How digital marketing measurement is set to change in the next 12-months for hotels
As we look towards 2021 it seems there is real hope for a hospitality recovery with news that multiple vaccines will be available to tackle COVID-19. Over the next twelve-months the ways hotel’s measure digital marketing campaigns will also be changing. It’s going to affect every single digital marketing campaign you are running, and so understanding it at a basic level is a minimum requirement for success.
In this post we first look at why it’s happening, then understand the impact on campaigns, before concluding with a summary of the changes at Google and Facebook. We also suggest some steps and strategies your hotel can start taking to prepare for the future.
Internet Affected will be offering a premium training seminar on this topic, details for enrollment can be found at the end of this post.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
On May 25, 2018 the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became enforceable across EU countries. That regulation set several requirements on how websites (businesses) would have to te visitors about the information being collected during a web-visit, and how it would them be used in the future (and for how long).
A lot of amplification or noise went with GDPR announcement, but when distilled and looked at objectively, the terms of GDPR would seem reasonable to any normal human being:
tell people what data you are collecting from them;
why you are collecting that data;
what you are going to do with the data once collected; and
how long you would hold that data for in the future.
The noise came largely from technology companies that had until the enforcement date been happily collecting personal information as part of services they provided for free to webmasters - whether these webmasters were using Google Analytics or running a Facebook Like button on their website. However, once GDPR came into effect these two platforms, among others, needed to make changes to the way their services were provided, to avoid falling foul of the new data protection regulations.
Historically Google has had much less of a difficulty in mitigating the impact of GDPR on their services, although recently the Conversion API from Facebook looks to tilt the balance in their favour. These are two of the wealthiest technology companies on the planet, with eye-watering advertising revenues, but these ad-revenues could have been much higher, had GDPR – and similar country-based data protection measures – not come into force.
WHAT IS THE IMPACT ON MARKETING CAMPAIGNS?
The outcome of GDPR has been in raising the awareness of the general public concerning the data they give up when going online. In a historical timeline, Apple was one of the earliest companies to start with what they termed, Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP), a technical measure which essentially blocked 3rd party JavaScript based scripts used by Google and Facebook to provide their services. Mozilla Firefox is another browser tech company that by default blocks conversion events triggered via the Facebook tracking pixel. It’s expected that Microsoft’s own browser Edge, will at some point in the near future implement similar changes. Google’s Chrome is unsurprisingly reluctant to implement ITP as it could potentially kill their advertising revenues, so they are working on other models and systems (including their latest Google Analytics script covered in more detail below).
It’s important for hotels to understand what’s changing because we know that these changes will be already affecting the measurement of existing digital marketing campaigns, if not protected by a very specific setup.
At Internet Affected we have implemented campaign tracking that does not rely exclusively on third-party scripts to measure a campaigns effectiveness, and that means we can still attribute the revenue and value of our campaigns for our clients whether ITP or another variation is being used by a browser or not.
WHAT’S CHANGING AND WHAT YOU NEED TO DO
Facebook recently launched the Conversions API [link] which is a method to send Facebook information about conversions taking place on a website, without relying on the standard tracking pixel. Instead the conversion is sent to Facebook via the web-server and that means campaign tracking works, even if the browser has tracking protection running.
To illustrate:
Let’s say a person clicks on one of your hotel’s Facebook adverts and arrives at your website. At the moment unless they book within 1 day of clicking your ad, you will have no way knowing that it was the Facebook advert that brought the booking. Before ITP and similar systems came into effect Facebook campaigns could be tracked for up to 30 days after the click. Therefore, the length of time available to attribute value to a Facebook campaign was much longer.
As you might imagine, if Facebook can’t tell advertisers their campaigns are delivering revenue over a longer term, then advertisers might start thinking that Facebook campaigns are not worth investing in, idem Google.
The challenge for hotels is going to be finding ways to implement the Facebook Conversion API so that key conversions such as purchases, and inquiries are triggered and sent via the Conversion API. This will require Development by Booking Engines (ask your booking engine provider what they are doing about this!), but also hotel web-agencies that need to trigger events on the website via the Facebook API.
