Seems like every time innkeepers open an email or answer the phone they hear about another tip, trick, or product that they are made to feel they must have, but at what cost in terms of time and money? Perhaps it’s this overload of information and offerings that has resulted in many inns missing out on one of the most important tools – one that is free, and once it's set up, doesn’t have to take up a lot of your time.
This free tool will:
1) Give you the ability to know the last place a guest found you before they booked a room on your website (which is so much more valuable than just knowing about the sites that send you traffic).
2) This tool will give you the ability to know if any other websites "assisted" the guest in choosing to book with you, in addition to last place they were before they booked.
3) This tool won’t let you lose money by dropping advertising that is converting into bookings.
4) This tool will save you money by helping you know which sites are not converting into bookings, so you can stop paying them.
The tool itself is free, although you will probably need a little help from your webmaster setting it up. Once that's finished, it will provide quick and valuable information at your finger tips.
The tool is Google’s Universal Analytics / E-Commerce Tracking, and most of the popular booking engines now support it, so there is no reason not to harness its power. Looking at your traditional Google Analytics traffic reports doesn’t give you enough useful information to make a quality advertising decision, especially if you don’t know which of the sites on it are actually contributing to bookings. Some sites send lots of traffic, but if the referrals do not convert to guests, the traffic is pretty much useless. On the other hand, sites that send less traffic may be sending high-quality referrals that are generating thousands of dollars in revenue. So even if the traffic numbers don’t look impressive, the revenue does! (Full disclosure: This is the category BnBFinder usually falls into.)
A Free Tool That No Innkeeper Can Be Without
By Mary White