When this blog started out, quite a few years ago, it was intended to focus primarily on marketing and evaluating reservation or booking software. With changes in the industry, and in my situation, that emphasis has shifted, but, from a high-level view, it has all been related. However, it has been some time since I’ve written specifically about booking engines, but for some historical perspective, you can find some useful information here and here.

] Among small lodging properties it has been common to refer to TripAdvisor(“TA”) as “the 600 pound gorilla.” While this term recognizes the enormous influence of the review site with prospective guests, it is not usually intended as a compliment. Instead it is meant critically, implying some measure of unfair treatment by TripAdvisor (B&B’s have historically been difficult to find on the site) and sometimes by reviewers (differences of opinion, sometimes remarkably so, can be readily seen by scanning the reviews of many properties).

It’s that time again. A new year, and with it lots of good intentionsresolutions 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.

At the recent Hospitality Marketing Summit Conferencein Denver, I gave three presentations on Google Analytics. This is the third of those three, Google Analytics: Tracking the Money. The earlier Google Analytics presentations were Google Analytics: Follow the Moneyand Beginning Google Analytics.Google Analytics tracking using Ecommerce tracking can be a very effective way to evaluate paid listings. However, it is necessary to use a booking engine that supports Ecommerce tracking, and then set up Ecommerce tracking properly.

At last week’s Hospitality Marketing Summit Conferencein Denver, Colorado, I presented several sessions on Google Analytics for Innkeepers. The first of those sessions, entitled Follow the Money, gave an overview of how Google Analytics can help innkeepers evaluate their paid marketing to see if they are getting good value for the investment, that is, to see if they get an adequate return on investment. The slideshow is below. Beneath it is a description based on my HMS Conference session.

Who sends guests? That was the question innkeepers wanted to know when Scott spoke recently at the Bed & Breakfast Association of Virginia 2014 annual conference. In two Google Analytics sessions, Scott began by asking what the innkeepers wanted to know. Answers ranged from “How long people stay on my site” to “What do people do on the site” but the number one question was “Who is sending me guests?”

Google search changes again. There are Panda changes and Penguin changes, now Hummingbird changes, and Google has removed keywords from our Analytics, and we have to figure out what to do with Google+ and Google Local Business listings aka Google+ Local (or is it Google+ Local Business Pages this week?). What is an innkeeper to do? How can you keep up with all the changes, in order to make sure your business is successful?

How effective is your website? You probably check where you come up in search engine results, claim your Google+ Local page, link to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more, and use Instagram and Pinterest, right? But once your guests get to your site, what do they look at? How effectively is your website delivering the goods? You could ask the same question about your blog. You may write about different things (food/recipes, things to do in the area, specials, events, etc.

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.

Where do bed and breakfast guests come from? How do the find you? At the Mid-Atlantic Innkeeping Conference there were some great presentations. One of the special opportunities was to hear from the members of LocalU, a group of nationally recognized experts in local search – who present papers and seminars on local search opportunities. This one was geared toward B&B’s and small lodging properties. Much of the valuable information has been presented in a blog post by Mike Blumenthal, one of the LocalU members, in the form of a survey of members of the public on how they find a bed and breakfast.

At the end of January we gave two presentations on Google Analytics for innkeepers at the PAII (Professional Association of Innkeepers International) annual conference in Las Vegas. Last week we provided the presentation called “Getting Started with Google Analytics“. This week we’ll wrap it up with our other presentation, Google Analytics – Climbing Higher. In this presentation we’ll look at Ecommerce Tracking, Goals, Multi-Channel Funnels, and a custom dashboard for a quick overview of the performance of paid listings.

At the Professional Association of Innkeepers International (PAII) annual conference last week in Las Vegas, we presented two sessions on Google Analytics – Getting Started with Google Analytics, and Google Analytics – Climbing Higher. This week we’ll post the presentation from the session entitled “Getting Started with Google Analytics” and next week we’ll post the follow-up presentation. You can download the Dashboard mentioned in the presentation by logging in to Google Analytics, then clicking on this link to add it to your Dashboards.

[Updated, December, 2014] In our previous posts, we’ve talked about organizing a year end review of your bookings and about the information that will help you identify guest booking trends and stronger or weaker performing rooms, providing an outline of the information you can track (or should start tracking) to prepare you for next year’s review. In this concluding post we’ll talk about a year end review of web analytics, specifically emphasizing paid listings.

