31 Jan 2022 Business Insights

How Can Google Analytics Help Your Travel Brand?

Google Analytics is the perfect companion to your website. It lets you measure performance and helps you make decisions about how to drive your travel brand forward. Think of it as the Robin to your Batman, a handy tool ready to ensure your website performs at its best. But just how can Google Analytics help your travel brand? We’ve got the answers below.

What is Google Analytics? 📊

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock for the last 10 years, allow us to give you a quick rundown on Google Analytics. Often referred to as GA for short, it’s an in-depth tool providing users with metrics and the overall performance of their website or app.

You can use it to integrate Google’s marketing and advertising platforms – Google Ads, Search Console and Data Studio – into your site. It’s also free to use, although a paid version is available. The paid-for version gives you advanced funnel reporting and attribution modelling, roll-up reporting, plus more views, dimensions and metrics per property.

The importance of Google Analytics for travel brands 🏖️

As a travel brand, every visit to your website is an opportunity for conversion. And with GA, you can better understand the dynamics of your site and how visitors use it. There are several ways to benefit from GA. It helps you…

Identify how users find your website 🔎

Whether it’s organic visits, paid adverts, or on social media, there are many ways for customers to find your website – they don’t come from one single source. Yet, you need to identify how they landed on your page. Doing so helps you better understand the most successful sources for website traffic. Google Analytics allows you to navigate all traffic by clicking on the Acquisition tile. From here, you can pinpoint where people are coming to your website from, better understanding website trends in the process. To illustrate, if you find that most people arrive on your site from Facebook, you can create more content for that specific channel and make it a more prominent focus of your marketing efforts.

See which pages are the most popular 😎

Once people land on your website, the aim is to get them to navigate the different pages and progress to the checkout. It’s important that you understand how users engage with your website, so you achieve conversions by improving their overall experience. To do this with GA, navigate to the “Behavior” tab and review the most visited pages on your website. You can also look at pages that aren’t performing and put a plan together to improve their traffic.

Create custom reports 📈

Consumers are likely to spend more time deliberating about paying for big-ticket purchases like holidays. Therefore, you want to ensure that your website journey is configured for the unique experience of paying for a vacation. That’s where GA’s custom reports come in handy. They allow you to create bespoke reports for different experiences on your website. In the Customisation tab, click on Custom Reports and choose your report type. For example, you might want to see the split between desktop and mobile use. You can do this by choosing traffic for a device and setting your required metrics, thus giving you more insight into how people are using your website to book travel.

Visualise the booking flow 👀

The end goal is always conversion. Every time someone lands on your website, they could end up becoming a customer. However, the checkout stage is usually where most people fall off during the journey, especially when it comes to travel booking.

In order to reduce cart abandonment, you need to identify the areas that cause friction, such as a lack of payment options. Fortunately, Google Analytics can help you do just that with its Funnel Visualization model that gives you a step by step overview of how many visitors leave your website and the stage at which they’re doing it. Consequently, you can better pinpoint the reason why and fix the issue.

Why might customers leave before converting? 👋

One of the primary reasons people abandon their checkout is the lack of options available for paying. Too often, travellers are presented with a debit or credit card payment method or Paypal. Because holidays can be pricey, paying all in one go can act as a deterrent for booking travel.

One way to fix this is with flexible payment options. Using a solution like Fly Now Pay Later lets you offer customers alternative methods to split the cost over several payments.

As a result, customers feel more empowered to book higher-priced items like holidays, safe in the knowledge they don’t have to take on the entire cost all in one go. Your travel brand can increase average order values and boost revenue thanks to the ability to offer monthly payment options.

Understanding your travel brand with Google Analytics

Google Analytics gives you clear insights into how to improve website performance. Use it regularly, and you can unearth details to help move your travel brand forward and offer an improved experience for customers, resulting in more bookings and increased revenue.