a “check your Google Analytics” comment. In Facebook there is a thing called Facebook Insights. To get to it, go to “Edit Page” and in the left column, click on Insights. There you’ll see Users and a summary and graph and Interactions and another summary and graph. Both also provide more details, and you can view the latest day, week, month, etc. This gives you a good idea of how much you are engaging people, and which posts were the most effective to encourage interaction.

Thanks for listening. I hope you find this useful, and that you’ll continue encouraging engagement among your social networks.

From conversations with innkeepers at some recent conferences, we know that innkeepers understand that web analytics are important, and they are searching for ways to use and understand them, but are not finding that to be an easy task.

We were looking at tools that provided some additional capabilities for Google Analytics, and came across GA Evolution, and think it may help some innkeepers get useful results, without overwhelming amounts of raw data. GA Evolution is not intended to provide all the information in Google Analytics. For example, it provides no information on where your visitors came from, time on site, etc. However, it does a really nice job of slicing and dicing the information about visits, page views, bounce rate, etc., while remaining easy to use.

Getting Started

GA Evolution Metrics

In order to get started with Evolution, you’ll need to have a Google Analytics account, and it must already be collecting data on your website (that is, it must have been installed for a month or more, or Evolution won’t have much to do). If you haven’t yet set up Google Analytics, you’ll find an overview of the steps needed to set up Google Analytics in our article providing an overview of analytics. Once it is active, you can set up Evolution, and then all you need is a month or more of statistics-gathering by Google.

If you have a GA account, log in to the account and authorize Evolution to access your GA data. If you have multiple sites and/or profiles in GA, you can select the one to use, then choose the data to graph and away you go with nice, simple graphs of only the information you want to see!

Getting the Data

GA Evolution Data

Once at the GA Evolution site, and logged in, select the domain or domains (your website and your blog, for instance) to view, and check the boxes for the columns to display. Evolution allows the most common data points – Visits, Unique Page Views, and Bounce Rate – and also allows additional columns for Transactions, Quantity, eCommerce Conversions and CI (Confidence Interval or margin of error). You can add columns for your defined Goals, if you like. Select a date range, and if you would rather see data weekly instead of monthly, check that box.

When you’re ready, click the “Get Data” button, and a chart appears below, with columns for each selected item. If you used more than one domain, there will be a separate table of data for each.

Getting a Graph

GA Evolution Graph

To graph a particular column, simply click the column header. If you want to see your Visits over time, click the Visits column and the graph will appear above the data table. If you are using more than one domain, there will be multiple lines on the graph, one for each domain, measuring the same column information. If you click another column it is not added to the graph, but the existing graph is replaced with a new one for the new column. Hovering your mouse over a point on the graph gives information about the value at that point.

Google Analytics is  a free tool, though the author of it has a PayPal button on the site in case you would like to support his work with a donation. Try it, and see if you find it useful.

Let us know how it worked for you!

Recently the Professional Association of Innkeepers International (PAII) asked me to do a webinar on building a dashboard to aid in online reputation monitoring. I had read a really good article on the topic a year or so ago, so put some of that information to good use, added a bit of my own, and created the presentation.

The presentation (slightly adapted) is below. One note from the audio (which isn’t included) is that at the time of the presentation the TweetBeep.com site was not responding. Since I haven’t actively used it in a while, I don’t know if it is still in operation.

Instead of re-writing the article, we will simply mention and link to the great information provided by our friends at Acorn Internet Services showing a comparison of statistics on bookings from before there were Google Place Pages and currently, and also noting which directories produce bookings. This is obtained from Acorn’s customers who use Acorn’s Intell-A-Keeper tracking software.

We will comment more on this topic before long.

Enjoy this useful information!

If you’re like me, you’ve used Google Analytics for quite some time, and find the wealth of information quite useful. One area that has always been a bit frustrating, and not as useful as it seems it should be, is the Site Overlay report. When you would click on this report, a window would open showing the home page of the site, then an overlay would appear (making the site page fade a bit), with some statistics on different links, showing how frequently they were clicked.

Depending on your browser and operating system, sometimes this display would not clear properly, causing problems with browsing later. In any case, the information was tantalizing, but but not always clearly understandable.

Google has now replaced Site Overlay with In-Page Analytics (right). This display is very similar to Site Overlay, but seems, at least at first blush, to work much better, and is in a frame in the page, instead of a new window. Google says the feature is still considered beta, meaning things may change, or may not always work correctly, but so far it seems smooth in our exploration of it.

The little percentage numbers near a link indicate the percentage of clicks for that link. Hovering the cursor over the number drops down a small window with details indicating the number and percentage of clicks, the goals information if they are configured, and, if ecommerce is configured, transaction and revenue information relative to the link.

For most this will be a nice improvement over Site Overlay, and may be very helpful in diagnosing the performance of your web site. What do I mean by that? Suppose you believe that your site visitors will click on certain links on your home page, such as your rooms page or your availability link. In-Page Analytics lets you see what percentage of the clicks actually go through that path, and determine what they are doing from there. You may be in for a surprise.

It is quite possible that the wonderful “call to action” link that you feel is on your page is not getting many clicks. What should you do? One option is to make it more prominent, wait a few weeks, and see if the statistics have changed. Another is to use Google’s Website Optimizer to create multiple versions of the call to action, and see which produces the best results.

