Inngenious B&B Web Site Promotion

Bed and Breakfast Web Site Stats and Trackers

An important tool to determine the health of a website as well as the effectiveness of some of the directories and associations you pay to be listed with is a website statistics tracker. What they do is compile information about the traffic coming into your site so you know where visitors came from, what they searched for to find you, and how long they spent on your site. If your tracker is nothing more than a hit counter that counts up every time someone loads the page, it is time to get rid of that and utilize something that gives more meaningful information.

Some hosting companies provide tracking information as part of the hosting. These are done using server logs and can contain a lot of information. However in most cases the information is not presented in a meaningful way, or they don't include detailed enough information like search phrases used and length of stay. The other limitation I find is that server logs often only record one month of information so it is difficult to look at year long trends. It is certainly worth finding out what information is already provided by your hosting company as they may already have tracking built-in that will meet your needs.

For the rest of you, you will need to have some code added to your pages that will track your website visitors and provide the kind of information you need to make decisions about your marketing efforts. If you do a search for web trackers you will find hundreds of them, some free, some not free. I have found that two of the best are free, reliable and easy to set-up. Sometimes I recommend using them together as they each give different types of information and present it in different ways.

ExtremeTracking.com - is a page tracker that in the free version only tracks one page per tracker (you can set up multiple trackers if you want to). It uses this little graphic Extreme Tracker icon to keep track of the page being loaded and the graphic also is the link into the tracker information. This tracker even though it is limited to just one page, does a few things very well.:

  1. It keeps a long history that will capture info for as long as you want until you reset it. This is very useful for keeping track of referrals from directories for an entire year. (I recommend resetting this tracker every year)
  2. It allows other people to see the tracker information. This is not a bonus for individual B&B websites, but I do recommend this for association or group sites so that all of the members can see how the association site is doing. It can be a good use of disclosure for an association to reveal this information honestly to its members as well as potential members.

Google Analytics (used to be called Urchin) - is a very powerful tracker that gathers lots of information and has the ability to email reports to you on a weekly or monthly schedule, and you can view them online whenever you'd like by logging into your Google account. It can be set up in either of two ways, either the site owner creates an account and has full access to everything including allowing others (like a webmaster) to access certain reports or the webmaster can create the account and then grants access to the owner to access certain reports. Either way it is similar, but I find for novices it is better to just give them access to the reports that are important to them. Many of the reports are not useful and can seem a bit overwhelming. The other nice thing about Analytics is that if you are using Google Adwords as PPC advertising, it will pull information from that and help you see which ads are working well and which ones are not. Analytics is set up by creating an account and then placing the code they provide on every page of your site. It is a private tracker meaning only you or anyone you designate can see the information.

Once you decide on what tracker to use, you have to start making sense of the data and what it may tell you. In many cases the data by itself may not be that meaningful, but by looking at a couple of reports together you can start to get an impression of the health of the website and what areas may need work. For the rest of this article I will continue with the Lost and Found Inn comparisons so you can start to put together an idea of what healthy and unhealthy websites might look like from a tracker's point of view. Remember, the mythical Lost Inn has a lousy website from a search engine point of view and has to spend more on directories and PPC than the Found Inn which has a healthy website.

The Lost Inn
The Found Inn

Basic information provides interesting numbers to look at but by themselves don't say much. It is however important to understand how these terms are defined. (Caution: different trackers sometimes define these terms differently so it is important to look on your tracker to see how they are defined.) The following is how Google Analytics defines them:
Visits: represents the number of users (computers) who have used your site. If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more (ex: they go eat lunch), any future activity will be counted as a new visit. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the same visit.

Unique Visitors: is a count of how many users have been to your site. One visitor can account for more than one visit if there are more than 30 minutes time between visits.

Pageviews: The number of times a page was loaded by a web browser. If a user hits reload/refresh or returns to a page they have already seen, it will count as another pageview.

Unique Pageview: is the number of times the page has been seen but not counting repeat viewings within the session.

