More and more hotels have been investing in Metasearch Engines in recent years and, especially, Google Hotel Ads.
Regardless of the MSE though, this behavioral change in prospects’ booking journey also exposes hotels to subtle issues and pitfalls that may be difficult to detect, yet can lower the performance or the quality of the data collected through these Search Engines.
Despite their harmfulness though, these mistakes are all quick fixes. In this article I’ll be guiding through them all, why it’s important to solve them and, of course, how to solve them.
Let’s start.
UTM Parameters: know where the traffic comes from.
Here’s the pitfall:
UTMs (Urchin Tracking Module) are parameters that can be used in any given URL and whose values will be tracked in Google Analytics.
There are 5 UTM parameters:
- utm_source
- utm_medium
- utm_campaign
- utm_term
- utm_content
Pretty self explanatory, aren’t they? In fact and for example, utm_source will tell what’s the source of traffic and utm_medium will tell what’s the medium used to navigate the site. More importantly: 1) you choose their values and 2) no need to use all UTMs, most times even just source and medium are more than enough.
When not in the URL, Google will try to read grab this information from the referral the link is coming from. However, quite often identity of the referral is not so explicit, therefore Google doesn’t know what value should be respectively for Source and Medium, resulting in a huge spike in (direct) / (none) values.
In fact, the good practice to follow is very simple: use UTM parameters for any link pointing to your website from other websites, including Metasearch Engine sites.
For example, in your Google My Business profile, under the Info section, instead of this:
yourwebsite.com
You might want this:
yourwebsite.com/?utm_source=GMB&utm_medium=google
Finally, this is how the above deep link will look like in your Source/Medium report in Google Analytics.
Auto generate deep links with UTM values.
If you are wondering how to write deep links with the right syntax and avoid mistakes, Google itself has a UTM builder tool that does that in no time: just plug in the values you want, and the final link will automatically be generated for you.
Booking Engine not linking the hotel website.
In a pre-metasearch engines era, there was this myth by which the booking engine shouldn’t be having any links, including the hotel website’s the user just landed from.
No header, no footer, no links, no buttons at all, other than the ones needed to complete the booking process.
The reason behind the myth was that, once landed on the booking platform, users should not be given any option to go elsewhere.
Right or wrong, the myth had its point.
However in this metasearch era we are now fully into, not only such myth makes no more sense, but it’s also counterproductive.
Travellers now begin their booking journey on Metasearch engine sites and very often the call to action they click is the one next to your room prices, which points to the booking engine.
Like in the example above, the CTA may be misleading: Visit Site on Google in fact doesn’t bring people to any website.
Instead, prospects may land on a booking page like the one below: do you think such a page can help the hotel make a good first impression?
Here just some of the macro aspects that make the above a bad user experience:
- I was browsing in English, but the booking engine showed up in French;
- Poor look&feel, no logo, no brand visuals;
- Wrong copy;
- Different prices than those displayed on Google Hotel Ads;
- Finally, no link to the website…
… actually, there is a link to the website, in the very footer of the page, and not very much visible:
I clicked this Home link, and here comes the 3rd issue. Let’s see if you notice it:
No, it’s not UTM parameters not being passed to the hotel website.
Instead, whilst cross-domain tracking works normally from website to booking engine, it doesn’t work at all from booking engine to website.
2-way cross-domain tracking.
Cross-domain is common practice when it comes to Google Analytics and, in general, tracking tools.
As you know, most times website and booking engine lie on different domains. Plain and simple, cross-domain tracking does what it says: it tracks across different domains.
Its importance stands in what happens when it’s not there: 2 Sessions being counted rather than just 1.
So what?
So, all session-scoped metrics and KPIs in Google Analytics are messed up, for example: wrong bounce rate, wrong avg. session duration, avg. pages per sessions. Most importantly, wrong conversion rate, the North Star of every E-commerce and hotels.
Setting up cross-domain tracking is very easy, yet I’ve noticed many old installations in which only the booking engine domain is listed in the API. This setup results in exactly what we’ve seen in the example above: cross-domain tracking working from website to booking engine, but not the other way around.
P.S. If you wish to know how to set up cross-domain tracking, here‘s the link for Universal Analytics, here‘s the instructions for Google Tag Manager.
The super simple way to check cross-domain tracking.
When moving from domain A (source domain) to domain B (target domain) check if the _ga is appended to the target domain.
For example, let’s assume you move from your website to the booking engine: when the booking engine loads up, check the URL and if you see something like this, it means cross-domain tracking is working fine:
Those numbers after _ga= represent the ClientID, which is the value Google automatically stores in a browser cookie to make cross-domain tracking work.
Now, do yourself a favour and open up your booking engine. If you open it by clicking a Book Now or a Check Availability button on the website, make sure to strip the _ga parameter and its value before proceeding with the test.
What we are doing now is checking whether your cross-domain tracking works also from the booking engine to the website.
Click now a link that points to your website: maybe it’s the logo, or the hotel name in the header, or in the footer.
Done?
Good, does your website URL includes a _ga parameter?
If so, you’re good to go. If not, call your webmaster, the web agency, your uncle… whoever installed Google Analytics on your behalf and have it fix.
Plus, be aware that your data so far is totally unreliable.
If you don’t trust but you understand a bit of cookies, open up the Developer console in your browser (e.g. Chrome) and search the _ga cookie in the Network panel. Do that on both website and booking engine.
Do you see different values like in the example above? Very bad, 2 sessions are counted.
Conclusion.
There’d be so much more to watch out for, some things way more obvious that these above, some even more hidden. I thought of mentioning these 3 though because they are easy to detect and even easier to fix, yet their impact in case of a wrong set up is so relevant.
Keep watching: Metasearch Engines: Why You Should Not Invest in Them… Except Google Hotel Ads.
