How to track your booking conversions with Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics
All businesses selling products online should be data driven. Knowing how, when and why your website visitors convert (complete a booking) into paid customers should be the foundation of your digital operations.
Google Analytics is an extremely efficient and feature rich platform for gaining valuable insight into the performance of your website. Firstly, it reports on how your visitor has arrived at your site; secondly, their behaviour on the site, for instance where they go and what they do. Finally, and most importantly, it tells you if those visitors buy your product (booking).
Having the means to track your visitor from the moment they land on your site, all the way through to clicking on the 'place booking' button on your Anytime Booking page, to being directed to your payment gateway, before finally landing on the booking complete page, is essential. It means not only will you know how you can improve the layout and user experience of your website, but where to direct your marketing efforts.
Google Analytics Ecommerce tracking is a convenient way of not only understanding the value of each booking, but from what source that visitor has come ie, Facebook, your website, another website, paid listings such as Googles Adwords, email campaigns and so on. You are able to accurately and objectively determine the return on your investment.
Effectively optimising your website for search, managing adwords campaigns and analysing your data is outside the scope of Anytime Booking; you would need in-house knowledge or a digital marketing partner for this. However, did you know that we can help to implement e-commerce tracking for you?
The most efficient way to prepare Google Analytics to begin reporting on your booking data is via Google Tag Manager (GTM), which is Anytime's only supported method of integration. If you or your digital marketing agency are familiar with this, it involves adding a little snippet of code obtained from the GTM dashboard, called a container to the header of your website (and booking pages). Then, from within the GTM interface, you can set a whole plethora of tracking tags, both Google's and many third party tags, without having to add each of these tags into the source code of your page every time. Each one of these tags can gather the necessary information from your booking pages via the container.
Google recently announced the integration of a new incarnation of Google Analytics, GA4, which provides a much more feature rich, event based form of curating data. All sites using Google Analytics will need to migrate to this method from the 1st July 2023.
As part of this you will notice that in GTM you are able to create the necessary tags to send data back to Google Analytics.
Note: By adding one container to your website/booking system sourcecode you avoid needing to add many different types of tracking tags which might all conflict with one another. They can all do their job without falling over each other. Each of the Tags in your Tag Manager account talk with the container on your web page and pull the necessary data.
How Anytime Booking can help you
If you already have a Google Tag Manager account and have generated your container which is sucessfully tracking your Google Analytics metrics we can add this to your booking pages too so that at the very least you can see your visitors from one site to the next. Its important here that you switch on cross domain tracking so that Google sees tracks visitors from your website into our booking pages and all the way to a customer making a booking. As from 1st July 2023, you will also need to have a Google Analytics: GA4 Configuration tag created which should trigger on all page views.
Tracking booking conversions
If you would like to take things further and track your booking conversions (with actual value metrics begin passed back to Google Analytics, then again in part, we have this covered. We have already added another snippet of code to the header of your booking complete page (known as a datalayer) which collects all the necessary basic data as soon as your customer reaches this page, which is pushed into Google Analytics via GTM. Data such as the transaction id, the total revenue, the unit type are all included, as shown below.
If you or your digital marketing agency know how to set up tags in your Tag Manager account then you will be able to make use of this data pretty quickly. You would need to set up a GA4 event tag with the event name 'purchase'. You can then test in GTM preview mode that the tag is being triggered against a booking complete url, that we can provide you. Essentially this url is a previous booking that has been made in your online facing booking pages and will look similar to this:
https://youraccountref.anytimebooking.eu/place_booking/complete/2423047#forward
Implementing Tag Manager and advanced reporting
If you do not have a Tag Manager account or a Google Analytics account then we can help to get you going. As mentioned our remit only extends to the implementation not to the management, administration or strategy associated with running a successful digital marketing business. For this you will need to contact a specialist agency.