Tracking the metrics of a company can be a challenging task. You’re introduced to a lot of information initially and it can be confusing where to focus your attention and what metrics to consider important for your tour and activity business. However, Google Analytics offers you the opportunity to gain important insights into your customers' behavior and how they interact with your site. If utilized correctly, Google Analytics can help you increase your revenue, drive more conversions, and allow you to focus your attention to better understand your site’s traffic. We’ll take a look at some of the key metrics and dive into what they mean for your business to take advantage of the wealth of information offered in Google Analytics.

Discover Key Information About Your Customers

One of the easiest and most essential pieces of information you can access from Google Analytics is the demographics of your customers. You likely already focus your marketing attention on certain demographics - you should do the same for your website visitors as well! In the Audience reports, you can see who your visitors are by age and gender by going to the Demographics report. This is the most basic view of who your visitors are but you can explore more by looking at Geo reports to see what countries visitors come from and what language they speak.

This is a great option for tour operators that have a lot of foreign visitors. One example might be discovering that there is a high usage of Spanish-speaking visitors on your page. This might inspire you to offer your tours in both English and Spanish if possible to reach more customers and increase bookings. Or maybe you see that there are a lot of site visitors from other major cities nearby. A great idea would be to focus some of your marketing on reaching potential customers living in those cities since there is already a clear interest.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for looking at visitor demographics! Discover more about your clientele by choosing new metrics to track based on sessions and pages per session.

How Did Site Visitors Find Your Page?

Spreading the word about your business is important, but so is figuring out the best channel to reach new customers! Whether it’s organic searches, social media, or Google Ads, you should be tracking where your site visitors are coming from to best decide where to focus your attention. By going to Acquisition reports, you can see where these visitors come from and decide where to focus your efforts. You may find out that even though you’re paying for Google Ads, your visitors tend to come from your social media accounts instead. That’s a sign to possibly invest more in your socials and allocate some of your budget to showcasing quality photos on your accounts rather than trying to win over customers through paid ads

Another aspect to consider is Referrals which can be accessed from Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals.  Here, you can see what sites your visitors are coming from and which ones generate valuable traffic by looking at metrics like transactions, revenue, and average session duration. Those with a high average session duration are valuable since they show that visitors spent more time on your site and were more interested in your content as well as more inclined to book with your business. You may also see that while paid listings such as Tripadvisor are driving traffic, they’re not generating a worthwhile ROI. This could be a good sign that the paid listing isn’t working as well as you thought and it might be helpful to focus your attention on other referral channels. Take a deeper look into the Referrals reports to see which travel sites and referrers are helping drive the most traffic and helping you grow your business! If you notice they’re not driving traffic to your site, then it may be time to rethink your referral strategy and partners.

Metrics to Watch

While there are many different metrics to track in Google Analytics, there are some that can be seen as more useful than others. Here are two easy metrics to start with - Bounce Rate and Site Speed. Once you've got the basics down, you can move on to tracking more advanced metrics to discover new information and statistics about your customers' activity on your site.

Bounce Rate

You want your visitors to spend time on your site and take a look around. It’s expected that there will be instances where visitors click on your site but then leave or ‘bounce’ without clicking another page, making a purchase, or completing a registration. There are of course exceptions such as when a visitor accidentally clicks on your site, but a high bounce rate can be a cause for concern. An average bounce rate is 41% to 55% so if you see your rate around 60%, then it might be time to consider making changes - especially if this occurs on your homepage. This may mean your home page content is not enticing visitors to search further or it’s difficult to find key information regarding your activity. Your home page should have a clear call to action, easily accessible booking links, and mobile optimization to best ensure a low bounce rate.

Site Speed

On average, you have 8 seconds to capture the attention of your audience. That’s a short amount of time to get your point across and maybe a reason why your bounce rate is so high! By going to Behavior > Site Speed, you can gain valuable insight into how fast your site is loading and why it may lead to lost revenue. Take it from Avital Food Tours who used Google Analytics to recognize their site speed issue:

"We can have the most amazing website in the world, but if it doesn't load, it's useless. GA helped us identify a site speed issue, which allowed us to investigate the issue and make the necessary fixes."

