Our recent post on evaluating online directories briefly mentions the difficulties in accurately determining where a guest has found your property. Yet how to track the source of bookings is one of the most frequent questions prompted by that article.

At our B&B (Brewster House Bed & Breakfast, in Freeport, Maine), we have used Google Analytics to track online bookings, and have attempted to ask every guests who books by phone where they located us, to add that data into the mix. As a result, our information has been a mix of somewhat reliable with not very reliable, which does not provide a very good basis for determining where to spend our marketing budget.

In fact, because of a design feature in the Brewster House website, we increased the difficulty (while improving the appearance of the booking page) of tracking bookings. Our recent redesign of that page eliminated that problem, so we can now validate the site which referred the booking via Google Analytics.

In our quest for better information on the sources our guests are using to find us, we have decided to enlist the aid of our friends at Acorn Internet Services, with their Intell-A-Keeper product. We’re currently in the process of installing Intell-A-Keeper on the Brewster House website, and will be evaluating its ease of use and the quality of the information it provides. Once we have accumulated some information, we plan to share it here as a review of the product.

As part of that review, we hope to be able to track the same information using Google Analytics, so we can directly compare the results with Intell-A-Keeper. If we are able to keep side-by-side data, we’ll let you know how they compare, as well.

Stay tuned!

• analytics
• return on investment
• roi
• tracking
• visibility