Optimizing your booking platform for speed, user experience and simplicity is one of the quickest ways to gain an increase in conversion rate. If you’re still looking for new ways to get ahead, however, one thing that continues to fly under the radar is the hidden value of granular booking analytics. After all, a booking engine is far from just a means to an end. It’s a telltale indicator of guest conversion behavior, seasonal booking patterns, and ways to best capture more reservations in the future.
That being said, here are five sneaky metrics you can start to track on your booking engine, each of which will provide important insights when planning everything from digital ad and email marketing campaigns to social media strategy.
Bookings By Arrival And Departure Date
Before you point me to your property management system that’s been tracking arrival and departure dates for decades, hear me out. I’m not suggesting arrival and departure dates for confirmed bookings, but rather for guests who ventured several steps into the booking engine before dropping off.
The point is, knowing which specific dates guests are shopping is incredibly valuable when configuring personalized retargeting campaigns. Need to fill rooms over a specific weekend? Start with your low-hanging fruit and target consumers who have already engaged with those specific dates, and watch your advertising return on investment (ROI) shoot through the roof.
Days Booked Before Check-In
By measuring how far in advance consumers are booking their stays, hoteliers are not only able to gain valuable insights into pricing strategy, but also into year-over-year booking patterns. For example, if revenue is mysteriously down year-over-year for a certain month in Spring 2019, knowing that this year’s booking window is shorter could help you forecast an imminent spike in bookings next month. Quarter 2 bookings could still be up overall; it’s just that people are waiting longer to book their summer vacations in 2019 than they were in the previous year.
Upgrade Rate
Much like blockbuster e-commerce platforms like Amazon, a hotel’s booking engine is the perfect place to run upselling offers like dynamic packaging and room upgrades. The upsells do you no good, however, if your booking engine isn’t set up to track statistics like upgrade rate and dynamic package opt-ins.
The value here is primarily from an offer development standpoint, allowing hoteliers to gauge which upgrade paths work and which ones don’t. Of course, the resulting insights allow for more strategic offer creation based on seasonal demand and proven consumer behaviors.
Bookings By Promo Code Or Rate Code
The same concepts apply here. If you’re able to track which promo codes and rate codes are drawing the most interest amongst guests — especially for bookings that haven’t been completed — it becomes much easier to configure retargeting campaigns and build successful packages in the future. You can also keep an eye on which packages have an abnormally high bounce rate (i.e., guests who drop off the booking engine after selecting a certain package).
Bookings By Room Type
Here’s a metric that allows hotel marketers to work directly in tandem with their revenue managers. If the revenue manager identifies a low occupancy for a specific room type in coming months, the marketer can use their booking engine tracking statistics to build a list of prospective guests who inquired about that specific room but didn’t complete the booking. From there, they’ll know exactly the audience to target in upcoming campaigns to successfully fill rooms on short notice.
The beauty of tracking is that marketers can get as creative and proactive as they want. When my agency implements booking engine solutions for clients, our default Google Tag Manager container is standardized with a certain set of tracking metrics, but we’re more than happy to set up additional variables based on each property’s customized needs. The takeaway for hoteliers is this: If there’s a certain metric that would help you run smarter digital campaigns and increase online revenue for the brand, chances are it’s possible.
