Recap: Demystifying Google Analytics Tour 2009
Article posted October 5, 2009 in Speaking Engagements
I am now back from my whirlwind tour of four California cities: San Diego, Santa Barbara, Torrance and San Jose. It was great to be in my ex -home state and deliver some very well received sessions on one of my favorite topics – Google Analytics.
Here are some of the questions that came up at the sessions:
Q: What’s the difference between using Omniture and Google Analytics for hotels?
I provided a detailed comparison of Google Analytics vs. Omniture in a previous post. Hotels usually do not have complex ecommerce metrics and dimensions in place, so Omniture might be overkill for the first-time hotel user. Omniture excels at tracking all the online events, metrics and comparisons for high-level operations, such as a hotel brand with hundreds of properties, or an ecommerce site with thousands of prouducts. Cost is also a big factor: GA is free, while Omniture costs between $30K and $100K.
Q: My hotel booking engine is not GA-integrated. Any possible way to track website conversions?
Stop using non-GA integrated booking engines! Some hotel booking engines help hotels track conversions from pay per click and other online sources by providing their own version of the Google URL Builder tool. This has been a great help for marketers as well as owners, because it helps them get a better sense of their ROI from online ad buys. Sadly, if you are not tracking the actual visitor clicks and behavior on your website, you are not improving your content, layout, etc, based on real-time data. This is preventing you from increasing your website’s conversion rate and limiting your ROI. The hotel industry can only get out of this vicious cycle by exclusively using and endorsing booking engines that are tracking through GA integration. Now, if your current booking engine does not have GA integration OR unique URL-based tracking, fire them.
Q: My marketing company has access to the Google algorithm and they are saying that we need to make every employee choose our website as the home page for their personal browser. Does that help?
OK. It’s 2009 and web marketing companies need to stop selling snake oil! Sadly, many hotels are still getting taken for a ride on these magic ranking carpets. Anyone claiming access to the Google ranking algorithm should be ashamed. As for having employees redirect to your hotel website from their browser, the only thing it’s contributing to is your website bounce rate.
Thanks for all the great questions, and also for the wonderful feedback. I enjoyed meeting so many hotel industry friends and a few fans during the last week. I’d like to end with a comment that was sent in by one of the attendees… this is why I do these sessions:
“Vikram Singh is an extremely effective communicator. He clearly feels passionate about the subject and helping businesses use reality-based information for marketing decisions. I’m not a techno-oriented person, but I could follow every point of the presentation and now know how to explore Google Analytics on my own and use it to benefit my inn.”
I’m glad to be the one bringing GA and demystifying it for everyone . I stuck with the title of this event and that is always satisfying to a speaker. So everyone, please start using analytics in your daily lives and start making data driven marketing decisions.
