It’s that time again. A new year, and with it lots of good intentions resolutions to improve business for the new year.

This is the time to go back over some statistics from last year to try to genuinely understand how you did last year, especially compared with the prior year, and to see what worked, and should be kept, and what didn’t.

I’ve written previously about year-end reviews, so, instead of re-inventing the wheel, I’ve revised and updated the three posts for 2014/2015, along with the spreadsheet for checking on room performance, which you can download from the posts.

As mentioned in the posts, if you don’t have a way of tracking this kind of information, start tracking it now. Use the spreadsheet, and update it once a month. It will take you half an hour a month, and at the end of the year, you’ll have valuable information to use when looking back at 2015.

These posts describe the most important aspect – using Google Analytics’ Ecommerce tracking to validate how paid referral sources are performing. As mentioned there, you should consider other factors in addition to Ecommerce results when decided to keep or drop a paid source. However, Ecommerce tracking is so valuable that one more thing needs to be said: **If your booking engine doesn’t properly support Ecommerce tracking, get another booking engine! Five years ago it may have made sense to say, “My booking engine doesn’t have ecommerce tracking, but it will soon. I’ll wait.” Five years has passed and they still don’t support it. Get one that does!_

The Year End Review posts are:

Year End Review: Making a List (Creating a spreadsheet to track room performance)

Year End Review: Who’s Naughty or Nice? (Looking at month-by-month performance)

Year End Review: Cutting Through the Cobwebs (Using Google Analytics to examine performance

• analytics
• Directories
• guest management software
• online booking
• property management
• roi