Quick Top Tips on what makes a successful Hotel website?

• High visibility. Good SEO (search engine optimisation), SMM (social media management, pointing traffic to the site from Twitter, Facebook etc) & lead generation activity is essential.
• The website needs to be simple and fast
• with Easy navigation
• Fewer, better images  – people buy with their eyes and consumers are definitely wanting more visuals (including video)

• People listen to other people - so if you’re on TripAdvisor – and you MUST be – then have a stream of TA comments clearly visible as that will probably be the most influential space on your homepage.
• Phone number prominently displayed. Of course we’d love visitors to book online and turn up without too much personal engagement, but the reality is that many guests prefer to talk to someone, ask questions and book over the phone. So make it as easy as possible for visitors to contact you by whatever means they prefer – phone, email, text, tweet etc – & improve your look-to-book ratio.
• Capture the lead on the site. Take an email address or lead the visitor to the booking page. Don’t let them bounce off to an Online Travel Agency as you’ll have to pay commission. Make it clear that visitors get the best deal (or at least can’t get better) by dealing with you direct.
• Up to date content – people will bounce straight off if they see out of date offers or articles.
• Succinct text
• Strong Calls to Action – tell people what you want them to do and make the path to that goal (eg booking page, or contact us page or subscribe to newsletter link) as easy to navigate  as possible
• Not too many pages
• Reflect the property in both appearance and feel
• Sell the location (or link through to us and we’ll sell it for you with our up-to-date information on What’s on, events, festivals, dog friendly beaches etc. You don’t have to do that work)

It's Suffolk Asparagus Season so come to Suffolk for fantastic local food

• Software installation not required – I really think long and hard about adding any new software from unbranded sources to my PCs so don’t put up an unnecessary barriers to engagement
• I’ll add to these tips as we go along but if anyone has any comments please shout!

 

Quick Guide to Website Effectiveness

Today’s post is all about what makes a website effective so when you’re thinking about commissioning a new site, or reviewing your current one, these are the things to look for -

• Where do your eyes go first? Generally we have ca 8 seconds to grab a visitors attention otherwise they bounce away. So your website must hook them straight away. Make sure the first thing they can see is 1) what they expect to see – no nasty surprises. If they’ve searched for a campsite in Southwold and you’re a B&B in Clare they are going to bounce straight off. 2) something interesting enough to keep them there on your site eg attractive pictures
• Is it clear what your website is about? – you have limited time to get your message across (eg best Pub in town) so don’t distract the visitor with too many rotating images or pop-ups. Tell the visitor what you’re selling clearly & simply
• Is the important info ‘above the fold’? ie top part of the page. Often people have a lovely picture at the top of their page which might look great but does it tell the visitor what the Unique Selling Proposition is, and why they MUST book there? If they have to scroll down and search about they may well bounce.  
• Is there a clear call to action (CTA)? If visitors like what they see you need to clearly tell them what you want them to do – click here, book now, call us, sign up for our newsletter etc. Choose one or two strong CTAs and make them easy to find (and action – make sure the ‘Click Here’ button is clickable!) 

• 

  Topiary Spider from Suffolk based Millers Meadow Camping & Campsite

• Are the colours and pictures aesthetically pleasing? I visited a site yesterday that was predominantly orange and yellow – I didn’t stay long. Images are CRITICAL – people buy with their eyes – so take a bit of time over this, and keep them up to date – a winter scene of your garden still on your website in July is not going to convert your visitors from lookers to bookers as easily as a Summer scene.
• Is the font easy to read? Bear in mind the profile of your client base here too – the older they are the bigger the font should be! (I’ll probably be sued for age discrimantion for saying that but there we are). It’s all obvious really – make it easy for your visitors.
• Menu items should be nice & clear, and should take your visitor to where you want them to go eg Book Online page. There should always be an About Us and a Contact Us menu tab – make it easy for people to contact you by offering every method you have – phone, email, text etc.
• Get those sign ups! Make sure you have a form that people can fill in so that you can capture leads from your website and store their email addresses – see email marketing posts about this.
• Social media links – If you have a Twitter and/or Facebook account put a link to it on your website so that people can Follow you and then you can communicate with them. So even if they don’t want to give you their email address at least you have some way of promoting your business to them on an ongoing basis.  