Hits: is a worthless term that has many meanings but is often a count of every time a file (page, image, graphic, sound...) is sent out by your server, so viewing one page could count for lots of hits due to all the other items that go with the page. Thankfully, Google Analytics does not look at hits. If your tracker reports hits, make sure you know what it is actually counting.

The ones worth paying a little attention to are Unique Pageviews and Unique Visitors. Basically the higher these values are, the better. This is really only useful in comparing one month or year to the next. If your Unique Visitor count decreases from one year to the next, it is a sign that you are getting less traffic. It is not an indication of the cause though.

Lost Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

Unique Visitors: 87
Unique Pageviews: 120

Indicates that there were fewer visitors to the site than there were rooms available for the month of May (A 3-room B&B would have 3 rooms x 31 nights in May = 93 room nights). This site has a definite traffic shortage. Also indicated by comparing visitors to pageviews, we find very few visitors stuck around for more than a page or two (more on this coming later).

Found Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

Unique Visitors: 1200
Unique Pageviews: 5,720

Indicates a significant amount of traffic, more than enough to fill the rooms available. Comparing pageviews to visitors indicates that most visitors had a good look around before leaving the site.

 

Pages / Visit (pages per visit) and Depth of Visit are an indication at what was hinted at above. If most visitors only look at one page and then leave, it may be an indication that either what you have to offer is not very good, or the way you are portraying it on your website is not very good. Pages / Visit is just a number while the Depth of Visit report actually shows what percentage of visitors visit how many pages.

Contradictions: If a site is healthy AND has lots of regional pages (such as local restaurant descriptions ...) it is possible that the pages per visit may be lower as people searching for restaurant info will find it, but may have no interest in staying in a B&B and may leave after seeing only the page they needed.

Lost Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

Pages / Visit: 1.4

Lost Inn - Depth of Visit

This means the average visitor to the website looked at less than 2 pages before leaving the site. Again, this indicates a dissatisfaction with what is being offered or the way it is being presented on the website.

Found Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

Pages / Visit: 4.8

Found Inn Depth of Visit

This indicates the average visitor looked at just under 5 pages before leaving the site. For a B&B site that may only have a dozen pages total this would be a good percentage. Consider how many pages it might take to decide to book a room. The path might look like Home page -> room descriptions -> guest comments -> policies -> reservations. So in five hops an average guest might book a room. Others might do more hopping around on the site first, but few will book a room in only two hops unless they are repeat guests, or have been on the site before and are just coming back to book.

 

Average Time on Site: This is an indication of how much time people are spending looking around and reading. Generally, you want this to be higher (longer time) since the more time spent viewing the site, the greater the indication that the site is valuable and people are looking around and eventually deciding to stay.

Contradictions: If a site is healthy AND has lots of regional pages (such as local restaurant descriptions ...) it is possible that the average time on site will be lowered by this popularity since people find the one page on restaurants and then leave because they are not looking for a B&B, therefore spending less time on the site.

Lost Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

Avg Time on Site: 00:00:38

This shows that the average visitor spent 38 seconds on the site before leaving. It indicates that either the Lost Inn is attracting speed readers and people with ADD, or more likely, the site is just not inviting people to spend more time looking around.

Found Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

Avg Time on Site: 00:02:29

This shows the average visitor spent 2 minutes and 29 seconds looking around. Some visitors may have spent 30 seconds, and others spent 10 minutes, but this is an average, and fairly healthy for a B&B site.

 

Bounce Rate: is a look at what percentage of people arrive, see the one page they landed on and then leave the site. The higher the percentage, the more visitors are seeing one page and leaving. So a bounce rate of 36% means that of all the people who arrived on that page (or site) 36% left without looking at any other pages. Obviously you want a lower bounce rate as you want your site to be so inviting that people are magically drawn in, no matter what page they land on first.

