Working in tourism and hospitality, Google Analytics has become a must-have tool for us. It offers us a wide variety of features without which the performance analyses of the sites we support would become unthinkable. So we’ll briefly explain how some of its practical features work and how they could benefit your business.
Google Analytics is a free web tool for analysing website visitor data and traffic. It will show you the behavior of users on your site, what actions are performed by them, what their hobbies are, which pages they visited, which previous site they came from and much more. This way you can easily build a customer profile and learn about their needs.
HOW DOES GOOGLE ANALYTICS ACTUALLY WORK?
Google’s tool creates a personal code, also called Cookies, which is attached to your website code. This code compiles a sophisticated encrypted report of the activity of users who visit the site, along with a variety of information about them, such as: age, gender, interests, location, etc. It then sends this database to Google’s servers, where it is decrypted and processed into an easily understandable form, available for viewing by the site owner.
HOME TAB
The home page contains general information for a quick overview of the website’s activities. This indicates changes in the number of users, number of sessions, revenue, number of active users, etc. for a certain period of time, which may change.
CUSTOMIZATION TAB
The Customize tab is divided into 4 subpages: Dashboards, Custom Reports, Saved Reports, and Custom Alerts.
With dashboards, you can view your most important reports, easily customize them or create new ones according to your needs and preferences.
REAL-TIME REPORTS
They provide useful information to visitors in real time. In addition to the Overview, you can view other fields in real time such as Location, Traffic Sources, Content, Events and Conversions. This feature is very useful for timely response and especially important when launching and monitoring risk campaigns.
AUDIENCES
As the name implies, the Audiences field provides detailed information about your website visitors. Here you can learn in depth: who your active users are; what their demographic and geographic characteristics are; what interests and hobbies they have; what is their behaviour on the site (which pages have they viewed and how long have they stayed); whether they prefer to use the mobile or dextop version, etc. We encourage you to take the time to explore this field, as it contains many breakdowns with detailed and varied useful information for your users. Separately, Google often adds subpages with new kinds of calculations, analytics, and features.
ACQUISITION
This type of report will show you how users actually decided to visit your website and where they came from. You’ll be able to browse through the Overview or in more detail: your organic and direct search; links from other websites or social networks to your website; traffic from emails and paid traffic. You will also be able to learn which words your site visitors are using or searching for. Note that there are differences in the method of data calculation between Google Analytics and social networks (e. g. Facebook Insights), so comparing the data you will find the same values differ.
BEHAVIORS
Here, Google Analytics uses information about the site such as webpages, content within them, loading speed, site search, words, etc. , and then compares the collected statistics with visitor behavior. Using this feature, it’s easiest to find out what the user experience is like on your site, how you can optimize or change it, and whether people like the content you’re uploading.
And last but not least in importance.
CONVERSION
This report will show you the actions taken by visitors to your website before they turn into conversions (actions important to your business – transaction, purchase, goal achievement, adding an item to cart, email inquiry, and so on). In principle, this feature offers additional options such as setting goals and creating multi-channel funnels, but as useful and effective as they are, they complicate the process of working with Google Analytics to some extent.
With this functionality, Google Analytics can become the ideal tool for measuring your hotel or travel agency’s website traffic. With it, you have the opportunity to achieve your goals and maximize the effectiveness of your site.
So if you have any questions or need advice on using Google Analytics or marketing your travel business, don’t hesitate to contact us!
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