Using Analytics for customer insight

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From the course by ESSEC Business School

The fundamentals of hotel distribution

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ESSEC Business School

The fundamentals of hotel distribution

511 ratings

Course 1 of 4 in the Specialization Hotel Management: Distribution, Revenue and Demand Management

In today’s hotel sector an increasingly complex network of traditional and web based channels have to be managed to insure hotel success. Key questions include: how should you distribute over the web? What should you include on your brand.com website so people book through it? How can you maximise the potential of online travel agents (OTAs)? With the distribution environment both highly complex and constantly evolving, this course will give you comprehensive foundation of current industry practices to help jump start your career in this fascinating domain. Acknowledgements: Claire Bertrand, Vincent Chatain, Jessica Moses, Benjamin Six (ESSEC Business School), Emilie Dupré (Image-In), Gregory Halidy (Triplay)

From the lesson

Direct distribution: the key to hotel success

Distributing directly, thus building an effective and efficient website, is an essential success factor. Through this module, you will have a deep understanding of the web development process but also understand the cost of driving traffic, and the importance of using indirect distribution and online marketing techniques.

Using Analytics for customer insight5:01

Wrap-up and conclusion3:19

Meet the Instructors

Peter O'Connor
Professor of information systems, Director of the MBA in Hospitality Management
Information systems
Nicolas Graf
Professeur
Management

[MUSIC]

One of the great things about the web is that everything is measurable.

Tools such as Google Analytics allow you to

analyze visitor behavior to establish what users of your website actually do.

Such analytics packages give you access to a wealth of information.

What pages have been viewed and not viewed,

how long surfers spend on each page, the most popular paths, sequence of pages,

that people usually follow to your site, where they come from, both physically and

the site on which they were before they came to your site, and much, much more.

Information such as this allows you to develop an in-depth understanding of

consumer behavior on your site and thus refine both your content and

features to more closely match their actual needs.

Analytics can also help you establish the effectiveness of your online marketing

techniques, helping you understand which actions are driving business to your

website, what their respective conversion rate is, and helping you to establish

what you should be doing more of and what you should be deemphasizing.

Let's have a look at an example of some Google Analytics screens

taken from a real hotel.

If we look at the overview screen, we can see some key metrics for

accessing the success or not of your website.

Notice in particular the number of users, which tells you how

much traffic you're getting, as well as the number of page views.

The ratio between these two numbers,

shown here in the middle, as well as the average session duration,

helps you understand whether this traffic is engaging with your site.

Also here you will find the bounce rate, or the percentage of visitors who come to

your website, but immediately leave without looking at any other content.

Obviously a high number here is bad,

as it means that visitors have not found what they're looking for.

And a high bounce rate also negatively affects you

in organic search engine optimization.

If we look at this next screen, we can see the geographical

origins of visitors to your site broken down here by country, but

you can have a different level of detail if you so wish.

Again, it shows the number of sessions,

the pages per session, the bounce rate, and the average session duration.

If you set up specific goals on Google Analytics, it also shows you the goal

compression rate, and even the monetary value earned, here on the right-hand side.

Google Analytics can also give you information about how many people

are accessing your site from a desktop or a mobile device, and

highlighting difference in performance between these devices.

With the behavioral flow screen,

you can see the typical paths that people take through your website.

What pages they look at, in what order, how many people drop off from each screen,

and where they ultimately end up before they leave.

This, and practically all of the other analysis shown, can be sliced and

diced in many different ways to gain deep insights into how people

are interacting with your site, and what parts are actually working.

Perhaps the most interesting part,

though, is how it can help you measure the success of your online marketing efforts.

As you can see from this screen,

Google Analytics lets you see how traffic is being driven to your site.

Here, Direct means that somebody has typed in the hotel's domain name,

which is one of the key ways that people are finding this particular site.

Assuming you're using them, you will also see organic and

paid search here, along with social media, with the table allowing you to have

an overview of what is working in terms of traffic acquisition, engagement, and

even what is actually driving sales on your site.

The software then gives you the opportunity to dig even deeper.

For example, you can see which keywords visitors are typing in

to Google search engine in order to find you through both organic and paid search,

along with the average position on search result listing pages, your cost per click,

your click true race, as well of the overall cost of each campaign,

as well as how these have actually translated into sales.

In the limited time that we have,

you can see that these analytic facilities are really powerful.

They allow you to monitor the effectiveness of your pages and

your actions, and make adjustments to cut out the dead wood and

make your site cleaner and more efficient.

In effect, this means restarting the web development cycle again,

reconsidering whether you're achieving your objectives,

re-looking at your content, redesigning, adding, or

eliminating pages, and re-examining your electronic marketing efforts.

All based on facts, rather than hunches or gut feeling.

The key thing to remember is that everything on the web is measurable.

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