Situation
We work with resort clients that don’t have an online booking engine for reservations, and instead rely on call agents for revenue tracking and recording booking data. We also have clients that use both, but see the majority of their booked reservations come from calls. Our digital campaigns, therefore, have very limited conversion signals toward which we can optimize.
Objective
Identify different types of website behaviors that correlates with offline bookings to optimize our digital efforts.
Methodology
To avoid a scavenger hunt inside Google Analytics, we used a script to programmatically pull user information to determine what behavior correlates. We compared offline bookings for different months with the following GA variables: event actions, event categories, a combination of both, and pagepaths.
Results
We found that qualified users had completed “Plan My Trip” submissions or interacted with the guest selection box when exploring room availability. We expected these to correlate; people planning for activities or searching for open rooms for five people are further along on the journey to purchase.
However, unexpected behaviors that had high correlations with bookings were interactions with the resort map online, and visits to a select welcome page that website users could not navigate to organically. The welcome page was emailed to consumers after making a booking.
Recommendation
A post-booking email is one more thing that we can track, and can benefit any client that is lead-based or reliant on call centers.
