What Hotels Should Know About Cookieless Tracking & Google Analytics 4

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June 14, 2021 by

We’ve recently written about Google’s latest iteration of Analytics and important things hotel’s should know about Google Analytics 4 (GA4). In this post, we will go into a bit more detail on how the change to cookieless tracking might impact your hotel’s digital marketing efforts.

What are Cookies and Why Do They Matter?

Cookies are small pieces of data stored on your computer by the web browser. What they aren’t isn’t so important as to what they are used for, which is to track individual users. By dropping a unique cookie or pixel onto your browser, a website can then track behavior outside of your website.

Are Cookies An Invasion of Privacy?

This is the big debate currently being waged and many people would say yes. Legislations like Europe’s GDPR, California Consumer Privacy Act, recent updates to Apple’s IOS to block more 3rd party tracking are all efforts to protect user’s individual privacy by making it harder to identify those individuals. At the heart of this debate is cookieless tracking. While cookies are not banned nor illegal, a lot of browsers, plug-ins and software help to block cookies and there is evidence the cookies are becoming a less viable way to track users.

What does this mean for Google’s Universal Analytics?

Google’s current and most popular iteration of Analytics, Universal Analytics, uses first-party cookies to determine a number of variables within their tracking. Already, digital marketers are reporting gaps in data based on people that are actively blocking cookies and tracking. Within our own data, we have noticed certain instances where traffic from California has decreased, while traffic from locations not tracked has increased. This change is very likely indicative that California’s privacy laws are having an impact on our ability to track.

Why is Google Analytics 4 A Solution To A Cookiless World?

Despite what the name suggests, GA4 isn’t actually more robust tracking, it is actually less tracking on individual users. This is because GA4 is not tracking every pageview. Rather than rely on cookies and javascript variables to track every pageview, GA4 is tracking based on specific events that are built and established. Google then applies advanced models to fill out data for traffic and behavior. What Google Analytics 4 lacks in individual tracking it makes up for with the robust tools of their machine learning algorithms. The need for something like GA4 comes from the new privacy laws and public awareness around data collection.

What Should Your Hotel Do About Google Analytics 4?

As we discussed above, changes to the way users view their privacy will make Universal Analytics less and less reliable as time goes on. The earlier that your hotel starts to utilize GA4, get familiar with it and start to utilize data from it, the further ahead of the curve your hotel will be when Universal Analytics comes to a point it is no longer recommended to utilize. Also, your historical data will not automatically carry over from Universal Analytics. Your historical data will only go as far back as the 1st day that you start using GA4.

How To Get Started With Google Analytics 4?

After my father got a debilitating injury trying to build a retention wall in our backyard at the ripe-young age of 56, he decided it might be better to trust the experts. In this situation, we would also recommend utilizing an expert to help install GA4 for your hotel’s website. The truth is, GA4 is a completely novel way of tracking that does not rely exclusively on individual user data. Instead, it relies on event signals that are built and established based on the functionality and goals of your website.

Google Analytics 4 Tracking From GCommerce

If you’re interested in having the experts at GCommerce help establish GA4 tracking and reporting for your hotel website, contact us today!

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Top 5 Reasons Your Hotel Needs Prospecting Campaigns

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September 21, 2020 by

You want your hotel to make money, right? At least that is usually the main goal when it comes to most hotel digital marketing campaigns. What if we told you that the secret to driving more revenue and building your audiences up was by prospecting and targeting top-of-funnel users? 

We all know that retargeting campaigns, or campaigns serving ads to users already familiar with your brand or hotel, are the main money makers of the marketing world. However, those digital marketing campaigns would quickly run out of gas without the continued support of prospecting. While we don’t typically see a hefty number of conversions through prospecting campaigns (although a strong campaign can still see results), they are a key player when it comes to success with any digital marketing campaign.

Here are the top reasons why you should be running prospecting marketing campaigns for your hotel.

