Micro conversions in the hotel industry - from configuration to data interpretation

Conducting e-marketing campaigns, in addition to appropriate knowledge about reaching a potential guest, requires proper measurement of the effects of such activities. Use our tips and turn the famous micro conversions into your friends.

Google defines a conversion as "an action that is counted when someone interacts with an ad (e.g., clicks on a text ad or watches a video ad) and then performs an action that has been identified as valuable to the business, e.g., purchases online or calls the company from a mobile phone."

Conversions are divided into macro and micro conversions. Enough theory, below you'll find specific tips on how to set up tools to measure them.

Macro conversions in the hotel industry

Macro conversions are the main goal of e-marketing activities. In the hotel industry, they include online reservations, which in reports sent to hoteliers as part of the Marketing Services department, are marked, for example, as "Booking". Thanks to this position, you can see how many online reservations the campaign, ad group, or keyword generated.

Micro-conversions in the hotel industry

Micro conversions are interactions on a page that show the user's interest in a given offer, for example:

• the form being sent,
• calls made through the ad extension, which contain the facility's phone number,
• click on the phone number,
• click on the email address,
• newsletter subscription,
• switch to the contact subpage,
• PDF offer file download.

Why track micro conversions?

Most guests who visit the hotel website do not make online reservations immediately, so they are not counted as valid macro conversions. This does not mean, however, that their behaviour is worthless - you can use it.

Many users have additional questions related to the offer and prefer, for example, contacting the hotel by phone or email. As a result, the appropriate sales or reception department closes the sales process through a different form of contact.

There are many telephone and email contacts, initiated by the eMarketing campaign - this is confirmed by the data from Google Analytics (Report "Top Conversion Paths") in hotels that actively use Profitroom CRM. Users first go to the hotel website from the campaign, then call the hotel, and then book their stay from the "sales opportunity" sent to them.

Newsletter subscription is another of the micro conversions that allow you to follow up on a potential guest via email marketing. He then becomes a customer whom you can encourage to book in the future.

It is also worth measuring the number of visits to the "Contact" subpage - to know how many potential guests check the location of the facility and want to contact it by phone, email or using the form.

How to measure micro and macro conversions?

The most popular tool for measuring the effectiveness of website traffic is Google Analytics. You can measure conversions in it as:

Events

All user interactions with the content, e.g. downloads or clicks on links. You can compare them with other data, such as keywords and traffic sources. It is worth configuring the corresponding events in Google Analytics using Google Tag Manager .

Goals

In Google Analytics, you can also measure the right goals, i.e. find out how often users perform specific actions on your website. The right configuration is also important here.

Measuring macro and micro conversions in Google Ads

Do you run advertising campaigns in Google? Measure the results of your actions. The Google Ads panel allows you to create macro and micro conversions .An example macro conversions configuration is as follows:

• You log in to the Google Ads panel.
• You go to the Tools tab, then: Settings -> Conversions -> Website
• In the Website tab, because you have reservations in the Profitroom Booking Engine marked as macro conversions, you choose the Purchase option and give the conversion the name "Booking"

Then select Apply different value to each conversion, currency, and in the part regarding number - Each.

In the next step, select the conversion window and attribution model. In the attribution model you have several options for measuring conversions. The most popular is the "last click" model, where Google assigns conversions to the last click on the ad, but does not count other previous clicks on the ads, so we don't have a complete picture of the conversion path in ads.

At Profitroom, due to Google suggestions, we use the "Include position" model. It allows us to evaluate advertising activities more widely. The last booking amount is divided as a percentage over the entire conversion path. The first click gets 40% of the final conversion, the last click also gets 40%, and the remaining 20% go to all clicks between the first and last.

The fourth step is to choose how to install the tag. It's worth using Google Tag Manager (GTM) for that.

The last stage is entering the ID and conversion labels in the conversion tracking tag in the Profitroom Booking Engine. There are two ways to do it in the Booking Engine:

• the code is added in full at the appropriate step of the booking path or
• via GTM - then in the Profitroom Booking Engine you need to add the GTM container ID and in GTM you only enter the ID and conversion label.

Online reservations, i.e. macro conversions, are of course very important, but by measuring them in conjunction micro conversions, you can get a much more complete picture of how users navigate your website.

Thanks to the data from the micro-conversions, you can assess the scale of contact initiated by the email campaign or by using the contact form.

However, you can consult micro conversions that indicate clicks on your phone number with data from your Reservation Department. Perhaps running an online campaign translates into an increase in telephone activity visible at your facility. If so, the last step to achieving more reservations will be to optimize the sales process at your facility.