The positive outcome will be that key campaign metrics will no longer be negatively affected by individual browser settings or ad-blockers, and Facebook will be sent GDPR compliant requests back to Facebook making campaigns much more effective.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS TO UNIVERSAL ANALYTICS TO GA4
At Internet Affected we’ve been through all the versions of Google’s statistical measurement tool, Google Analytics. The tool relies exclusively on 3rd party cookies set in the browser to gather data. Even if the implementations of the code can be expedited using Google Tag Manager (GTM), it doesn’t change the code base and it still loads as a third-party cookie-based service.
Just consider this: If all third-party cookies were blocked tomorrow Google would lose the lion’s share of its revenue because advertisers that use Google Analytics to measure and reconcile campaign spend against goals, would simply stop working. That is quite a frightening prospect for such an advertising dependent company.
The response came at the end of October: Google announced the launch of Google Analytics 4 (link). The new analytics code has the promise of being able to provide webmasters with a way to measure their advertising campaigns and user interactions in a more holistic way, and that it can capture conversions that happen by a user across different devices, more effectively than the widely used Universal Analytics adopted by the industry since 2012. Where GA4 finds gaps in user data, Google claims that machine learning will be used to plug these gaps and use AI to make inferences on the data to provide the most complete picture of the user to-date.
At the moment what you should do is create a new Google Analytics property for the hotel and add the GA4 code to your hotel’s web-pages. You can then run both Universal Analytics and GA4 tracking codes side by side on your website and start collecting data and understand it better. Prepare for a shock as the new GA4 interface has far less sections than what you will be used to. Importantly, even if you might have received emails from Google, there is no need to do a hard switch over now, but simply get the code installed and start collecting data. Consider that most Booking Engines will need to completely rewrite the way they track steps through the booking engine as Universal Analytics event data is not compatible with GA4 (read: it will take time for GA4 to become a standard).
CONSIDER YOUR OWN TRACKING SOLUTION
We expect 3rd party tracking using cookies to be completely abandoned in the future, and this does pose a problem for any third-party statistics program. Matomo (previously PWIK) is similar to Google Analytics (it actually captures more data) and is installed and run on your hotel web-server.
It will give you access to raw web-statistics and won’t fall foul of future ITP implementations - depending on how it is configured when set up, you don’t even need to ask for user-consent because it is GDPR compliant. As happens frequently in technology things come full circle and we find ourselves resetting to technological standards, that were available right at the birth of the internet. We think that there is value in running Matomo in parallel with Google Analytics based on how the future is unfolding.
THE BIG TAKEAWAY
Both Facebook and Google rely on cookies that can fall foul of GDPR/CCPR/PDPA data regulations if they are not properly consented for usage on your hotel’s website. In the future these two companies will find ways to implement new ways to measure campaigns, and Facebook has been the first to develop this technically with their superior Conversion API.
It’s healthy to start thinking about how you will attribute value to campaigns where the tracking environment is unreliable. We know that hotels will have campaigns that are being affected right now, but for our own clients we have also developed solutions to ensure we can still measure value across the campaigns we run.
Implementing GA4 and starting to ask your booking engines about implementing Facebook’s Conversion API will force them to look at it and mean that your marketing campaigns can still be measured effectively and bring value to your business.
We will be offering a premium seminar that covers the Google Analytics and Facebook changes, implications and step by step instructions. If you would like to receive further information on this specialist seminar, please send an email to hoteltraining@internetaffected.com.
At Internet Affected we have over a decade of experience managing and measuring digital marketing campaigns for our luxury hotel portfolio. If we can be of service to your hotel, please use the call scheduling function below this post to setup a call, or please reach out to us using this contact form.
NEED HELP MOVING TO GA4 OR FACEBOOK CONVERSIONS API (CAPI) ?
If you don’t have the in-house capacity to manage the switch over to Google Analytics 4 or CAPI (Facebook Conversion API) let us help. We have successfully completed the integrations for our hotel client’s and can offer a fixed pricing package so your hotel can complete this migration. Now is a good time to complete this process as it is expected that by the end of January IOS 14 will be impacting on a hotel’s Facebook conversions. Contact us via our contact form.
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.