  1. Audience Refresh. The continued use of prospecting (or brand awareness) campaigns will help refresh your retargeting audiences by consistently bringing in new users. Most retargeting windows are within 30-90 days of being onsite, but if you aren’t refreshing this audience regularly, it will quickly decrease. This in turn will cause whatever users are left to be shown your ads in excess which can lead to ad fatigue, higher bounce rates, lower CTRs, more spam reports and of course, less revenue.
  2. Discover New Audience Targeting Segments. Many people shy away from prospecting because they think they already know their target audience. At GCommerce, we argue that there’s always potential to expand into new markets, geographics, demographics, and more! After all, there’s no way to see if a new targeting segment is viable if you never try it out. By steering away from the traditional targeting segments into new geographic locations or interests, we’ve often found new, responsive audiences that were previously unconsidered and thus expanding our reach and driving more revenue.
  3. Increased Traffic to Your Hotel Website. Aside from building up the run of site list, getting users to your site is a major benefit of prospecting campaigns. Our clients are always seeking out new ways to increase their site traffic with qualified visitors. Prospecting is one of the most cost-effective ways to do this, especially if you use Display and Facebook advertising as they traditionally see much lower CPCs and can run on a smaller budget compared to other channels, such as paid search.
  4. Increased Brand Awareness. Prospecting isn’t only for supporting retargeting campaigns. In fact, most people will think of prospecting in digital marketing as a tool to build brand awareness and high visibility across the web. This is especially important if you are launching a new brand or starting out on a new channel for the first time. Whenever we launch a new client at GCommerce, we tend to focus on their prospecting campaigns first so that we can build up our retargeting lists as quickly as possible and increase brand visibility at the same time.
  5. Drive More Wedding, Meeting & Event Lead Submissions. That’s right, prospecting campaigns are also great for eliciting onsite leads or on-Facebook leads. Unlike using retargeting lists, which are normally limited in size, prospecting marketing campaigns can be specifically targeted to drive quality traffic to your onsite lead form. Facebook also has great lead generation ability and allows you to re-create your form in the Facebook ad itself, allowing the user to engage with your hotel’s ad and complete the form in with less clicks. As a bonus, you can also add the users who filled out your form to your retargeting lists (win-win).

Utilizing prospecting marketing campaigns for your hotel is always important and will always be encouraged by the marketing experts at GCommerce. It’s especially important to use them right now as we’re learning how to cope with COVID-19’s impact on the industry. If you’ve had your marketing channels paused during this time and are now getting back to you regular advertising schedule, prospecting will be pertinent to your hotel’s digital marketing campaign success. 

Most likely, your retargeting lists are depleted and your normal target audiences have shifted to the drive market or similar markets. Pushing your marketing dollars toward prospecting over retargeting first will help to build up your run of site and serve your ads to the most qualified audiences rather than wasting it on an audience who isn’t looking to travel to your location or is no longer interested in your brand. 

For more information and guidance on building your prospecting audiences up, consult the experts at GCommerce today!

The Rise of Data Regulation & The Impact on Hotel Marketing

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February 18, 2020 by

The rise of digital advertising grew from an era of limited tracking capabilities to an era of almost unlimited access to tracking user data across the web. This advancement in tracking has provided amazing opportunities to enhance campaign targeting options, narrowing targets based on user behavior and tying that tracking back to direct online booked revenue. This wild west atmosphere of digital tracking reached an apex that finally had governments and citizens around the world taking notice and growing concerned. Concepts around privacy and data took hold with the general public and political scandals, such as the ones documented in Netflix's The Great Hack. This drew attention to the need for the government to step in and help protect citizens from how their data was tracked, used and sold across the web. 

To better understand where we are and what it means for hotel marketing, let’s look back at a brief timeline of changes and regulations surrounding online data over the past decade.


What Do These Changes Mean?