That’s all for now folks! Just work through these little tips and let me know if you have any feedback.     http://www.suffolkonlinebooking.co.uk/

How to measure and optimise your online marketing performance – Part 1

So this is Part 1 of an introductory Guide to this topic, more will follow but this is the start for anyone who is new to the subject of analytics but wants to learn more. As the person who optimises the Suffolk Guides (Tourist, Hotels and Weddings) I try to walk the talk or talk the walk, whichever way round it goes. So this isn’t just theory, this is what we do and why we do it. So let’s dive in –

Why Analytics is important

Basically you don’t want to waste your time or money so you need to know what’s working and what’s not. Then you can drop the stuff that doesn’t work and improve the stuff that does. That’s it in a nutshell. Analytics takes out the guesswork – it gives you the evidence you need to decide what to prioritise in terms of your time and hard earned cash.

Which bits of data to track?

Now I’ve persuaded you of the value of tracking and analysing your data, the issue is what to monitor as there is obviously masses of information that you could look at but life is too short, you just need to know the important bits.

So let’s assume that you have a website and want to attract more traffic to it; that maybe you do a bit of email marketing and want to know if anyone is responding to your emails; you might have a blog and want to know if anyone is reading it (tell me about it!); you might have a twitter or Facebook account and want to know if the hours you’re spending slaving away trying to write witty posts is really worth it etc. Each one of these will have a different analytics package so we’ll look at each in turn.  

How to measure your website and landing pages

Your website is the core of your marketing efforts. All roads should point to your website. Every tweet you tweet or campaign you run should be designed to drive traffic to your website and possibly to specific landing pages (by landing pages I mean any page on your website other than the homepage. So if you’re running a special offer you might create a new page on your website just for that offer, including terms and conditions etc etc and then you’d drive traffic to that specific (landing) page rather than to your homepage. That way you can monitor specifically home much traffic that special offer has generated and work out whether it’s worth running again).

When you have visitors on your website you have the chance to convert them to bookers/buyers – this is why you need to get them on there.

Visitors and Unique Visitors = the number of visitors to your website and the total number excluding repeat visitors. So you might have say 100 visitors and 80 Unique Visitors as 20 have been on your site before.

Obviously here we’re looking for a good upward trend in both visitors. If the number of visitors isn’t increasing then you need to look at your content on your website, your marketing campaigns and your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to make sure that the search engines are showing your website to visitors for the keywords you want to appear for. (see other articles on these subjects in my blog)

The more repeat visitors you have on your website the more ‘sticky’ your site is deemed to be ie people have found content they like and are returning for more of it. This is a good thing as the repeat visitors are statistically the ones who are more likely to book.

However you don’t want all your visitors to be repeat visitors otherwise you can’t grow – you need a healthy balance of repeat and new visitors. On the Tourist Guide about 70% of our visitors are new and 30% repeat and more importantly the total number of visitors is growing – over 550,000 in 2011 compared with 368,000 in 2010.

Traffic sources – it’s useful to look at where your traffic comes from as it’s good to have a diversified range of leads so that if one goes wrong for any reason you’re not stuck. There are several different types of traffic sources

1. Organic – this means that traffic has found you by searching online and putting in keywords that you rank highly for eg if you put ‘What’s on Suffolk’ into any search engine the Tourist Guide should appear first for that – if you then click on our link you would be an organic visitor. This is the best really as the visitor has hopefully found exactly what they’re looking for at the time that they are in ‘buying mode’ and is more likely therefore to book. They also don’t cost you anything to obtain if you do your own SEO.
2. Referrals – this mean traffic referred to you from other websites eg your advert on the Guides. This is a good thing as the traffic is likely to be highly targeted and the endorsement of the referring website adds to the credibility of your website. This is one reason why it’s good to build relevant links. Eg So if you’re a B&B near Jimmys Farm you might ask Jimmys Farm to add a link to your website on their website as people visiting Jimmys Farm might be needing a place to stay.  (don’t tell them I sent you though otherwise I’ll be in trouble, but you get the picture!). So build up those links.
3. Direct – this mean traffic that have typed in your websites URL into their browser, or saved your website as a favourite (or clicked an untagged email or document link).
4. Other – this could refer to traffic brought to you through paid search (these are the ones in the right hand column of the page of the search results, the sponsored links or Ads as they’re now called)

Most & least popular pages – you want to see what pages on your website are attracting and retaining traffic so that you can do more of one and drop the other. Basically you can see from these pages the content that your visitors are interested in, and then you can give them more of that. So if, for example, your special offers page is attracting lots of attention then make sure you have plenty of special offers running. If the special offer page isn’t attracting any traffic but the Luxury Breaks page is, then dump the offers and make sure the Luxury Breaks page is constantly refreshed.