Your site may have great content, but you may lose out on potential customers if it’s a pain to access. Monitor your site speed regularly to make sure you’re not missing out on customers because of slow loading times!

Enhanced Ecommerce

Looking to gain important insight on how visitors move through your booking flow? Try adding Enhanced Ecommerce to your Google Analytics tracking to analyze which of your activities are performing the best. Peek Pro’sEnhanced Ecommerce integration links directly with your booking flow to pull relative data to better understand how customers use your site. With this integration, you can track abandoned bookings or see how long it takes for customers to move through your booking flow. You can also take a closer look at certain data in your booking flow such as Product ID/Name, Activity Date, and Number of Guests. This information can be found in the Ecommerce reports section of Google Analytics as seen below.

These data points offer a more in-depth look at site visitors' shopping (or purchase) behavior. You can use this information to create Google Ads that specifically target these audiences or retarget those that showed an interest in your booking but ultimately didn’t follow through with a purchase. This is achieved by creating new segments for certain actions that account for all the product data linked from Peek Pro. Discover how to build new segments to track specific data from ecommerce in this step-by-step guide from the Google Partner, Optimize Smart

Learn more about how to integrate Enhanced Ecommerce directly into your Peek Pro account here or check out this helpful video on how to add the integration into your Google Analytics account.

Google Analytics opens up a world of possibilities to effectively track your customers and better understand their behavior when using your site. Avital Tours also discovered key insights on their site through Google Analytics:

"GA is a very robust platform that can feel intimidating and overwhelming if you've never used it before. I'd recommend starting small and simple by using many of the built-in views, like Audience Overview. Then, as you feel more comfortable, you can view more reports, use filters, and explore flows."

Interested in using Google Analytics to track customer behavior on your site? Learn more through this helpful article or set up a demo with Peek Pro to learn more about Google Analytics integration and other tools to increase bookings and grow revenue!

Table of contents

Tracking the metrics of a company can be a challenging task. You’re introduced to a lot of information initially and it can be confusing where to focus your attention and what metrics to consider important for your tour and activity business. However, Google Analytics offers you the opportunity to gain important insights into your customers' behavior and how they interact with your site. If utilized correctly, Google Analytics can help you increase your revenue, drive more conversions, and allow you to focus your attention to better understand your site’s traffic. We’ll take a look at some of the key metrics and dive into what they mean for your business to take advantage of the wealth of information offered in Google Analytics.

Discover Key Information About Your Customers

One of the easiest and most essential pieces of information you can access from Google Analytics is the demographics of your customers. You likely already focus your marketing attention on certain demographics - you should do the same for your website visitors as well! In the Audience reports, you can see who your visitors are by age and gender by going to the Demographics report. This is the most basic view of who your visitors are but you can explore more by looking at Geo reports to see what countries visitors come from and what language they speak.

This is a great option for tour operators that have a lot of foreign visitors. One example might be discovering that there is a high usage of Spanish-speaking visitors on your page. This might inspire you to offer your tours in both English and Spanish if possible to reach more customers and increase bookings. Or maybe you see that there are a lot of site visitors from other major cities nearby. A great idea would be to focus some of your marketing on reaching potential customers living in those cities since there is already a clear interest.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for looking at visitor demographics! Discover more about your clientele by choosing new metrics to track based on sessions and pages per session.

How Did Site Visitors Find Your Page?