The first part of this series discussed the sources of information for our year end review. In this post we’ll look at ways you can “drill down” in the information you have to learn more about the year’s performance. If you haven’t been keeping records that will give you the information, we’ll talk about how to get started keeping those records. We’ll look at two different areas for our year end review.

Wouldn’t it be nice to do a year end review of the year’s bookings and see if there are areas that can be improved? As the calendar year draws to a close, our natural tendency is to take a look at how we did this year. But what will give you that information? Most of us will look at total revenue, total number of room nights sold, and perhaps one or two other statistics, and then hope we’re on track and getting better.

Several of our previous posts on analytics have dealt with the “how to” aspect of setting up various things you might want to track across your website and your booking engine. A recent online forum discussion among innkeepers about this topic prompts an overview of what things you can track, why you might want to track them, and some potential problem areas. 1. Is your site set up to use Google Analytics?

Last week’s post, examining whether or not BBOnline’s staff had been able to rectify the huge drop in referrals and bookings after their site redesign a year ago, observed that more information was desirable, reflecting the results of other properties. In the comments, Sarahprovided some information, indicating a similar drop of 61.4% in traffic, noting that others had increased, while some had dropped slightly, but BBOnline’s drop was the most significant – by a lot!

Last April we first posted our concerns about the sudden drop in traffic from BBOnline to our Bed & Breakfast in Freeport Maine. Our traffic had dropped 95% for the first several months of 2012 compared to the same time frame in 2011. Other innkeepers reported similar drops. We followed up that article with another, detailing concerns about an email response to our inquiriesabout the traffic drops, then a third article about a more encouraging telephone response from BBOnlinestaff.

Last week we talked about how goals in analytics are used in Multi-Channel Funnels to show you how referral sources can be sending value (including bookings), that doesn’t always show up in the standard analytics reports. This week we’ll take a different approach, and look at creating a Dashboard designed to give you, with only a quick glance, an easy way of comparing online directory listing performance. From the start, we want to emphasize a word of caution – we are not suggesting that this dashboard will replace a more in-depth comparison of online directory performance, or that it should be used instead of the Multi-Channel Funnel approach from last week’s post.

With all that is written about Google Analytics on a daily basis, it is hard to imagine the some businesses still question the need for tracking goals in Google Analytics. Yet they do just that. Recently we were asked to justify why a small bed and breakfast should bother setting up goals in Google Analytics. Our cynical side struggles to keep from answering that you don’t need them – so long as you don’t want to know which sources are sending website visitors who click certain things, visit certain pages, buy certain products, book their stay, or view certain videos.

A few weeks ago Google Analytics announceda new measurement (metric) called Page Value. Actually, it is an old metric, that had disappeared for a while, and was now reappearing, in a new and improved condition, but that really isn’t the point. What is Page Value? What does it mean? Does it tell innkeepers anything useful? The Google Analytics blog post on Page Value (linked above) details the history and calculations of Page Value, for those who are interested.

Landing Pages are the doorways to your website Landing pages are the doorways to your website. We tend to think of our site like a book – people start at the front (the home page) and work their way through the content in a logical sequence. In reality, however, people use a search engine to find a page that matches their search results (which may not be what you expected), and enter your site through that page.

Several weeks ago we posted our concerns over the significant drop in BBOnline traffic (referrals) following their site redesign late last year. When we heard from BBOnline, the response was disconcerting, so we posted further concerns. More recently online innkeeping forums (both public and private) have had active discussions about the drops in BBOnline traffic to inn websites. Significantly, while the exact amount of traffic loss varied from inn to inn, no innkeepers reported gains or traffic staying constant from year to year.

Transitioning from our recent posts on measuring social impact with Google Analytics and Using Google Analytics’ Multi-Channel Funnels, we presented a webinar for the Professional Association of Innkeepers International (PAII) discussing ways to measure the results of using social media, and tools to help make the best use of your time. The presentation is below, with general commentary (not a transcript) below. What is our objective? Without defining a goal for social media, we can’t really tell if it is of any value.

In our prior post on Measuring Social Media Impact we briefly mentioned Multi Channel Funnels and promised to discuss them soon. This post will discuss Multi Channel Funnels and what they can tell innkeepers about reservation sources. What are Multi Channel Funnels? A significant number of visitors make multiple visits before booking. That, alone, should make us pause before we draw conclusions about the value of a referral source only from the number of visitors it sends.

A month ago Google’s Analytics blog announcednew social media reports in Google Analytics. Last week they discussed how to use them, and analytics experts have been posting similar articles ever since. If you’re thinking this is the same “Social” report that measured “Engagement” and similar items (under the Audience tab in the new Google Analytics), it is not. This is an entirely new section, located under the Traffic Sources section, and has far more information (and more useful information) than the Social reports in the Audience section.