September 2017: Internet browsers start to step in. Apple, whose revenues don’t rely on advertisements, was the first to take action by banning 3rd party cookies in September 2017.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/14/16308138/apple-safari-11-advertiser-groups-cookie-tracking-letter

May 2018: After 4 years of debate and refining the law, GDPR finally goes into effect. The first set of regulations aimed at protecting citizens from how their data is tracked, used, stored and sold.

Fall 2018: Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.0 for Safari, which was announced in June 2018, goes into effect.

https://webkit.org/blog/8311/intelligent-tracking-prevention-2-0/

May 2019: Google announces during Google Marketing Live that it is expanding its privacy and data security settings with new tools to give users more control as well as giving them more transparency on how data is used to personalize ads.

September 2019: Firefox bans 3rd party cookies by default, blocking thousands of companies from viewing users' online activity and giving users the ability to see what companies it blocks.

Today’s Firefox Blocks Third-Party Tracking Cookies and Cryptomining by Default

November 2019: Google Ads Announces Data Processing Restriction Setting. The launch of restricted data processing capability allows advertisers to block all users from California or on a per-user request. Applying this setting turns off the ability to build and use remarketing lists for these users.

December 2019: Apple’s Update to It’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) Initiative made it harder for 3rd parties to track user behavior and track conversion data. 

January 2020: CCPA officially goes into effect. Google Announces it will Ban 3rd Party Cookies on Chrome browser by 2022.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/16/21065641/google-chrome-cookie-ban-advertisers

February 2020: Google’s SameSite change goes into effect, meaning Chrome will stop supporting cross-site third-party cookie sharing by default.

In addition to CCPA, there are new laws and regulations on state legislature dockets across the country. How or when the U.S. federal government will take action in the form of data regulation law is unknown. The question remains, how will your hotel marketing evolve and change based on current and future changes coming to data regulation. We’ve taken some time to outline how we are viewing data regulation changes and evolving our hotel marketing to address them.

What Do These Changes in Data Regulation and Tracking Mean for Hotel Marketing?

  1. You should have already consulted your lawyer. The topics and laws surrounding data regulation and technology changes can easily get confusing. GCommerce recommends that you consult with your hotel’s consumer privacy lawyer immediately if you haven’t done so already to make sure your business is in compliance with these laws. Please feel free to check out our GDPR and CCPA guides for hotels, but understand that these are not to be used in any way as legal advice.
  2. Audience lists, such as remarketing lists, will be impacted. As more people take control of their privacy and restrict sites from using cookies to track their actions and behavior, the data behind audience lists will decline and so will remarketing audience list sizes. While we’re not seeing a huge impact on our clients yet, this might result in the decline in size for these types of audience lists which can directly impact ROAS tracked.
  3. Lean into 1st party data for audience and campaign targeting. While companies that rely on 3rd party cookies to track user behavior across the web and develop audiences will suffer, companies that hold 1st party data such as Google and Facebook stand to gain the most benefit. Since Google has so much 1st party user data through its various platforms, it can continue to offer rich in-market and affinity audience targeting opportunities through its ad platforms. GCommerce already uses these audiences to drive targeting campaigns and will continue to use audiences that provide favorable results for our clients.
  4. Our ability to track conversions will suffer. It will continue to get harder to track conversions to the same level of detail we have been used to through some browsers and platforms. The changes implemented by Firefox, Safari, and Chrome can all have an impact on this tracking. The industry is having to pivot and changes in technology that move away from cookie tracking are being worked on by large tech companies including Google. GCommerce is on the pulse of changes to pivot how we implement tracking across sites like Google Analytics to mitigate as much interruption to tracking as possible.
  5. Contextual targeting will become a greater asset. Contextual targeting options on Google and DV360 offer an alternative to audience-based targeting. Using keywords and topics allows us to craft ads and messaging to match content the user is viewing. This will continue to be a method for us to effectively market our clients and drive performance.
  6. Automation and machine learning tools can help. When cookies are blocked, it also prevents the ability to control certain campaign aspects like ad frequency. Google is investing heavily in ways to ensure the user experience isn’t impacted. One way is using machine learning within DV360, GCommerce’s programmatic solution of choice, to help prevent users from seeing your ad too many times.