Google Analytics provides two different pieces of information regarding bounce rates. It provides the bounce rate for the whole site (found in the site overview), which is not that helpful, and the bounce rate for individual pages (found on the Landing Pages report) which is extremely helpful. You want to examine the bounce rates for the pages as they are often clues to poor pages. Main pages of your website ought to have a low bounce rate. Say someone searches for your location + the word "inn" and they arrive at your room description page. They were obviously looking for an inn in your area, so the search was on target, they ought to then have reason to look deeper. If most choose not to look deeper, then it indicates a problem with what is appearing on that page. It might be bad photos, small rooms, too big a doll collection, too high prices, too low prices. There are lots of things it could be, but the point is, the page should be examined with a critical eye to see if it ought to be improved.

Contradiction: Again, if you have a related page like a local restaurant page, it is entirely acceptable that this page has a high bounce rate. It is likely that of the 100% of people searching for a restaurant in your area, only 5% may actually be interested in a B&B too. So we expect the other 95% to not bother looking any deeper. So in summary, every page of your site that is directly related to the B&B (policies, rooms, home, reservations...) should have as low a bounce rate as possible, but your other pages that are of interest to guests, but also of interest to lots of non-guests can have higher bounce rates.

Lost Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

URL Entrances Bounce Rate
/ (home page)
120
80%
/rooms
80
65%
/policies
19
75%
/dollcollection
82
99%

A home page where 80% of the visitors leave is a strong indication that the homepage or the offerings are chasing visitors away ... the only other explanation would be that it is showing up in the wrong kind of searches (like a search for wool socks) . Notice how the doll collection has them running for safety ;-)

Found Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

URL Entrances Bounce Rate
/ (home page)
1024
10%
/rooms
400
26%
/policies
35
38%
/restaurants
350
75%

This shows a healthy site. No B&B site will ever have a 0% bounce rate. It is just the nature of window shopping. Even a flawless B&B will not be perfect for everyone, they are all unique as are the potential guests. You can't be all things to everyone, nor should you try.

 

Top Exits (Exit Pages): An exit page is the last page a visitor saw before leaving your site. It is similar to a bounce, but a bounce is only counted if the page they left was the only page they ever saw. An exit page is just the last page they saw, regardless of how many pages they saw before that.

At some point people have to leave your site, so there will always be an exit page. They can't be avoided. You have to look for what pages they are leaving from. It is likely that your home page will be the top exit, it just stands to reason that if most people start out on your home page, some will decide immediately that the site was not what they wanted. It may or may not be related to the quality of the home page. However, if the home page is overwhelmingly the top exit, it should be looked at. Some pages you want to have a high exit count. For example, if you have a reservations page that leads to your online booking system, you would want and expect to have the reservations page have a high exit rate as they had to leave your site to go to your availability system (usually hosted on some other site). However, you don't want your page that describes your rooms to have a high exit rate as that might indicate a problem. Ignore the actual exit count, it is just a number. What you want to pay attention to is the % visitors which puts it all into perspective with the rest of your site by showing what percent of all visitors to the site left from that page.

Contradiction: Again, it is likely that a page describing local attractions or restaurants may get a lot of search traffic, but only a few searchers want to go past that and look at the B&B pages. As a result, the attractions page might have a high exit rate.

Lost Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

URL Exits % visits
/ (home page)
90
50%
/rooms
45
25%
/policies
19
15%
/reservations
12
10%

According to this report, 50% of all the visitors left when they were on the home page. That is not a great indication of a healthy site unless the home page is showing up for many searches that are not related to its topic. It is also a bad sign that 25% of the visitors left when they saw the rooms page, but uncertain as to whether it is a website or inn issue. .

Found Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

URL Exits % visits
/ (home page)
27
35%
/reservations
20
30%
/restaurants
20
30%
/rooms
10
15%

The low exit rate on the rooms page indicates that page is encouraging people to look deeper. The high exit rate on the reservations page indicates that people are leaving the site by going to the reservation system to try and reserve a room.