Also on your most popular pages it’s a good idea to add a subscription link so that you can build up your email database, or a Facebook like link or Twitter follow link etc so that you can capture this traffic and start to build a connection with them before they bounce off.  

CONVERSIONS!  – sorry for shouting but this is the key metric – this is basically the number of visitors who land on your website who actually book (or, if not book, take an action you want them to take eg subscribe to your enewsletter database). This is the Holy Grail – if you get 100 visitors but none of them convert then you can generate lots of traffic but they might not convert either, so then you need to focus on conversion not on traffic generation. (To find out how to improve conversions see other articles in this blog)

Bounce Rate – this is the % of new visitors who leave your website without visiting any other page on your site, or taking any other action (eg subscribing to your database). This is bad – if you have a high bounce rate then it means that visitors are not finding what they want and are going away without you getting the chance to convert them to bookers. It could mean that you are using the wrong keywords to get traffic eg maybe you rank highly ‘campsites’ when you no longer offer this service, or you don’t have any clear calls to action (book Now! Call us now!) on your landing page so people don’t know what to do, or maybe there’s so much going on people are confused (this is a common statement regarding the Guides -we’re working on it). Whatever your bounce rate is try to get it down – about 10-20% is fine, you can’t please everyone.

 

Coming soon –

How to measure (Search Engine) Optimisation

How to measure paid search/PayPerClick

How to measure social media marketing

How to measure email marketing

Key mistakes hotels make with travel review websites

Basically the cardinal rule with review sites is to engage with them – they’re not going to go away, and they will probably get even more influential, so all you can do is to try to manage them. So even if all your reviews are positive, there should still be some level of management response to demonstrate your interest. This is the top key mistake -

1. Not showing that you care

If a review has potential to be damaging to your reputation, somebody should respond to it pronto before it does too much damage.

The response should be written thoughtfully, carefully and intelligently so that everyone who goes on to read it will get the impression you run a thoughtful, careful, intelligent business.

People want to see that you care. They want to know that if they have a problem, somebody at the hotel will seriously attend to the matter.  Research from TripAdvisor shows that 71% of travellers believe management responses matter. So you don’t have to be perfect, but you do have to respond.

2. Accountability

When you write a response, put your name to it and your title. People need to know that the response has come from an individual and preferably someone who is taking responsibility.  This builds trust in your hotel. An anonymous, depersonalised response won’t.

3. Inadequate proofreading

Unfortunately it only takes one careless error to give the impression that your management is either not well-educated or not that bovered (see what I mean?). So get someone to quickly check over your response before it goes out otherwise you’ll give a sloppy impression & your response will be counter productive

4. Responding in anger

Big no-no. Attacking the reviewer is REALLY risky – they may be a pain in the rear, you might have done everything you possibly could to make their stay perfect and the review may feel completely unjust but…. don’t do it, you could scare away potential guests. Keep the tone of your response cordial. They don’t need to know your teeth were gritted when you were writing it.

5. Failure to deal with a seriously problem raised in a review

Another major no-no – if somebody says you have a problem and you don’t respond unfortunately other people might assume that the problem is real and will avoid you as a result. If you don’t make it easy for dissatisfied guests to complain and respond to them when they do, there’s a real danger that they will get even morre irritated and go on to create more in-depth negative reviews and negative buzz – the average Facebook user has 130 friends so word can spread very quickly if you don’t respond. Make yourself available to intercept those reveiews & take the heat down before they become damaging

If the review has any chance of being accurate, then be completely transparent about how you are addressing the situation.

6. Failing to ask for positive reviews

Whenever you let a satisfied guest walk out of your hotel without asking for a review on a specific review site, you are letting opportunity slip right through your fingers. Extremely satisfied guests, especially those who are first-time visitors, are the most likely to follow-through and write a positive review for you. Just put a notice up on your reception for when guests check out (or put a line on their receipt) reminding people that you’re on say, TripAdvisor, and requesting them to write a review on the site and share their experiences with others. If you don’t ask you’re less likely to get.