The digital environment will continue to evolve as more data protection regulation emerges, forcing platforms and advertisers to adjust accordingly. While this does provide uncertainty in areas like audiences and tracking, it does provide the hope of a more secure web for us all. Please reach out to GCommerce with any questions you have in regards to our stance and preparation for these changes to the hotel digital marketing landscape.

Increase ROAS & Decrease CPA

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October 9, 2017 by

How much are you paying for conversions?

In a world of increasing competition, rising CPC’s, and an ongoing battle over shrinking organic impressions; every click in the Paid Search world counts. As CPCs continue to increase YOY across all industries; the battle over rising CPAs is becoming tougher for hotels to win. Are you maximizing your budget to obtain the most clicks and conversions?

HOW ADWORDS AUDIENCES CAN HELP YOU WIN THE BATTLE OVER RISING CPA

We have all heard of remarketing lists for search and audience targeting, but are you effectively utilizing these tools to maximize your campaigns’ CPA and ROAS performance? If your answer is “no” or “I don’t know”, then you’re missing out one of the most effective ways to segment and target your campaigns to get more conversions for your budget.

Reviewing audience data from multiple clients, here are the results:

  • 16% decrease in cost per click
  • 62% increase in average click-through rate (CTR)
  • 103% higher return on remarketing audiences then non-remarking lists search user traffic
  • 161% increase in conversion rate


Still wondering about your bottom line? COST PER ACQUISITION (COST PER RESERVATION SPECIFICALLY) WAS 64% lower for remarketing lists for search audiences versus all search traffic.

Search Engine Marketing for Hotels

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September 28, 2017 by

AUDIENCE TARGETING AND ITS INTRODUCTION TO SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING: As advertisers, we have the option to add specific audience targeting to paid search marketing campaigns. Google’s audience targeting was originally only available on display networks and YouTube campaigns, but in May 2017, Google expanded audience targeting to its paid search ad network. For advertisers in the hospitality industry, the in-market audience targeting options include demographics, such as age and gender.

AUDIENCE TARGETING FOR HOSPITALITY PPC: Age plays a vital part in marketing for the hotel and hospitality industry. The legal age to book a hotel room in the U.S. is 18 years old, but many hotels have the option to limit the booking age to guests who are 21 years and older. When evaluating previous traffic and booking behavior, we noticed a higher ratio of spending to revenue in people under the age of 25. Based on this information, we decided to focus our audience targeting for men and women above the age of 24. Currently, there are two different options for including audience targeting for hotels:

  • Focusing on specific demographics
  • Remarketing to the hotel’s returning guests

We focus on a few different types of remarketing. One type of remarketing is website targeting, which delivers ads to people who previously visited your website. Another form of remarketing through Google AdWords is audience retargeting to the hotel’s email distribution list. This is called Google AdWords Customer Match and includes any customer who stayed at the hotel or signed up for a newsletter. Targeting an audience that focuses on specific demographics requires an extensive knowledge of the property and the demographic groups that have the highest conversion rates. Google Analytics will track the conversions and separate each demographic group, based on age, gender, income, or location. Based on the information that we gathered for this hotel, we determined it would be most effective to target age demographics for our audiences.

THE LENOX HOTEL RESULTS: Our team at GCommerce Solutions ran a test for using audience demographic targeting within PPC campaigns for The Lenox Hotel in the Back Bay area of Boston. We completed the following bid adjustments:

  • Added negative bid adjustments of 90% to their audiences that had the lowest conversion rates (18-24 year-olds not searching for Name Terms)
  • Added positive bid adjustments of 25% to their audiences that had the highest conversion rates (45-54 and 55-65).

