June 22, 2016
There used to be a day where you would place an ad in a local or regional publication, and you’d get a sense that the phone was ringing more often to indicate success.
Those days are gone.
In today’s environment, marketers are able to look at success in a much more linear, and direct manner — from first impression, all the way through final checkout (not to mention their next and future stays).
In order to grasp a better understanding of how your marketing dollars are working for you, taking some time to ensure these 5 steps are complete will help guide your hotel’s marketing efforts for years to come.
1. Check Your Google Analytics (or any analytics platform you’re using)
There are limitless ways to set up Google Analytics for your hotel, but at the very least, ensure that you have the basic implementation set up. You’ll need either the Analytics snippet or Google Tag Manager Code (preferred) set up on every page of your hotel’s website. And for your booking engine, ensure you have Ecommerce tracking set up capturing room nights, revenue, and a unique transaction ID that tie in to your hotel’s revenue management system.
2. Link Your Accounts
Google Analytics allows simple connections between other Google products such as Google Search Console, Google Adwords, and Double Click Campaign Manager. These links provide integration to analyze the effectiveness of your hotel’s media and SEO efforts, and how they relate back to online bookings.
3. Centralize your delivery
If you’re using display marketing to promote room nights at your hotel, it’s important that you centralize the delivery of your ads. Not only does this help in maximizing the efficiency of your ads, but it will also allow for proper attribution of revenue and conversions. This building block is especially important as we look to connect first impression to complete stays.
4. Have a way to aggregate
Your marketing metrics most likely come from multiple sources — whether they be from various media channels (e.g. search, display, email, local publication media buys, etc.) or from different marketing partners. Having a system in place to gather all your marketing information into one database allows for much more efficient analysis
5. Visualize
Even if steps 1-4 are all done, a major factor is still missing — the visualization. Visualizing all of this information helps your hotel make informed decisions to comprehend the information quickly, identify relationships and patterns, find emerging trends, and help communicate the story to management and investors.
Proper visualization makes large amounts of data more easily digestible and will help expedite decisions on how to manage your hotel’s marketing budgets more effectively and with quicker response times.
Overall, clean analytics for your property and improved tracking can lead to more efficient marketing.
Destination
Hospitality
Media
Online