Vacation Rental Marketing: Optimizing Your Website with Analytics

One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing is the ability to precisely measure the results of your online marketing campaigns. Analyzing your marketing results enables you to gain important knowledge as to what converts users into customers and where you should/should not be spending your marketing budget.

That being said, one of the biggest drawbacks to analyzing digital metrics is that the raw data can be overwhelming and certain measures need to be taken to ensure the raw data is transformed into insightful marketing information.

Website Analytics:

Your website is your online storefront: it is where most of your marketing efforts originate from and are diverted to. Measuring and analyzing your website activities are fundamental to ensuring you are providing customers with what they want, not what you think they want.

Website analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, can provide you with the following vital analytics:

Traffic Sources by Keywords:

SEO is a very important factor when it comes to increasing the volume of visitors who come to your website from search engines such as Google. If you are optimizing your website with keywords, you can measure the success of each keyword cluster by seeing if the traffic sources to your website come from specific keyword searches.

Google Analytics also shows you which websites your visitors are coming from. If you are receiving a significant portion of visitors from a vacation rental portal website, it is a sign that you should concentrate marketing efforts into portals, as opposed to websites that do not refer traffic to your website.

Note of caution: Google Analytics does not always give you the precise list of keywords visitors used to come to your website. However, it does give you a glimpse of the top keywords. The traffic your keyword specific landing page receives is a good indicator when it comes to measuring your keyword campaign success.

Bounce rates:

According to Google, bounce rates are the percentage of visitors who only visit one of your webpages before exiting your website. Why is this important? Visitors who are interested in booking a property with your vacation rental agency will most likely visit a few of your web pages before making a decision.

A high bounce rate usually indicates that your website is not what the user is looking for and they are continuing their search elsewhere. Website design and content optimization are big factors when it comes to reducing bounce rates and increasing property bookings.

Traffic Sources by Country:

Knowing which countries your website visitors come from is great when you want to know which languages you should translate your website into. Also, knowing the traffic source by country is useful when you want to see which countries you should concentrate your online advertising campaigns on.

Month-over-month analytics:

The whole point of investing in marketing is to ensure your customer base is constantly growing. Month-over-month or year-over-year website traffic analytics will show you whether your marketing efforts are paying off. For example, if you are starting a SEO keyword campaign, you will want to see a meaningful increase in your website traffic. If there is no increase, you should be optimizing your keywords campaign and website design with A/B tests.

Conversion Tracking:

An important factor when calculating your Return on Investment (especially if you are spending money on online ads), is to measure whether your website visitors are converting into paying customers.

Website analytics programs allow you to setup conversion tracking, so that you what percentage of your website visitors are converting and where they are coming from. Converstion tracking will also allow you to further test your content/design so that you can see what converts a user and what does not.

Set up is simple and free:

Best of all, free tools such as Google Analytics, are easy to implement and you can customize reports so that you can choose which information you want to receive. You can also set up your Google Analytics so that you can periodically receive emails of your custom reports.

In the following weeks we will dig deeper into each of the factors mentioned in this blog post, so that you can set-up and effectively manage analytics campaigns. To ensure you do not miss any of the blog posts on this topic, be sure to sign up to our newsletter that is located on the top of the right section of our blog page.

As always, if you have any questions or you want to share an analytics case-study with us, be sure to join the conversation by commenting below!

If you are vacation rental agency or owner in need of a vacation rental website, one of our Kigo experts can help set you up with a SEO optimized website and vacation rental software tools in no time!You can reach us at [email protected] or on the phone (Spain) +34 512 702 105 ‧ (France) +33 1 84 17 04 18 ‧ (USA) +1 (786) 292-0030

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