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.

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?

As innkeepers, we are accustomed to working very hard to get our websites to climb the rungs of the Google search engine results (SERPs). But the Google algorithm is a moving target, and its frequent changes mean we are constantly chasing the algorithm with our SEO techniques. Enter Go-Trippin– a new website, created by Acorn Internet Services, presenting information on local activities furnished by innkeepers. This may sound like a directory of local businesses, but it is much more than that, in its own subtle way, Go-Trippin’s opportunity is entirely unique.

Earlier today Mike Blumenthalposted on his Local Search blogabout the latest changes to Google+ Local Business pages and Google+ Pages (I know, half the problem is that they named them so similarly!). After sharing Mike’s Google+ post about the Google announcement, there have been a few questions about what, if anything, innkeepers need to do next. What has been the status quo? There has been a long series of changes, big and small, in Google’s listings for Local Businesses – name changes, function changes, merging pages, and more.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or so it is said. Google itself says it changes its search algorithm over 300 times per year (almost daily!). However, it seems beyond question that some changes require more attention for small business websites than others. When there are changes in Google search results that would penalize your website, for example, or when credit is given for particular formats or content, a change is surely warranted.

Before your eyes glaze over because we used the word “Microdata”, hang in there just a bit longer to see how you can easily help Google (and other search engines) better understand your website. Google Wants Relevant Sites (Really!) Let’s start with the idea that Google really wants to present a searcher with relevant and useful search results. Yes, they may have ulterior motives, like selling advertising, but for now, that’s not the main point.

Search engine experts both within the lodging industry and outside it have already written on the previews of the new Google Maps, announced in May. Most have described the ways the appearance will change, some expressing concern, others joy. Few have taken a hard look at what the new Google Maps will mean about your Google+ Local Listing. If you’re not actively using Google+ Local, you will have to change that, for your business to survive.

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.

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.

Yesterday (16 July 2012) Google’s Webmaster Central Blog published a post explaining “semantics”(more about that in a moment) of web pages, urging sites to use semantic markup (specific types of HTML), and several “Do’s and Don’ts”. Could this be a signal of an upcoming algorithm change? A Bit of Background This will be the geeky part, but a bit of background will help understand what may turn out to be significant about the Google Webmaster Central post mentioned above.

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.

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.

Closing the circle in this series on the process guests use to book lodging properties is what WIHP Hotel Marketingcalls the Second Moment of Truth – the arrival of the guest at your property. We have already discussed the four-step booking decision process, how the guest becomes aware of your property (the Discovery or Stimulus step), how guests make the decision to visit your website (the Zero Moment of Truth), and the process of deciding to book with your property (the First Moment of Truth).

Our first post in this seriesprovided an overview of how guests find and book a lodging property, based on research from WIHP, a hotel marketing agency. The four step process assumes the future guest has selected a destination area and then proceeds through the steps of (1) discovery of a particular property, (2) seeking information about the property to see if it is a good prospect (the zero moment of truth), (3) the guest on your website (the first moment of truth), and (4) the guest at your property (the second moment of truth).

In our previous post we introduced the four step process (identified by WIHPa hotel marketing firm) of a guest finding, and staying at, a lodging property, then feeding the beginning of the cycle again by telling others. In this, and the next few posts, we will break down the components and see how you can more effectively help future guests find you. As a refresher, the four steps are Discovery or stimulus (where the guest learns of a hotel and gets interested) Zero moment of truth (the guest begins to research the hotel) First moment of truth (guest finds the hotel website and begins to determine if this is what they want), and Second moment of truth (guest arrives at the property and is either happy or disappointed – which will sometimes result in that reaction being shared) We’re going to focus on the first topic in this article: How does a prospective guest discover your lodging property?

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.

Let’s face it, Google is obsessed with speed. But don’t take my word for it, look here and here, too. So what can you do about it? Last week we came across an article noting a security product that “accidentally” makes web sites load 60% faster. We almost passed it by, until we saw that it arose from Project Honey Pot – which we had seen previously. In brief, Project Honey Pot is a project that studies how spammers and hackers operate, and applies that knowledge to defend against them.

