Benchmark your hotel's website conversion rate using our online calculator, and then see how much extra revenue our services could bring.
Internet Affected has created a tool that helps owners of luxury hotels measure how well their website converts visitors into bookers. Our benchmarks are based on a sample of conversion rates drawn from our portfolio of luxury hotels.
Using the Calculator
Using data readily available in your hotel’s Google Analytics account, you can see how well your hotel converts visitors to bookers (website ecommerce conversion rate) and how much extra revenue your hotel might have received if it had been using our services during the same period.
If you find that your hotel converts web visitors to bookers at a very low rate, your web-marketing agency should still be providing you with clear explanations as to why this is happening. At a minimum they should be making suggestions to help you improve the performance of your current marketing mix - whether helping you to perfect the current Revenue Management model to attract direct bookings, or by making the website easier to use through usability enhancements. This is all part of the full-service Internet Affected provides to its own Clients.
If you would like us to provide your hotel with performance suggestions, please use the form in the calculator on this page to request more information.
If conversion rates are a new concept for you as a form of web measurement, or if you would simply like a refresher on their value and how they are calculated, skip over our calculator and first read our mini guide, where we explain conversion rates in more detail.
What are conversion rates?
We use conversions to measure how often certain things happen on a website. The conversion rate formula is expressed as a percentage, that shows the number times this thing (a conversion) happened as a frequency of all the website sessions (the total sum of all visitor session to your website). So, for example if you wanted to look at the conversion rate for dining reservations, you would take the total number of dining requests (conversions) and divide them by the total number of sessions.
Conversion formula calculation example
If the total number of dining reservation requests equals 20
and the total number of visitor sessions was 200
the conversion rate would be 10%
Room Conversion Rates
When a hotel connects their Google Analytics account with its booking engine Google Analytics can calculate an ecommerce conversion rate which can then be used to evaluate performance. This measurement comes in two slightly different formats, and it is important to understand how they differ.
“booking engine ecommerce conversion rate” – represents the rate at which a visitor to the booking engine goes on to complete a booking.
“website ecommerce conversion rate” – represents the rate at which a visitor to the website goes on to complete a booking (on the booking engine).
Digital marketing seeks to drive room revenue conversion through a hotel website, while booking engine providers offer services that deliver conversion through the booking engine. It therefore makes sense that to evaluate the effectiveness of a web-marketing service, website ecommerce conversion and not booking engine ecommerce conversion is more appropriate, even if there will be some overlap between the two.
The success of Room revenue conversions is influenced by other elements in the marketing mix, and it’s useful to summarise these to illustrate these relationships more clearly.
Revenue Management – If your hotel does not have room availability when a visitor wants to book, this will lead to a visit without a booking and will therefore lower your conversion rate. The same thing will happen if the incentive to book your hotel is more convincingly made by an Online Travel Agent (OTA). That is because the visitor might still visit your hotel and then go off to book on an OTA, thus lowering your conversion rate.
Website & Booking Engine design – Revenue Management might have availability and a great rate, but if the visitor doesn’t see the offer when they visit your website, or gets lost on the booking engine due to poor usability, the chances are they will go somewhere else to complete their booking.
Web-marketing – Good Revenue Management and good website and booking engine design can be working together effectively but if your web-marketing agency is not delivering high quality visitors to your website, your conversion rate will drop. The role of web-marketing should be to shine light and raise awareness about your unique hospitality offer and bring in the web visitors that want to book.
Why are conversion rates so important?
Conversion rates are important because they can provide a benchmark for evaluating how well digital marketing services, such as Google Ads, or Facebook Ads are performing.
For example, if a Google Ads campaign has been delivering revenue historically at a conversion rate of 25%, and then suddenly drops to 5% it tells you that there is a problem in some area of the marketing mix. It could be because the hotel has no more room inventory and so people are clicking on the Google Ad (an increase in sessions) and not booking (fewer total conversions). Our live dashboards capture this.
Conversion rates are also really important because tiny changes in the conversion rate of a channel, translate into huge increases in revenue.
Let’s say your website was getting 30,000 visitors a month and these visitors booked 100,000 in room revenue. Your website conversion rate would be 0.60%. Using exactly the same numbers but with our baseline performance conversion rate of 0.80% would lead to an additional room revenue of 33K. Small changes in conversion, large increases in revenue.
What makes ‘website ecommerce conversion rate’ particularly interesting?
Even if the success of room conversion rates rely on good pricing and ease of booking and quality of traffic, website ecommerce conversion rates can still provide a high-level view of the overall performance of your current marketing mix.
Are conversion rates just for rooms?
No. Conversion rates can exist for anything. At Internet Affected we setup conversion measurements across the different areas of a hotels business –meetings and events, spa treatments, gym memberships, restaurant bookings, or specific types of web forms based on the needs of the hotel. During COVID-19 our specialised campaigns for Alternative State Quarantine have helped our Clients in Thailand capture revenues that were not available to book via the hotel booking engine.
By setting up these conversion measurements our Clients can see a detailed view of their website performance, and we then work with them each month to identify any areas of the marketing mix that can be strengthened further, taking feedback directly from the campaigns we run for them.
How should we interpret conversion rates?
Conversion rates help evaluate the impact that a change in pricing, a website enhancement, or the activation of a new marketing service can have on room revenues.
Conversion rates should be measured over a 2 – 3-month period, even if in theory the changes should be immediate, it will help you to get a more accurate picture of the contribution you current marketing services are bringing your hotel.
With conversion measurements in place, questions such as the following can be easily answered:
Was there any increase in the website booking engine conversion rate when we added an offer to the homepage, such as a free bottle of champagne on arrival?
How well have general or specific web-marketing activities contributed to the overall conversion of visitors through our website and revenues?
These are the reporting expectations of our Clients. We demonstrate our service value and they entrust their brands to our care for their digital marketing.
Conversion rate scores - reliability and limitations
With three main factors influencing conversion rates, should we rely exclusively on conversion rates when looking to evaluate the performance of the current marketing mix?
Not exclusively. Website ecommerce conversion rates are global values and so won’t pickup on some of the nuances in the performance of your website. However, they do signal the degree to which the quality of your web-traffic combined with your revenue management strategy and website design are working effectively together. For this reason, we feel that they can be used as safe and reliable thresholds for evaluating your hotel’s visitor to book conversion rate.
At Internet Affected we work exclusively with large (300+ rooms) independently owned luxury hotels with multiple dining, meeting and events spaces plus the additional areas of health and beauty, fitness, weddings and private dining. Our performance rate benchmarks as checked against third party data to ensure their reliability and accuracy.
The goal of our tool is to help you get a sense of the revenue opportunities available at your hotel, through the use of our marketing services.
If you have any questions about using this calculator, please get in touch or provide your hotel’s information using the form on this page.
If you are now ready to use the calculator click here!
About the Author
Glyn Spencer Hopkins is the owner of Internet Affected and has been working exclusively with hotels for over a decade.
Internet Affected provides web marketing services tailored to the individual personalities of hotels; a complete range of digital services designed to help them take back ownership of their hotel brand from the OTAs. Specialized marketing solutions to increase guest loyalty, food & beverage bookings, events and wedding inquiries, clearly reported in straightforward language.