The point isn’t that there is a particular answer that will work for everyone. Instead, the point is that information is valuable, and knowing that something is not performing as expected is the first step to making changes for the better.

Try In-Page Analytics, and see how your links are performing. Then you can determine if you need to make any changes.

A few months ago we wrote about the importance of tracking the sources of reservations, and mentioned that we would be testing the Intell-A-Keeper software available from Acorn Internet Services. While the high season bookings will get busier in the coming weeks, we thought it was time for an update on that process.

Our Prior Tracking Method

Before using IAK we would track our reservations by asking guests (via an online form for online bookings, or directly if over the phone) where they had located Brewster House Bed & Breakfast. We tracked those results in a spreadsheet each year, so we could compare year-over-year changes. We also used Google Analytics to determine hits on our website, and the sources of the traffic, and configured Goals so we could attempt to track the source of bookings.

In general, we knew that guest responses were not reliable, but without a better tracking mechanism, were not able to determine which were valid. Using Google Analytics only partially helped in this regard, as we could get a booking, then not be able to determine how the guest came to our site. This is largely because Google Analytics tracks only the last referer (yes, the correct spelling is misspelled – go figure) – the last source before coming to our site.

To attempt to do better, we talked with Acorn and installed Intell-A-Keeper.

Setting up Intell-A-Keeper

Set up is not difficult. You must have access to your web pages via an FTP account (unless you host your site with Acorn), and they will also need access to your Pay Per Click accounts, if you have any. For anything else you want to track, such as your online booking system (of course!) and any online directories to which you subscribe, Acorn will need login information so they can update the link to your website, and, in the case of your booking system, they will add some tracking code so that bookings and their sources will be properly tracked.

Once the setup is completed, bookings will be tracked in the IAK system (in addition to anything else you may be using).

What happens when you get a booking

After IAK is installed, when you get an online booking you receive an email from Acorn, showing the various places the guest visited in searching for your property. Often the results will show that they visited several sites – from search engines to directories – before booking with you. This is one of the great strengths of IAK – you know more than just the last place they visited before booking with you.

What about bookings over the telephone? There is a clever solution to that problem, and one that usually results in good information to verify (or correct) the information provided by the guest. When you take a booking over the telephone, if you send an email confirmation, you put a link in the email to a special page on your website, asking the guest to click the link to confirm their receipt of the confirmation. When they click the link, the same browsing information is transmitted as when they book online, and the property receives an email detailing the guest’s searches before the booking.

Analyzing the information

Because most guests visit several sites before committing to a booking, IAK gives a portion of the credit to each site that led to the booking. This usually results in a much better understanding of which referral sources are actually sending guests your way.

After signing up for IAK, you have a login to a reporting page at intellakeeper.com, where you can select reports on referrals, search terms, entry pages, reservation types (email confirmation, online booking or website confirmation button), history (bookings by date and time), unknown visitors and query strings (the queries used to locate your property and book – including your own tracking query strings).

The Referrals report (left) shows the referring sites, the number of bookings the site participated in sending, and the percent of the total bookings that represents. You can drill down to see the search terms used from that site, the entry page to your site, and other details from that site.

You’ll notice that the bookings are fractions, such as google.com being responsible for 16.68 bookings. This means that, to some degree, google.com participated in 16.68 bookings, but it was not the sole referer in all of them (or else there would be no fractional amount).

The History report also allows you to obtain the details of an individual booking. This is, in a slightly easier-to-read format, the same information that comes in the email after a booking.

Comparing the IAK results to Google Analytics in determining the source of bookings hardly seems fair. With Google Analytics, if you examine the reports shortly after a booking, and if your Goals are properly configured and your online booking system is configured to properly report on bookings, you may be able to determine the source of the booking. If many bookings have occurred, or much time has elapsed, finding only the last source to refer the visitor is an educated guess, at best. IAK not only shows several sources (we have seen as many as 23 referral sources, but the average seems to be between 2 and 5 sources), but you can verify a specific source for an individual booking.

IAK isn’t always able to identify all possible sources, but it is far more accurate than either guest information or Google Analytics. One area where IAK can not provide accurate information are where the booking occurs more than 30 days after the search for lodging. In that case the “cookie” file that IAK relies upon may have expired and been deleted, so any sources prior to that time will not be recorded. Another problem occurs when the guest calls to book, but confirms the reservation by clicking on the email link from a different computer (such as a work computer), so that the cookie information simply isn’t present. Even with these limitations, the ability, in the significant majority of cases, to supply detailed information on multiple referral sources makes it a very valuable tool, indeed.

Final thoughts

One thing we want to make very clear is that we are not suggesting dropping Google Analytics for IAK. Google Analytics provides a huge amount of valuable information. However, it is not really adequate for determining the sources of bookings. Neither its Goals nor its e-commerce settings adequately give credit to the various sources of a booking. IAK beats it in that department, hands down.

In order to accurately determine ROI for your referral sources (such as directories, etc.), you must be able to pinpoint where your bookings come from. While IAK isn’t perfect, it provides great detail on the sources of bookings, and arms the innkeeper to make a much better decision than relying on guest information or Google Analytics for booking source information.