The prospect of delving into Google Analytics data might seem overwhelming to many hotel owners and managers. However, analysing and reporting this data becomes lot easier if you have a firm grasp on the foundations of what each key performance indicator (KPI) represents and what it monitors. Many hotel marketers overlook Google Analytics’ potential for analysing social media engagement. Make sure you are familiar with the data accessible in Google Analytics before shelling out money for a third-party social media analysis tool. Over the past several years, Google Analytics has undergone a number of design updates meant to make the platform more intuitive for consumers. Finding and understanding news based on social media is simpler than ever. In order to evaluate the success of your social media operations and identify which channels warrant the most attention, hoteliers should consider the following three measures.
Traffic
Click the Acquisition page, and then select the Social tab to see a breakdown of how many sessions your site received from social media. When the submenu appears, select Overview. You can see exactly how many people found your site through each social media platform here. Using this report, you can determine which referral sources are most productive. The term “Sessions via Social Referral” is used to describe the total number of visits that were referred via social media. The amount of conversions that can be directly attributed to a user’s social media activity is known as the Contributed Social Conversions. They first found your site through social media but may have returned through a different channel before making a purchase. Direct conversions from social media are known as Last Interaction Social Conversions. Someone clicked on a social media link, visited your site, and converted while they were there. Your social media postings may be particularly effective in eliciting a call to action if they account for a high percentage of the site’s last interaction social conversions.
Behavior
You can see how people who found your site through social media are behaving and interacting with it in the Network Referrals section. You may use this report to check how many pages a social media visitor from each network saw. It also details how many pages each visitor views throughout their session and how long they spend on your site on average. Both the social media traffic and the total traffic from all sources are visualised in the two graphs. Here you can see if there was a sudden uptick in visitors, as may happen if a social media post went popular and had people flooding to your site. Keep track of the topics that bring in the most visitors and build on their success in future blog entries. View the Landing sites report to get even more specific information on which sites social media is driving traffic to. These are the sites that people visited after hearing about your site on social media. This might be done in a post or in the profile’s summary. Knowing which sites are most likely to result in a conversion might help you choose which links to share on social media. Trackbacks are another crucial indicator to examine. The Trackback report details the domains that have linked to your articles. To get in touch with the people who are connecting to you, this is a great tool.
Conversions
The conversion is the most crucial indicator to analyse and monitor in addition to traffic and user behaviour to assess the effectiveness of your social media activities. The number of confirmed online reservations is a good proxy for website conversion rates. Other key performance indicators (KPIs) could be considered conversions if your analytics are not linked to your booking engine. The amount of people who sign up for your newsletter or use your booking widget are two measurable and actionable metrics that may lead to a conversion. You can see how well each social media platform is performing in terms of conversions in the Conversions report. The Users Flow report can help you understand the steps that led up to a conversion. This report details the actions of social media users as they explored your site. Select the desired social media channel and then choose to view only this piece. If you want to see where people are dropping off or leaving your website, this report will show you. If you see a high bounce rate on your rooms page, it may be time to improve it by adding more high-quality images that effectively represent your hotel and its services.
There are three social media indicators that are crucial for any hotel to track in Google Analytics, and we’ve found them for you. It’s time to begin tracking the success of your social media strategy by establishing goals in Google Analytics. Keep an eye out for our next how-to article on using Google Analytics to define and implement objectives.