Our study includes data from June 11, 2017- July 20, 2017, compared to July 21, 2017-August 29, 2017. With changes in demographic targeting, we were able to better control our budget with a 5% decrease in cost per click and 7% decrease in total cost, while capturing a 4% increase in revenue for the property. The results of this test conclude that utilizing age/ demographic bid adjustments is a more accurate way to target the most qualified audience for this hotel, and allows us to increase our overall Return On Ad Spend. GCommerce recommends tracking data at the audience level to understand performance before implementing any bid adjustments. Specific adjustments and test parameters should be unique for your hotel, based on historical data. Please contact us if you have any questions about audience targeting and how you can better utilize this feature to improve performance.

Ready to increase your direct revenue and returns-on-ad-spend? Great! Click the button below and get started today.

Hotel & Digital Marketing Analytics | Water Business Analytics

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September 22, 2017 by

Psychology experts have estimated that having something like a communal water cooler will increase workplace productivity by as much as 10-15%. Experts at GCommerce will tell you it’s a huge pain when the communal water cooler stops working. Which is exactly what happened last week at our offices in Park City. It took just over 2 days for it to be fixed and in that time we used 2.5-gallon jugs as replacements. Our Reporting and Analytics specialists are always looking for new ways to measure data and we saw this as a great opportunity for some water cooler insights. While this information probably does not benefit our business in any way, we thought it would be interesting to measure out our drinking water usage in an exercise very similar to building insights for hotel websites. Here, we’d like to share our results with you:

We bought 2 different types of water, Spring Water and Drinking Water, both from Mount Olympus. We contacted the wonderful people at Mount Olympus Water for comment, they explained: “the difference between the 2 is that Spring Water is from a locally sourced spring with a natural mixture of minerals that give the water a pH balance between 6.5 and 8. Drinking Water is purified from a locally sourced tap with natural minerals added that give the water a pH of exactly 6.” The representative that commented for us said that he personally preferred the Drinking Water to the Mineral Water. I was unable to determine any difference in a blind taste test.

Table 1

Screen-Shot-2017-09-22-at-11.02.45-AM-1

As Table 1 illustrates, GCommerce employees also prefer the Drinking Water to the Spring Water, nearly 2:1. A full Drinking Water jug unopened has about 7.5 inches of water in it. The Drinking Water jug that was not fully consumed had about .4 of an inch of water left in it. Therefore, we could estimate about .2 of a gallon of water were left, or 2.3 gallons consumed. With 1 Spring Water and 1 Drinking Water empty, that gave a total consumption of 4.8 gallons of Drinking Water and 2.5 of Spring Water.

Considering this is only about half the water the office consumed, as only 1 water cooler went out, we could double these numbers and make predictions about our office drinking habits. Assuming there are 5 days in a normal workweek, we will drink about 29 gallons of water, with 22 workdays in an average month, we will drink close to 129 gallons and with 262 workdays in an average year, we will drink over 1,530 gallons of water.

Table 2

Screen-Shot-2017-09-22-at-11.03.04-AM


If that sounds like a lot of water, it sort of is. Each gallon of water is enough to take up 7.5 cubic feet of water in a swimming pool. Which means we could completely fill a pool of over 204 cubic feet with the amount of water we drink each year. Although, as an Olympic sized swimming pool is over 88,000 cubic feet, it would take us over 441 years to drink enough water to fill a pool of that size.

At this point, you might be asking yourself, why does this matter? The short answer is, it probably doesn’t, but we thought it would be interesting. What does matter are the insights that we can learn and the strategy that can be developed by tracking data. Knowing that your office of 40 people drinks enough water each year to fill a kids-size inflatable swimming pool might not help your business at all. But accurately tracking user interactions across multiple advertising platforms to build a deeper understanding of your website visitors, bring more revenue to your business while maximizing your Return On Advertising Spend is important.

Whether it’s your website’s business analytics in the office during the week or water cooler data on the weekend, your Analytics and Reporting specialists at GCommerce are passionate about accurate data and reporting insights for hotels. Contact us today to see how we can help support your website analytics.

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