Spreading the word about your business is important, but so is figuring out the best channel to reach new customers! Whether it’s organic searches, social media, or Google Ads, you should be tracking where your site visitors are coming from to best decide where to focus your attention. By going to Acquisition reports, you can see where these visitors come from and decide where to focus your efforts. You may find out that even though you’re paying for Google Ads, your visitors tend to come from your social media accounts instead. That’s a sign to possibly invest more in your socials and allocate some of your budget to showcasing quality photos on your accounts rather than trying to win over customers through paid ads

Another aspect to consider is Referrals which can be accessed from Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals.  Here, you can see what sites your visitors are coming from and which ones generate valuable traffic by looking at metrics like transactions, revenue, and average session duration. Those with a high average session duration are valuable since they show that visitors spent more time on your site and were more interested in your content as well as more inclined to book with your business. You may also see that while paid listings such as Tripadvisor are driving traffic, they’re not generating a worthwhile ROI. This could be a good sign that the paid listing isn’t working as well as you thought and it might be helpful to focus your attention on other referral channels. Take a deeper look into the Referrals reports to see which travel sites and referrers are helping drive the most traffic and helping you grow your business! If you notice they’re not driving traffic to your site, then it may be time to rethink your referral strategy and partners.

Metrics to Watch

While there are many different metrics to track in Google Analytics, there are some that can be seen as more useful than others. Here are two easy metrics to start with - Bounce Rate and Site Speed. Once you've got the basics down, you can move on to tracking more advanced metrics to discover new information and statistics about your customers' activity on your site.

Bounce Rate

You want your visitors to spend time on your site and take a look around. It’s expected that there will be instances where visitors click on your site but then leave or ‘bounce’ without clicking another page, making a purchase, or completing a registration. There are of course exceptions such as when a visitor accidentally clicks on your site, but a high bounce rate can be a cause for concern. An average bounce rate is 41% to 55% so if you see your rate around 60%, then it might be time to consider making changes - especially if this occurs on your homepage. This may mean your home page content is not enticing visitors to search further or it’s difficult to find key information regarding your activity. Your home page should have a clear call to action, easily accessible booking links, and mobile optimization to best ensure a low bounce rate.

Site Speed

On average, you have 8 seconds to capture the attention of your audience. That’s a short amount of time to get your point across and maybe a reason why your bounce rate is so high! By going to Behavior > Site Speed, you can gain valuable insight into how fast your site is loading and why it may lead to lost revenue. Take it from Avital Food Tours who used Google Analytics to recognize their site speed issue:

"We can have the most amazing website in the world, but if it doesn't load, it's useless. GA helped us identify a site speed issue, which allowed us to investigate the issue and make the necessary fixes."

Your site may have great content, but you may lose out on potential customers if it’s a pain to access. Monitor your site speed regularly to make sure you’re not missing out on customers because of slow loading times!

Enhanced Ecommerce

Looking to gain important insight on how visitors move through your booking flow? Try adding Enhanced Ecommerce to your Google Analytics tracking to analyze which of your activities are performing the best. Peek Pro’sEnhanced Ecommerce integration links directly with your booking flow to pull relative data to better understand how customers use your site. With this integration, you can track abandoned bookings or see how long it takes for customers to move through your booking flow. You can also take a closer look at certain data in your booking flow such as Product ID/Name, Activity Date, and Number of Guests. This information can be found in the Ecommerce reports section of Google Analytics as seen below.

These data points offer a more in-depth look at site visitors' shopping (or purchase) behavior. You can use this information to create Google Ads that specifically target these audiences or retarget those that showed an interest in your booking but ultimately didn’t follow through with a purchase. This is achieved by creating new segments for certain actions that account for all the product data linked from Peek Pro. Discover how to build new segments to track specific data from ecommerce in this step-by-step guide from the Google Partner, Optimize Smart

Learn more about how to integrate Enhanced Ecommerce directly into your Peek Pro account here or check out this helpful video on how to add the integration into your Google Analytics account.

Google Analytics opens up a world of possibilities to effectively track your customers and better understand their behavior when using your site. Avital Tours also discovered key insights on their site through Google Analytics:

"GA is a very robust platform that can feel intimidating and overwhelming if you've never used it before. I'd recommend starting small and simple by using many of the built-in views, like Audience Overview. Then, as you feel more comfortable, you can view more reports, use filters, and explore flows."

Interested in using Google Analytics to track customer behavior on your site? Learn more through this helpful article or set up a demo with Peek Pro to learn more about Google Analytics integration and other tools to increase bookings and grow revenue!

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