 

Traffic Sources displays where your visitors are coming from. Search Engines means they found you in a search. Referring Sites means they found a link to you on some other site like a directory or list of places to stay. Direct Traffic means they typed your address in specifically, which could have been from a bookmark or print advertising that gave them your web address. "Other" (if it appears at all) usually means they clicked on a link in an email that brought them to your site.

Generally speaking you want at least half of your traffic to come from search engines. If you are paying for a lot of directory listings, it may upset that balance a bit (not a bad thing). A healthy site would have the majority of the traffic coming from search engines. You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket though. So you don't want either Search Engines or Referring Sites to be too small.

Lost Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

Lost Inn traffic sources

The lack of balance here indicates that either the site is new and not doing well in the search engines or is poorly designed. Also, the lack of referring sites indicates the site may not have enough incoming links, which would also help explain the lack of search engine performance. The direct traffic indicates either a print marketing campaign or the innkeepers spend a lot of time going to their own site.

Found Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

Found Inn Traffic sources pie chart

This is well balanced, showing that the site is likely doing well in the search engines and it also has a large portion of traffic coming from referral (links to the site). The direct traffic amount indicates that some visitors are coming in from print advertising that gives them the web address.

 
Search Engines is a breakdown of what search engines are providing your Search Engine traffic. There is a bit of useful information to be gained here, but it is not obvious. Typically if a site is doing equally well (meaning that the site shows up in similar positions for the same searches) in the three big search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) the typical breakdown for travel related searches would look something like Google 70%, Yahoo 20% and MSN 10%. If the numbers differ from this pattern greatly, it might indicate a problem.

Lost Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

Search Engines
URL
Visits % visits
MSN
20
77%
Yahoo
12
46%
Google
4
15%

Google being the smallest contributor of traffic indicates quite strongly that the site is not doing well in Google and the low number of visits overall indicates that in general the site is not doing well. This could be due to age. MSN typically picks up new sites and allows them to do well, while Google and Yahoo tend to be a little bit more cautious about letting new sites place well without strong evidence of popularity (links and time).

Found Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

Search Engines
URL
Visits % visits
Google
350
70%
Yahoo
100
20%
MSN
50
10%

This shows almost a picture perfect level of search engine distribution for the current use of the three main search engines. (Some day Google may not be the world's most popular search engine, but today it is.)

 

Keywords keeps track of what words or phrases were used in a search engine to arrive at your site. Some phrases will be right on target, meaning that what they were looking for, you provided (ex: your town bed and breakfast). While others may be a bit off target (ex: movie night). While the off-target searches may make you laugh sometimes, they don't really say anything about your site's performance because someone looking for "movie night" is not likely to have any interest (at the moment) in your B&B. So it will cause these visitors to have a high Bounce Rate (no offense, it is just not what they were looking for). It is the on-target phrases you want to make sure you are showing up for. The problem with the keywords or search phrase reporting is that it shows you what people are using to find you. What you really want to know is what on-target phrases are they using that you aren't showing up for. So you have to be more concerned with what phrases are not appearing in the keyword report. Look for what is missing. When looking at the report be sure to view the whole thing so you can see the entire list of phrases and not just the top five in the summary.

In Google Analytics you can dig deeper into the report and see which search engines were responsible and what the time on site and bounce rates were for each phrase. Very interesting information.

Lost Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

Keywords
keyword
Visits % visits
Lost Inn B&B
5
20%
tacky trolls
4
15%
trenton NJ trolls
2
7%
Lost troll inn
1
4%

Notice that what little traffic there is comes from off target searches. The lack of any competitive on target phrases indicates a real problem in the health of this site.

Found Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

Keywords
keyword
Visits % visits
Wolf Island B&B
90
20%
Wolf Island Bed and Breakfast
85
15%
Thousand Island B&B
65
10%
stay in the thousand islands
50
9%

The top four search phrases are right on target. The numbers that go along with them are not critical as long as they are not just a couple of visits. A few visits for a major phrase might indicate that the performance is inconsistent, showing up sometimes, not showing up at other times (for the same search).