It’s also really helpful to have up-to-date reviews on a site – if the last one was posted 6 months ago it has less authority than one posted yesterday as the old one doesn’t reflect your hotel currently. So this is another good reason to encourage reviews 

Other tips

• It’s a good idea to respond to some positive reviews – not every one, but just occasionally to show that you’re monitoring the reviews and take them seriously.
• Try not to repeat the same comments over and over again as this will begin to look like an automated response and people will feel a lack of sincerity. Mix up your responses.
• BEWARE of asking guests to write reviews when they are still staying with you. If a guest uses your IP address then the review site might think the review has come from you and is fraudulent. This happened in mid 2011 to one medium sized hotel (not in Suffolk) and Trip Advisor red flagged them and downgraded them, leading to a 25% reduction in their bookings virtually overnight.
• TripAdvisor is the dominant UK review site and in 2011 exceeded 50million reviews, but there are others eg Google Places, Yelp, HolidayCheck that you should keep an eye on.
• Use conversational English in your responses – no big words
• If you are certain a post is malicious or fraudulent, then use your capability with the review site’s management tools to report it and to request its removal.
• This is not so relevant for Suffolk just yet but one day it will be – voice recognition technology on mobiles enables travellers to login to apps on their phones (eg Siri for the iPhone) and request advice on where to stay eg ‘I’m going to Bury St Edmunds with the family and want a hotel tonight for under £200 – where can I stay?’ and the app will provide suggestions based on family friendly, price, location, availability that night and recommendations/reviews. Clever stuff. Watch this space….

Share your experiences and best practices here ….

Google+ What’s it all about?

You might have come across a new feature from Google called Google+ – basically it is their response to Facebook (FB). It enables individuals and now businesses to set up Google+ Pages which allow businesses to connect with their prospects, share their content and thus generate leads.  The Pages have a similar look and feel to FB, and fans can recommend your Page with a +1, in the same way they might ‘Like’ you on FB.

 I’ve spent some time on it this week to see what the fuss is about and whether we should be on it and if I should be recommending it to you, my clients. The jury is out on the second part of that to be honest, at this stage I wouldn’t recommend you spend a huge amount of time on it. It’s still in beta mode and ‘only’ 40million users have adopted it worldwide since its launch. So in terms of priorities, Facebook and Twitter still have my vote for the best time you can spend on social media at the moment. However… this is Google and Google is god in my world so I have created a Suffolk Guide page – https://plus.google.com/b/108860315504258358461/ to experiment with.

So what does Google+ have that all the other social media don’t have? Good question Sarah

1)      The key attraction at this stage is that a Google+ page is connected back to Google’s search engine in a way that removes the competition. So, for example, if you put Suffolk Tourist Guide’  ‘into Google’s search engine now the Tourist Guide comes up in the first 3 places, followed by near rivals using the words Suffolk Tourist Guide in their description tags. However, if someone types in +SuffolkGuide they will come to our new page on Google+ and none of our rivals will be shown. They don’t have to log in either, and they don’t need a Google or Google+ account to take a look at our Google+ page, so it’s easy, direct, no competitors listed, access. This is called DirectConnect and it’s still in Beta phase so it won’t work for every page yet, but it will soon

2)      In theory for traditional searches, Google+ Pages will show up in the search engine results pages (SERPS ) like any other ie no favourable weighting just because it’s a Google tool. (Not sure I believe that but we’ll see).  The point is that it’s an open tool – anything you post on Google+ can be found on the search engine, unlike FB which is a closed network – only your ‘friends’ can see what you’ve posted – so you’re only as good as the strength and depth of your network on FB.  

3)      We know that currently for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) purposes inbound links from other websites are critical. We also know that Google is wanting to move to a more social verification model of rankings. Getting a +1 from a user is the equivalent of a vote or ‘Like’ from Facebook or a Follower from Twitter, so the more +1 we can get the better our social verification strength will be and therefore, in time, maybe the higher our websites and pages will rank in Google’s search engine.

4)      People can add your Page to one of their Circles (ie a group they’ve created; these are known as Circles. So you can create a Family Circle, Friends Circle, Interesting People Circle, Dull People…no, don’t do that). When you’re in a Circle your updates appear on their Streams (or, in FB language, their Walls). So you can keep in touch with them and send them your news without having to drive them to your website. This is quite similar to FB, no added value here but…

5)      Hangouts are new and different. Basically anyone who has +1’d you can actually contact you face to face via Google+ Hangouts, ie video chat/livestreaming capabilities. So now people can talk to your receptionist to make a booking, or you can arrange to have a Hangout with a group of people to talk about this & that via your PCs FREE & with no software to download! The death of the meeting? Watch this space!

