It’s no secret that the key to growing tourism businesses in 2019 has been to master digital exposure. Congratulations if you’re a tour operator who has nailed this. It’s a bonus if this exposure has resulted in traffic to your travel business website.
If you’re a savvy operator who has taken the steps to embed the OperatorHub mobile responsive booking widget, then you’re probably keen to understand the way customers behave and interact with the rest of your website.
The good news is that Google Analytics monitors your audience 24/7, and harbors a plethora of data and reports available to you at the click of a button. But where to start?
Of the many meticulous corners of the world of Google Analytics, here are our favorite features you can harness for your travel website:
1. Source/Medium
This one should be glaringly obvious to most experienced analytics users, but that doesn’t make it any less important. For those new to the platform, Source/Medium should be the question looming over every purchase, enquiry, click and call that your website encounters: where did this customer come from?
Your website may be attracting thousands of hits from a shout-out a local digital site gave you, but you won’t know until you check your Source/Medium report!
Source/media can also be a secondary dimension used to identify the source of events on your site such as sales or enquiries, you’ll definitely want to know where they’re coming from.
2. Audience Segments
Segments are our personal favorite, they’ll be your best friend when you need to scrutinize traffic, and that traffic only.
Let’s say you want to analyze the behavior of “women only recipients” from a recent EDM you sent to a mass database. A segment will give you the capability to filter out all traffic BUT your desired data set. From there you can surf the entire analytics platform monitoring behaviors of just that demographic. Hoorah!
3. Behavior Flow
If flow charts are your reporting love language, then the Behavior Flow is going to be your new hangout, but this feature is best used once an audience segment (as above) has been applied.
The behavior flow is a high-level visual map of your users’ interactions with pages on your site. It may look overwhelming at first, but some incredibly valuable insights can be found in this area of Google Analytics, just don’t forget to segment your audience!
4. UTM Parameters
Now this one isn’t actually a feature that sits inside the analytics platform; however, we cannot stress this piece of advice enough:
Add UTM parameters to every single link of your website that gets promoted, you’ll thank us!
UTM parameters are the funny little tracking templates that sit at the end of a when it is promoted externally. They don’t look like much, but they will save your life months down the track when you need to decipher the Winter EDM traffic from the Summer EDM traffic.
5. Site Speed
Your OperatorHub dynamic booking widget is a tool used to accelerate those golden online bookings, but it’s no good if your website is so slow that it’s encouraging bounces before consumers reach the booking fare grid. So how does your website stack up? SemRush have reported that:
- if your site loads in 5 seconds, it is faster than approximately 25% of the web
- if your site loads in 2.9 seconds, it is faster than approximately 50% of the web
- if your site loads in 1.7 seconds, it is faster than approximately 75% of the web
- if your site loads in 0.8 seconds, it is faster than approximately 94% of the web
6. Technology & Mobile
It’s the catch 22 of our industry, that most travel websites are designed by developers sitting at desktop computers. But the results of your mobile use report for your website might provide some interesting surprises.
The Tourism Australia 2019 report showed that smart phones are the most common way that international holiday visitors access the internet while in Australia, accounting for 25% of all internet access.
7. Goals
For most travel businesses, the obvious goal of your website will be for interactions to result in purchases. But how does this translate to an on-site event or series of interactions?
For travel businesses using the OperatorHub dynamic booking widget, the goal of your website will be a page visit to the URL generated after a payment gateway transaction.
Once you’ve identified this URL, save it as your “goal”, so that you can analyze behaviors of converted customers and select campaigns. Imagine if you could backwards funnel every booking your business has received to trace the steps a consumer took – the goals feature is technically this.
8. Customization and Saved Reports
The last 7 points may be a lot to remember, but the “saved reports” feature in customization will streamline your entire weekly reporting schedule!
Have a play with our favorite Google Analytics features and get acquainted with your website visitors.
Find out how OperatorHub can help you to grow your business. Request a free demo.