Yesterday Google announced that the +1 button is now available for any website to use (just like a Facebook ‘Like’ button, or similar buttons). It raises two questions: Should you be using it? How do you use it? Both questions are easily answered – though most articles on the topic have not really dealt with them as much as emphasizing the “buzz” (no pun intended) or the absence of a “need” for another “Like” button.

As if you needed another reason to claim your Google Place page, the most compelling reason yet has now appeared. It is ridiculously easy (unless or until Google has fixed it) for a scammer to claim someone else’s Place Page if they have a mailing address in the same town as the business. Don’t believe me? Mike Blumenthaluncovered the way to do it, and it is quoted in detail at Search Engine Roundtable.

We tweeted the TechCruch story about the site which, if you visited while logged in to a Google account, sent you an email proving it had just harvested your email information. Scary, isn’t it? Well, the screenshotof the website, itself (no, we didn’t visit it to see if it was true – besides, it was down by the time we got there . . . ) got us thinking about security and how this occurred.

Recently the Professional Association of Innkeepers International (PAII)asked me to do a webinar on building a dashboard to aid in online reputation monitoring. I had read a really good article on the topica year or so ago, so put some of that information to good use, added a bit of my own, and created the presentation. The presentation (slightly adapted) is below. One note from the audio (which isn’t included) is that at the time of the presentation the TweetBeep.

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.

What is Google Instant? Search results while you’re typing. Not the little drop-down thingie that anticipates what you’ll type, but actual results (complete with local map, for appropriate searches) that change as you type. See the screen shot below for an example. Notice that while the user has typed in “bed and” Google suggest has added “breakfast” and the search results are for the full term “bed and breakfast”. If you change the third word to bath, the results change.

As review sites like TripAdvisor, Yelp, and others, supplemented by the more specifically-targeted sites like the bed and breakfast directory reviews, become so very important to small lodging properties, Google did not miss out, and began adding reviews from many of these sites on their “Place Page” (formerly Local Business Center) for the business reviewed. Google’s next step was to add the ability to review a property directly on the Place Page.

Not so many years ago, as the use of the internet technologies was maturing, there was a lot of talk about the leveling of the playing field, allowing the smaller businesses to compete with the larger. You don’t hear so much about that, these days. As businesses of all sizes have turned to internet marketing and social media to build relationships with customers and potential customers, the scales have reverted to the same imbalance as in traditional marketing.

As if you haven’t heard enough about getting started with Facebook, Twitter and other social media, and you need to claim your Google Place Page (formerly Local Business Center listing), here we go again, with more changes to the way we market our businesses. Those who are on Twitter will have noticed that the web pages for posting have recently shown a link asking if you want to add your location to your posts.

Wouldn’t it be great if Google would tell you which changes will help with search results? Don’t you wish your site ranked better in the organic search engine results pages (SERPs)? Wouldn’t it be great if you could find out from Google (well, let’s not forget Bing, Yahoo! and the others, but after all, their share of the market is tiny compared to GOOG) whether or not certain changes will really make any difference?

We’re used to seeing Google link (in the so-called organic search engine results pages – SERPs) to our home page, and sometimes to other popular pages on our lodging web site. But wouldn’t it be great if they linked directly to your availability or booking page? Well, now you can have them do just that (though not from the SERPs – for that the page is on its own for establishing popularity)!

Last week Google announced that its Local Business Center pages would be called Place Pages, and that they had added several new features to them. Now they have followed that up with an announcement that Place Pages now have a mobile version, at least on Android phones (such as the Google G1, Motorola Droid, and several others) and iPhones. Before this announcement, smartphones with good web browsing abilities could see much of the standard Place Pages, so in that sense this isn’t an earth-shaking announcement.

Today Google announced its new “Google Places” program– which is a new name, and several new aspects, for its Local Business Center. While many things will remain the same, there are some important new additions being rolled out gradually. These could have quite an impact on businesses – especially smaller lodging properties. A few weeks ago Google signaled the beginning of this change, by calling the Local Business Center listing a Place Page.