To create a Google+ Page click here - Google+ and then Circle the Suffolk Guide here https://plus.google.com/108860315504258358461

Any questions?

Online marketing – the who, what, where and why

As the Chinese might say – we are certainly living in interesting times (on a number of fronts). The world wide web is about 20 years old now and has dramatically changed so much of our lives – the way we gather information, the way we share news,  the incredible access we can all now have to world class experts at the touch of a twitter button – for free! So much has changed including the way we market our businesses. The old style – cold calling, direct mail, tradeshows, TV or radio advertising (if you could afford it) just doesn’t work well any longer and doesn’t provide a decent return on your money. Time for a change = online marketing.

Some stats for those inclined –

• Over 50% of the UK public have a Facebook account
• Facebook is the size of the 3^rd largest country in the world
• Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, emailing etc are FREE tools  – no subscription cost, no ongoing cost except your time

Online marketing is also called internet marketing as you use the internet to deliver it – email marketing, social media marketing (ie Facebook, twitter, linkedin, youtube etc)

Using online marketing methods you can reach a huge audience (global) at a tiny cost. However most of us don’t want to reach a global audience – we want to reach a targeted audience of potential consumers for our services.   The good news – great news really – is not only can we find and reach a targeted audience, we can reach them when they are in ‘buying mode’ as the nature of the internet means that consumers use it to research and purchase products & services at their own convenience.  Lovely.

Also – it gets better – being online means that we can monitor results – no more ‘pay and hope’ approach, now we have pay and track. Nearly all aspects of online marketing can be traced, measured & tested so you can work out quickly what’s working and what’s not.

So, to summarise, online marketing simply is using the internet and www  to deliver advertising messages to targeted audiences to attract customers. Examples include advertising on lead generation websites (like my Guides – Tourist Guide, Hotels Guide and Weddings Guide), email marketing, website Search Engine Optimisation, social media marketing (twitter, FB), Google Paid Search ie Pay Per Click, YouTube video marketing, and the growing mobile marketing sector (did you know in American people already spend more time on their mobiles than they do reading hardcopy newspapers and magazines?) etc.  We’ll go through each of these in the next few months as some will more suitable for your business than others, and the pace of change continues to be rapid so what might work well now might not work so well in 12 months time eg experts predict that social media will start to drive more business value than search engine optimisation? If you have no idea what I’m talking about don’t worry, all will be revealed!

Website Analytics (come on, stay awake!)

I know it’s dull, and a bit of a turn off but analysing your data is important – how do you know what’s working if you don’t? how do you know you’re getting value for money from your marketing efforts?  Let’s break this horrible sounding task into small steps -

1) Improve the data you’re getting – eg sign up for Google Analytics on your website. This is a free sevice from Google, it’s independent and it’s very very good. Basically when you’ve added a bit of code to your website* GA will be able to tell you -

