Tracking Revenue by Referral Source – Google Analytics

By Scott Thomas

An innkeeper who attended one of my Google Analytics talks at the PAII conference in Las Vegas earlier this year wrote to ask how to track average revenue by referral sources on RezOvation (he didn’t say, but we’ll assume RezOvation GT, at this point). The steps given here are specific to RezO GT, but the basic approach is the same for any booking engine. The primary difference is the way you would enable GA tracking and Ecommerce tracking on your booking engine. The innkeeper wanted to use average costs, so at the end we mention the way to set that up with Goals. However, using Ecommerce tracking is much more effective, as it will use actual transaction values.

There are a few steps to be done with RezOvation to make it track across their booking platform. You may have done some of these already – depending on where things stand so far. Consider this sort of a checklist:

  1. In RezOvation GT’s (I’m assuming you’re using GT – if you’re using RezO Web it may be a bit different – older RezO products, like RezO Desktop may not work entirely), in the Configuration/Settings for the System (I can’t recall if it is called General or System, or whatever), find the Booking Engine Settings, and make sure you put your Google Analytics ID number in the box. While you’re there, click the box to turn on Ecommerce Tracking, too (if you do this, you’ll need to go to your Admin settings in GA and check the box to indicate this is an Ecommerce site to see the Ecommerce reports).

  2. On each web page you’ll need to add a couple of lines to the JavaScript that calls Google Analytics. Basically you’re telling GA to consider the RezO booking engine as if it were part of your website. The lines are:

_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'none']);<br /> _gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);

These lines go immediately before the line with _trackPageview, so your complete GA script might look like this (with your GA ID in place, of course):

`var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', ‘UA-YOUR-GA-ID’]); _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', ‘none’]); _gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  1. For any links or forms which send the visitor to the RezO booking engine, you need to add code to pass your website as the source. For a link you add this

onclick="_gaq.push(['_link', this.href]); return false;"

to the link so it looks like this:

<a href="https://secure.rezovation.com… " onclick="_gaq.push(['_link', this.href]); return false;"><br />
and if you use a form to send data to RezO, you add

onsubmit="_gaq.push(['_linkByPost', this]);"

so your form says

<form name="f" method="post" onsubmit="_gaq.push(['_linkByPost', this]);">

After these three steps you should see conversions under Ecommerce with actual purchase figures in the Transactions reports. You can then add a Source as a Secondary Dimension so you can see which sources are bringing in how much revenue. Don’t forget to also check the Multi-Channel Funnels to see which sources are helping bring in revenue, even if they are not the “last click” before the purchase.

If you want to use an average amount to get a general sense of revenue by referral sources, you can do this at the same time. Set up a Goal in GA as the last page of the booking sequence (you may have to do a test booking to find that page URL), and give it an average value. Then the goals should start showing up with value once the booking process has been completed.

One thing to check – when looking at Multi-Channel Funnels the dollar amounts reflect all goals and Ecommerce, so if you’re using both, you’ll get the total dollar value of both goals and Ecommerce. To fix that, go back to the top of the MCF page and select only the ones you want to see at the moment.