Uncovering Opportunities on Your Website to Drive More Direct Bookings [Video Series]

This series has covered ways to reach prospective guests, and now we turn our attention to converting them after they’ve reached your website. 

Even a modest conversion rate improvement can result in a significant revenue boost. Additionally, higher conversion rates can significantly improve the ROI of your marketing efforts, making marketing-driven growth more viable.

Quantitative Assessments

• The importance of clean, filtered data. Before looking for improvement opportunities, you must understand your traffic mix, filter out spam traffic and content marketing pages, and ensure proper technical setup. 
• Page performance. Look for under-performing landing pages, and use exit rate, page value, and the navigation summary report to assess all pages. 
• Channel performance. Looking at all traffic in aggregate is rarely useful for conversion rate assessment. Review channels, source/medium, and campaigns to identify low performers that require adjustment. Sometimes that means adjusting the page that the traffic is pointing to. 
• Device performance. If your mobile conversion rate is less than 62-67% of your desktop conversion rate, your mobile site may be underperforming—but create a fair comparison by filtering out low-converting traffic that skews mobile, such as top-of-funnel display traffic. 
• FAQ tracking. You may be able to track which questions people are clicking on the most, and you can improve your pages with that data. 
• Site speed. Maintain a good user experience by keeping your site tuned for snappy performance.
• Scroll and click tracking. Tools such as Microsoft Clarity (free) and Hotjar provide visual representations of user behavior and can be a great supplement to Google Analytics data. 

Qualitative Assessments

• Usability testing. One of the most valuable tools for website assessment is also the least-used among small and mid-sized businesses. This is where you truly uncover why something happened when other tools only tell you what happened. Userfeel.com is the value choice; Usertesting.com is the premium choice but is a fit for only large businesses.
• The “think like a customer” assessment. You need an objective, dispassionate assessment of things such as:
  • What the website layout and copy are actually communicating. Do they market the company or just the category? 
  • Whether the claims are believable
  • Whether there’s any real reason to book now
  • What the images and video on the website actually convey, in terms of quality, environment, and emotions.

Watch All The Videos In The Series

Part 1: Why Direct Bookings Fail and How to Change That

Part 2: Building a Search Marketing Plan Grounded in Real Data

Part 3: How to Use Search Marketing to Maximize Your Direct Booking Revenue

Part 4: Building a Plan to Optimize Your Social Media Presence for Direct Bookings 

Part 5: Executing Your Social Media Direct Bookings Strategy

Part 6: Uncovering Opportunities on Your Website to Drive More Direct Bookings

Part 7: Top Tips For a Higher Converting Website 

See all of the Growing Revenue Through Direct Bookings series here.