Recently we posted about a very significant decline in the amount of referral traffic we had observed coming from BBOnline.com. Several innkeepers posted in the comments, some noticing similar drops. Some, like ours, have been enormous, while others have been “only” 40-50% (during a time when referrals from most other directories have increased!). We have not heard from anyone who has observed anything other than a significant drop in referrals.

At the Google Analytics sessions at the PAII conference in Little Rock this year, as well as in some online discussions on the PAII Forum (and elsewhere), innkeepers have occasionally commented that they feel they “have to” use Google Analytics, but they really don’t want to use it. This post reviews some of the complaints and gives (sometimes tongue-in-cheek) thoughts about them. Throughout the post, we’ll be looking only at the “New” Google Analytics interface (the one with the orange bar running across the top of the page, below the Google Analtyics logo.

We recently saw an innkeeper commenting that they were overwhelmed by all the things to look at in Google Analytics – too many choices, and no clear idea of which were the important things for them. When you can’t devote the day to studying the data, what do you really need to know, and how can you focus on that quickly and easily? Google Analytics is a powerful tool – no question about it.

If you’ve experimented with Google Analytics, you probably know you can set up and track Goals with it, but two things can make it challenging – (1) how to track goals from your site through the booking process, which usually takes place on a website managed by your booking software company, and (2) how to set up your goals so they are useful. Just to add to the confusion, Google has recently updated Analytics, changing the way you track from your site to the booking engine.

As busy innkeepers, we know that time is at a premium, so poking around the various Google Analytics menus and reports is not only daunting, it is time-consuming. What is needed is a shortcut – a way to set up an overview with just the most important information, so you can check it in just a glance, when you don’t have time for a deeper analysis. That is exactly what we’ll do in this article.

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.

As a follow-up to our recent posts on Evaluating Your Paid Listings and Taking Charge of Your Online Marketing, we presented two sessions on Google Analytics at the recent Innkeeping Conference for the Professional Association of Innkeepers International (PAII) at its annual conference in Little Rock, Arkansas. At the conference, time made it necessary to hurry through some of the slides, near the end of the presentations, in particular. As a result, we are posting the slide decks here, so you can revisit them and copy down any necessary information, links, etc.

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!

Segment Everything Google Analytics ninja Avinash Kaushikpoints 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: Log in to your Google Analytics account, and click the Advanced Segments button near the top left. To the bottom right of the new section which appears is a button reading “New Custom Segment” – click it.

This is the fourth article in a series examining how B&B guests proceed through the decision process for booking a stay. Based largely on research from WIHP Hotel Marketing, the first article describes the four-step process for booking, the second describes how a guest discovers your property, and the third examines how to provide information to get the guest to your website. This article discusses how to get the conversion – to capture the booking – once the guest has come to your site.

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.

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.

Instead of re-writing the article, we will simply mention and link to the great informationprovided by our friends at Acorn Internet Servicesshowing 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-Keepertracking 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.

Amid all the frenzy of keeping up with Twitter and Facebook and now Foursquare and YouTube and Blogging and sorting out which directories to list on, and responding to the never-ending flow of emails from directories telling you to hurry and post your latest specials for this month, your latest photos, your latest hot deals, your best recipes and oh, yes, did you remember that you actually have a business to run?

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. The results are both interesting and enlightening We have been using Intell-A-Keeper (IAK) since January, and find that the results are both interesting and enlightening.

Recently I had an opportunity to chat with a number of innkeepers about using analytics on their web sites. I wassomewhat surprised that there were so many who were not using any type of analytics program, and of those who were using it, I was surprised how many were unsure of what it could do for them, or how to do more. We talked primarily about Google Analytics, but discussed others, as well.

A recurring concern that I hear from innkeepers is how to understand all the different online marketing opportunities, and how they can be used profitably. Though the conversation often starts with Facebook or Twitter, it also encompasses other social sites such as MySpace, Plurk, and many other communities. It also includes YouTube, Vimeo, and other video sites, WordPress, Blogger and other blogging sites, delicious, StumbleUpon and other bookmarking sites. The list can go on and on.

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.

Most Bed and Breakfast owners realize they need to list their property on more than one directory, so this series (Part One can be found here) does not intend to present a magic formula for finding the one listing that will solve all problems. The objective is to present some guidelines to help evaluate any directory in determining whether to begin listing with them, or to continue listing with them.