Are You Taking Full Advantage of Web Analytics?

With more and more travel seekers doing their shopping online, it’s imperative that your website be optimized to – as we at LiveRez.com say – “Turn Lookers into Bookers.” While LiveRez-powered websites already come preloaded with multiple features to accelerate online bookings, one feature that requires some action by the partner is using web analytics.

Google Analytics is one of the many web analytics providers supported by LiveRez.com.

But, before we explain just how to set up Web analytics on your LiveRez-powered website, let’s first take a look at what these analytics do and why they are important.

The most commonly used form of analytics is Google Analytics. It’s free, and for the most part it’s simple to use. Here’s just a small list of the details Google Analytics can tell you about your website:

• The number of times your site was visited in a certain time period
• Approximately how many different people visited your page (these are called unique visitors)
• The average length a visitor spends on your website
• How many of those visitors are coming to your site for the first time
• How often do your visitors return
• The areas where your visitors live
• The percentage of your visitors who leave your website without clicking to another page (this is called the bounce rate).
• How visitors are coming to your site. Do they find it through search engines, through links from other sites, from links in e-mails, from social media platforms, or do they type in your URL directly? The places online where visitors come from are called referrers.
• The keywords potential guests are using to find your site through search engines. Are they searching for “Florida Vacation Rentals” or “Homes for rent close to Disney World?”

This is just a small snap shot of what Google Analytics can offer you in terms of website intelligence. But, LiveRez.com is also compatible with many other analytics providers. One that we commonly use here at LiveRez.com is called CrazyEgg. One of that program’s most popular features is a heat map, which shows you exactly where (and how often) people are clicking on each of your web pages. Intelligence like this helps you better design the format of your page.

At this point, you might be asking how all this works. Apart from the technical nitty-gritty, the answer is pretty simple. All you have to do is install a special code into your webpage’s html. Generally, it’s just a matter of a simple copy and paste.

But, LiveRez.com makes things even easier. At the very bottom of our preference page, accessible in the LiveRez.com reservation system, there is a section on Web analytics. If you’re using Google Analytics all you have to do is enter your Google Analytics ID, which Google gives you when you set up your free account. For other analytics providers, there is a box where you can merely paste in the html code those analytics providers give you when you signed up. LiveRez.com takes care of the rest. It’s really that easy. And, if you need help, all you need to do is call our free technical support or review our tutorials/videos, which are also available through our reservation system.

Not a partner? Visit LiveRez.com to learn more about how our end-to-end system can save you money and increase your bookings. And for timely news from LiveRez.com, check back here or find us on Facebook and Twitter.