With the Cookieless world quickly approaching, Google released its Google Analytics 4 beta in Q4 2020 putting the emphasis on user engagement rather than volume. Will Ferris, GCommerce’s Chief Technology Officer, provides an overview of Google Analytics 4 and some key updates you can find in this new tool.
Register to watch this on-demand webinar and learn why GA4 is important to your business.
Cookies or Cookieless. There’s been a lot of buzz among marketers about the timing of the Google Analytics 4 roll out. A few weeks back, Google made the announcement they were prolonging the timeline for their privacy sandbox push as publishers, browsers, advertisers and other 3rd parties were clamoring to roll out the approved version of tracking in the cookieless world.
This announcement doesn’t apply to Google Analytics and their rollout of GA4. Google knows that while 3rd parties begin to develop cookieless technologies, its analytics platform must be the foundation for measurement.
Their push for Google Analytics 4 adoption is obvious. With nearly half of all the websites across the web running analytics, Google is pushing GA4 right inside their account creation. Here is a screenshot of the set-up process which highlights Google’s emphasis on GA4. (You’ll see “Google Analytics 4” highlighted.)
If you’re a current Google Analytics user, it’s important to upgrade to the latest version. GCommerce has been running both GA3/GUA alongside GA4 to understand the difference in data and measurement. For the month of June, we saw significant decreases in revenue within our GA3 profiles.
Our tests have shown that Google UA underreports Organic by 33%, Paid Search by 26%, and Referral by as much as 51% when compared to the attribution of GA4. This could be for a couple reasons:
You want to have the latest analytics technology available for measurement, and that means upgrading to Google Analytics 4. GA4 will work with legacy cookie technologies along with new best practices as we move towards the cookieless world. There’s no reason to wait. Contact the experts at GCommerce today.
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:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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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
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
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.
In the world of online travel first came the search engines, then the OTAs (online travel agencies, i.e. Expedia) and most recently the metasearch engine websites such as Trivago and Kayak. Hoteliers are forced to evolve and utilize new online channels to be visible and compete effectively online. But what is the most effective way for hotels to use these channels? Since the launch of Google’s Hotel CPC program, hotels must now use a combination of search engine and metasearch campaigns just to be visible throughout Google’s search engine features. What are you doing to ensure your hotel is visible and driving qualified traffic across these online channels? Let’s break down what metasearch for hotels means, where it fits into your online marketing strategy and how hotels can be successful using this marketing channel.
WHAT IS HOTEL METASEARCH?
Unlike OTAs such as Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity, metasearch engines don’t hold their own inventory of hotel rooms. Instead, metasearch engines pull data from other search engines to provide information to users about rates and availability. The metasearch engine will then direct the user from their website to the original source (i.e. OTA or hotel website) to book their stay. The metasearch engine will then receive a referral commission or CPC charge for sending the traffic to the hotel or airline website.
Examples of Hotel Metasearch include:
WHY SHOULD HOTELS PARTICIPATE IN METASEARCH
Here’s another view, taken directly from inside Google Maps:
In the above screenshot, you can see two different ways Google’s monetized the local search results for hotels. The first is the ads on the far right for Cambria Hotel and AC Hotel. These ads are managed directly through Google Adwords paid search campaigns. The second is shown in the details view for Omni Chicago Hotel, which are the OTA channels displaying with rates – these ads are populated through Google’s Hotel CPC program. Google’s Hotel CPC program is a form of metasearch and managed separately from Google Adwords paid search campaigns.
HOW CAN HOTELS PARTICIPATE IN METASEARCH?
Hotels can participate in Metasearch directly through their Google Hotel partner booking engine providers. The Google Hotel program requires a direct API with rates and inventory feed directly from booking engine to Google. Google Hotel CPC partners include Synxis, TravelClick and more. You can find a full list here. Pricing through your booking engine is typically set up on a commission based model that charges you a percentage based on revenue from reservations driven by the campaigns. Some also charge CPCs on top of this commission. Review contracts with your booking engine partner to ensure it will be a profitable model for your hotel.
HOW CAN HOTELS BE SUCCESSFUL WITH METASEARCH?
Just like all other marketing channels and campaigns, it is important to closely monitor key performance indicators from your metasearch campaigns.
Have a question? We can help.