 

Top Landing Pages are the pages that people arrived (landed) on when they first hit your site. If they followed a link from a directory, it is likely that the home page was the landing page. If they came via search engine, it is possible that they landed on some other page within your site. Typically, an unhealthy site, if it shows in search engines at all, will only show the home page. A healthy site will have lots of pages showing up for different searches and will have a healthy collection of landing pages.

Here again Google Analytics lets you dig deeper into the landing page by clicking on it, and shows bounce rates and other info for just that page. This can help you fine tune your landing page to make sure it is as effective as possible.

Lost Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

Top Landing Pages
url
Entrances % visits
/ (home page)
20
90%
/trolls.htm
4
18%
/breakfast.htm
2
9%
/discounts.htm
1
4%

The home page receives nearly all the landings so this indicates that the other pages of the site may not be optimized enough to do well in the search engines. Also the topics (judging by the file names) of the pages are not likely ones that will convert website visitors into guests.

Found Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

Top Landing Pages
url
Entrances % visits
/ (home page)
680
65%
/attractions/
250
15%
/local-events/
200
12%
/bb-blog/
185
10%

The home page is doing well and will likely always be the top landing page, but the fact that the other pages related to travel are also bringing people in is a good indication of a healthy site.

 
Referring Sites is where you want to examine where your non-search engine traffic is coming from. This is very useful when it comes time to decide which directories to keep paying to be listed in and which ones to dump. Set the time span for a year (if you have been tracking your site that long) and see who has been sending you the most and least traffic. Be sure to view the whole report so you are not just seeing the top 5.

Lost Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

Referring Sites
Source
Visits % visits
bbonline.com
750
90%
i-luv-trolls.com
4
2%
cheap-o-stays.com
2
1%
innkeepers-pay-me.biz
1
0.3%

This makes it pretty clear which directory is delivering and which ones are not.

Found Inn Tracker Data: Month of May

Referring Sites
Source
Visits % visits
bbonline.com
800
20%
thousand-island-stays.com
700
18%
wolf-island-chamber.org
550
12%
bedandbreakfast.com
540
11%

This shows a healthy mix of national and local directories all contributing potential guests. If you get down to deciding between some that you think are close, take the cost for a yearly listing and divide it by the number of visits they sent in a year. That will give you the cost per click ($/click) and let you further evaluate which ones should go.

 

Map Overlay is a nice feature for narrowing down what part of the country / state / city most of your website traffic comes from. It tells you very little about your website, but it does give an impression of where your potential guests are coming from and may help you decide on where to target any print, radio or TV marketing. The size and color of the dots indicate numbers of visitors and their location.

map of state

 

Site Overlay is a very informative tool that actually shows your website, but over the top of it displays which links were followed and how often. This lets you examine things like the path of an avgerage visitor to your site.

For example, here is the site overlay for the main navigation on the home page of a site
Home page site overlay
The little blue bar graphs indicate that the majority of home page visitors clicked on the rooms&rates link. This is not surprising as most people want to view the rooms and pricing before trying to book a room or find directions. So then if you follow the link to your most popular link (rooms & rates in this case) we can see where most visitors went from there.
Rooms page site overlay
From here we can see that many visitors then went and checked out the Comments page and others when to the Reservations page. Unfortunately the Book Now link does not display any clicks because the reservation system is on a different website and does not record clicks.

Contradictions: If you have a couple of links on the same page that all go to the same place, they will all show the same number of clicks as the tracker can't determine which of those same links a person clicked on. It also seems to have trouble with recording clicks to some outgoing links, but records others fine, so it is necessary to be skeptical about click reporting if something seems out of whack.

 

These are some of the major ways to use tracker information to look at the overall health of your website. The key thing to keep in mind is that very few of these tell you anything specific by themselves, it is only by looking at them all you start to develop a picture of what might be happening.

 

I hope this helps. - Steve Wirt

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