Why you need website statistics for effective online marketing

Why the need for statistics for your web site?

Marketing and promoting holiday cottage web sites in search engine and via links on portals can be an expensive business.

Any owner of a web site wants to know which sites are sending them the most visitors and represent best value for money. The Country Cottages Online sites have integrated statistics.

A good statistics package will list not only referring search engines, domains, page hits, but also display any erroneous or missing pages, key words and phrases that your pages are found under, geographic information about your visitors, and more.

 
There are many different types of statistics packages and options.

Running a holiday cottage or a complex is a time consuming affair and the last thing that many self-catering owners want to do is to spend hours in front of a computer.  The larger holiday cottage businesses can afford to empliy a marketing person whose job it is to monitor results.
 

Google Analytics allows people to monitor results from their own web site and see the number of referrals from sites that they advertise with, that provide a link. It takes a little time to learn how to use Analytics and it is even possible to attend training courses. There are simpler Stats packages available that are easier to get to grips with. However, the picture is increasingly complicated.
If you advertise with Country Cottages Online, your enquiries could arrive from a number of sources:

    By telephone
    By email
    Via your own website
    Via a Facebook post

Unless people are meticulous about recording the source of each booking, keeping accurate statistics is a challenge.

 
The stats are just the base line

Stats provide the information which can lead to improvements. For example, if you find that your holiday cottage advertisment is obtaining a large number of page views but few bookings, you should ask yoursef certain questions:

What is deterring people from booking? Is it the cost or is it something else.

If your property record is achieving a low number of page views, investigate why. Is it the title of your advert? Is it the location?

In these days of geo positioning on Google Maps, it is critical to get the location exactly correct. Virtually all holiday rental websites use some form of may that cottages appear on. If your property is not correctly set, it will not appear and will not obtain those page views.

 
Spending time on the detail

The greater the detail you can provide, the better your holiday home will perform for you. It is not possible to advertise a property as child-friendly if you have not set it as such. The more detail that you can provide about why your holiday home is so child-friendly, the more pages it will appear on and therefore increase page views.