1. how much traffic you’re getting – numbers of unique & repeat visitors, and when you get them during the week (eg Sunday evening, Thursday morning, was there an uptick after your advert in the local paper was seen?). If you know that your users are going online on a Sunday evening then you can put some fresh content on your website to address them and improve your bookings.
2. how long they spend on your website – if they don’t spend very long you know you have a problem – they’re not interested in what they’re seeing. Why not? You have approx 7 seconds to capture a users attention when they get to your site otherwise they’ll click away and go somewhere else. Can you put some images on your site, people like pictures; is your site slow to download? Is your offering clear? eg if you’re offering self catering accommodation say that straight away so that users know they’re in the right place.
3. how many pages they visit on your site (and whether they get to the critical Booking or Contact Us pages) – the more the merrier. Obviously if you’ve only got 2 pages on your site and they visit both, that’s great, but if you’ve got pages of info on things to do in your area,  special offers etc and they visit these pages too, then you’ve hooked them and they’re on their way to making a booking.
4. the bounce rate – this is the number of visitors who bounce off a website having looked at just one page. Not good. Aim for a low % – on the Tourist Guide we have some pages with a bounce rate of 5% and others at 50%  and as long as there’s a reasonable explanation (eg it’s a contact page so they’ve effectively reached the end of the line and hopefully now the user is phoning you or making that online booking), it’s not a problem.
5. where the traffic comes from – are you getting value for money from your online adverts? is that money spent on SEO paying off? If you spend money on an offline advert (radion, magazine, local paper) did yoiu see an increase in website traffic following that ad? (this traffic will be direct ie people should be putting in your website domain name if it’s on your ad) Is that time you’re spending on Twitter or Facebook worthwhile – are they generating leads for you? what’s the quality of the traffic you’re getting from these sources? (in terms of the variables mentioned here). We find that we get a lot of traffic from Facebook but the quality isn’t as good as traffic from Twitter – the bounce rate is higher, they spend less time on the Guides & visit fewer pages. So I would pay less for a Facebook user than I would for a Twitter user, and most for a Google Adwords user as they have the best performance indicators for the Guides. But your site might be different – Facebook might be top for you.
6. what keywords people are using to find you – eg B&B in Bramfield. If you’re a pub in Bramfield NOT offering accommodation then appearing no1 for this search term isn’t going to help you – you’ll have a high bounce rate. You can look at your website and try to work out why you might be appearing for a search term that’s not relevant to you eg perhaps you’ve got a link to a B&B in Bramfield high on your homepage and the search engines are assuming it’s a service you offer? Don’t forget the search engines use spiders not people to ‘read’ pages, so be careful not to mislead them. Move the B&B link down your homepage and put ‘Pub in Bramfield’ up there instead!

When you start to track all this you can see what’s working, where to spend your time, what your users want & which words you should use on your website to get bookings (not traffic). When you know how much traffic you’re getting, and you know how many bookings you get (= conversion rate ie how much traffic is converting to bookings), then you can begin to work on improving both the volume of traffic AND the conversion rate. It takes time but if you do a little every now and then it can make a difference to your online results. So it’s gold dust – and it’s free!

Sign up now – Google Analytics  or give us a call/drop us an email if you have any questions or comments.

All best

Sarah Q

PS *If you haven’t got a techie to hand and don’t want to add the code to your website yourself just let us know – our techie Sue is very good and will be able to do it for you if you can give her administrative access to your website.

19/7/11 Useful article from Econsultancy - can Google Meet All of Your Analytics needs?

http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7722-can-google-meet-all-your-analytics-needs?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter

According to a recent Econsultancy report, the proportion of companies exclusively using Google Analytics for their analytics needs has risen to 44%, compared to 38% last year and 23% in 2009. 

Our Online Measurement and Strategy Report 2011, produced in association with Lynchpin, looks at the extent to which companies are using Google Analytics, paid for analytics tools, and which tools they are using for which reporting requirements.

Below, we include some charts from the report and also some opinions on whether Google Analytics can meet all your needs. 

Who’s using Google Analytics (GA)?

Does your organisation use Google Analytics? 

What are companies using GA for? 

87% of companies exclusively using Google Analytics use it for understanding traffic and conversion KPIs, 68% for campaign tracking, and 60% management reporting.    

Just 17% of client-side respondents use GA for product and cross sell analysis, and 9% for rich media, Flash and video tracking. 

Do you use Google Analytics for any of the following types of reporting or insight? 

The report has further charts about which tools (i.e. Google or a paid-for tool) are being used for different types of reporting or insight.

For example, those companies using both GA and a paid analytics tool are more likely to use Google for PPC optimisation, site search usage and campaign tracking.

Why do companies use paid analytics tools along with GA? 

The main reason given here (by 28% of respondents) is that Google Analytics is not sophisticated enough for their requirements. 

Brian Clifton, former Head of Web Analytics at Google EMEA and author of Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics, is sceptical about the perceived limitations of GA:

‘You don’t know what you don’t know’ is a phrase I use when describing this situation. The issue with Google Analytics, and it’s a nice issue to have, is that it is so easy to set up. It really is a matter of minutes before you can be collecting visitor data.

But that’s also the problem – it creates the expectation that’s all there is to it. The sophisticated stuff of tracking social media engagement, file downloads, rich media/Flash usage, visitor labelling, transactions, KPIs etc., requires additional thought and configuration. Often this goes unnoticed and hence a perception of “GA cannot do x, y or z” grows.

