“In addition to ROAS, the most important KPI is the website conversion rates!
Hoteliers are spending their limited marketing dollars on SEO, paid search, metasearch, online media, PR, and social media in order to bring users to the hotel website, and allowing 98%-99.5% of them not to book. A complete waste of precious resources!
The average hotel website conversion rate (bookings divided by unique monthly visitors) is typically below 2%. Out of 100 people who visit your hotel website, two or less will book, and 98 or more will abandon your website and make a booking elsewhere – either with your competitors or with the OTAs.
The situation is even worse with independent hotels, where conversion rates are even lower and range between 0.5% -1.5%. Most hoteliers do not even know what the conversion rates are on their property websites.
What are the reasons for these exceptionally low conversion rates?
Mobile-last property websites, poor user experience (UX), sub-standard CMS and CRS technologies, poor visual and textual content, lack of merchandising strategy and technology, lack of reward or guest appreciation program in place, market and rate disparity, lack of enticing offers or compelling reasons to even enter the booking engine process (less than 1/3 of website visitors do so), etc., are only some of the reasons for these poor results.
Now imagine the monetary benefit from improving the conversion rate from a property with an ADR of $200, a website with 25,000 unique monthly visitors, and 1.5% conversion rate. If the conversion rate increases by 25%, this will result in additional website revenue of $450,000 per year. A 33% increase will bring an additional $600,000 per year. Just imagine what any hotelier could do with these additional direct revenues? Hire much-needed staff members, implement new much-needed technologies like cloud PMS, mobile check-in, guest issue resolution and messaging, etc.”
