When analysing data produced by users navigating a website, it is essential to not only understand their behaviour but be able to measure KPI.
Unless data is available documenting how the website is performing, how can the internet franchise owners be expected to sell against that data. Savvy advertisers will easily be able to trip up a site owner about facts and figures and quote competitors information if they have not been shown how to interpret the site KPIs and analytics data.
Recording data about the sites performance over a period of time allowed for trending information to be analysed such as brand specific traffic. This might give an inclination of how a specific area was performing on the wider tourism map then by looking at the sector as a whole this might be a common trend. As seen below there is a gradual rise from March peaking at the school holidays and Easter and reaching a peak again in July when the schools finish for their summer holidays falling off dramatically in early September. This is a classic tourism yearly trend model for any UK seaside resort.
One of the great things about an online business is its ability to be measured and during the development of the Citys.info internet franchise some advanced uses of Google analytics were implemented to try and measure KPIs on a site wide level from accommodation enquiries right through to premium advert performance.
In Google Analytics there is a function to create “Goals”. Goals are achievements that have been made based on a set of pre defined variables. Maybe a user clicked on a call to action they can then be measured against an older version of that same call to action or maybe a user has clicked on a form and made a hotel reservation. As well as goals these are also known as conversions. The website converted someone to do something and it has been tracked in the analytics.
Conversion tracking can take many forms and become very complicated for example if the keyword “Majorca Holidays” is bought via Google Adwords taking the user to holiday information page for Majorca. Although all the functionality and call to action might be there for the user to complete that booking transaction they may just be researching the market to see what is available and what prices are like. This research may go on for weeks maybe months until the user finally navigates their way back to the original keyword they used some period of time ago and bought the holiday, this is known as an assisted keyword conversion and requires complex tracking software usually in the form of a cookie (a text file assigned to a users browser triggered by visiting a web page).
With Citys.info due to the nature of the content and the lack of paid traffic it is not really necessary to track the conversion down to that granular level. It is important to track hotel enquiries to individual hotels and hotel content in general purely from a sales perspective in giving customers an update on how their listing is performing. At a top level, looking at all the hotels on the website and to get a total number of enquiries for any given time frame some event tracking can be configured in Google analytics.
We have worked extensively with Citys.info to implement KPI measurement to a very granular level. Get in touch to see how we can help you.