I have yet to come across a customer who has exhausted the possibilities of GA. Often they say “there is too much to do…”

According to Lovehoney e-commerce manager Matthew Curry, GA has enough features for many companies:

The hard part is justifying why you would spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on a paid tool. The argument needs to be completely compelling and the paid vendors aren’t stepping up to the plate – they’re pushing the “add on” services like MVT, mobile and social, rather than differentiating the core.

What is the main reason you continue to use a paid-­for tool as well as Google Analytics? (Companies not exclusively using Google Analytics)

The ‘other’ reasons given included the fact that Google only promises to keep data for up to a year, as well as security and reliability issues. According to Matt Curry: 

You’ve of course got the issue of handing everything over to Google, how reliable that it is, and how much data they keep. The issues in April with lost data bring a reminder of how vulnerable you are.

There is of course, the option of going down the Urchin route [another Google product], to get a reasonably comparable feature set. I don’t know why this isn’t more popular? Maybe I don’t understand it properly yet.

Lynchpin MD Andrew Hood also acknowledges the issue with data ownership:

Data ownership, retention and integration are common tipping points for firms looking beyond GA to paid-for vendors.

Although Google has been generous to date in keeping historical data available and proven reliable in delivering the service, IT departments wince at the lack of formal commitments to uptime and access to data.

While marketing departments love the intuitiveness of GA reporting, traditional analysts quickly become frustrated with the inability to get to the underlying data. The scope to integrate data with other sources (e.g. offline) is extremely limited by the lack of visitor level data.

Depesh Mandalia, Senior Marketing Manager at Tesco, suggests that verifying a paid-for package’s numbers is one reason, along with paid search reporting:

For me it seems GA’s deep integration with AdWords is one of the key drivers to dual running with a paid-for package, which can take a little more effort to fully integrate. Another interesting take on this is in verifying a paid-for package’s numbers.

Whilst the majority of analytics packages differ in the way they track visits and visitors, I’ve used both GA and other free analytics packages to benchmark paid-for providers and verify, within a certain tolerance, that the numbers correlate. The worse thing to happen is to completely trust the numbers and find a glaring mistake which could add +/- 20% to your reporting (as we did!)

Reasons for not using Google Analytics

42% of companies say the main reason they do not use GA is because they’re happy with their existing web analytics supplier, while 19% aren’t happy about Google having access to their site data, and 15% say it isn’t sophisticated enough for their requirements. 

Adobe Product Marketing Manager Mike Quinn argues that paid analytics have a number of advantages: 

Are they happy with the often restricted and simple high level views of their data or do they want to dive deeper and analyse data further? Analysis is so much more than simple page views and click through, to get real value from your analysis tools you need to be able to gain insight across all your digital channels including mobile, social, video. 

Can you get a full view of your customers? Customers interact with you in so many ways and with so many touch points it’s critical to bring in your CRM, e-mail, content management and ad-serving applications. If these systems cannot easily integrate with your analysis tools then you will be missing out on some important customer insights.

What is the principal reason you don’t use Google Analytics? (Company respondents not using GA)

 

According to Matthew Curry, there some reasons to move to a paid vendor:

It’s become cripplingly slow. You’re no longer waiting seconds for a report to load, but minutes, and the Fast Access Mode has a degree of inaccuracy that isn’t very helpful, especially on statistics where a 5% change means something, like conversion rate or page load time.

If we were to move to a paid tool, speed would be the reason why. I’m much less productive if I’m waiting two minutes per click. 

Also, because of the GA terms of service, you can’t pass anything that could singularly identify a customer, so for example a customerID if you’re looking at lifetime value. You have to be creative here, and the actual terms of what you can and can’t do are still very grey.

According to Andrew Hood, there are other reasons why people may opt for paid analytics tools: 

GA has a natural strength for things like Adwords analysis – in reality it’s hard for any paid-for vendor to streamline this process quite like Google can. Set against that, GA has limited page flow and pathing options for content-heavy sites compared to the paid-for vendors.

There is also a flexibility/accuracy trade-off. GA’s advanced segmentation is on the face of it an extremely powerful tool (giving the enterprise vendors a run for their money) – but it often samples (approximates) data to the extent that the figures cannot be relied upon for decisions.

SQ – comment Obviously if you’re running a large online retail site like Tesco you’d want a bit more, but GA is fine for the rest of us