Your Google Analytics Funnel Has Changed A Lot: Here's Why

But basically, it's just kinda coming back to when you're looking at your website performance, putting this in air quotes, your website performance, your analytics performance, what are you looking at? Are you looking at the actual steps in the funnel that people take from coming to the website to making an online booking? Are you looking at each step of that funnel and measuring it properly? Are you segmenting? Are you slicing that data so you can understand how different traffics channels perform, where they enter, where they don't enter, how they end up going through this process? Or are you doing the surface level, which is just looking at the overall sessions, maybe the overall purchases, and just kinda checking the box and moving on? Because I've had my share of projects recently that I've worked on where the traffic flow has been...

There's been gaps and problems and issues and things like that haven't fully been resolved.

And sometimes the answers are not simple, by the way.

Sometimes the answers are really hard.

Wow, people really jump off this website on the property detail pages.

It's because our photos are- aren't very good.

We have 100 properties, all with poor photos.

[laughs] Reshooting 100 properties is a monumental task, but that may be what's re- necessary to improve the performance of this, and you have to sit with that and realize what to do with that.

Anyways, I'm already going off on tangents, but we're doing a revisiting of the GA, Google Analytics booking flow funnel with a little bit of kind of AI traf- traffic stuff sprinkled in.

So this was your idea to some degree, Paul.

So walk me through this at a high level.

What do we, what are we talking about here? How does it apply to the vacation rental manager looking to get more direct bookings?

I, I do.

I think part of this is, let's hypothetically, if you have been working with a vendor in this space, working with BuildUp for two, three, four years, [laughs] or you're working with any of the other vendors, we're not gonna, we don't need to mention anybody else, but if you are, if you're working with vendors, like, the likelihood is that you're probably visiting the same kind of metrics that you have been for the past three, four, five years, and I think that's fine.

I think that those are probably very important.

These are leading indicators of success.

I'm not calling you out as in a, in a negative way, but I'm thinking...

But what I'm saying is that holistically, when you take a look at reporting across the industry, it's pretty similar.

We're looking at the same things.

We're looking at the primary things that Google is showing us when you look at the, get your kinda first view of Google Analytics, [laughs] so when you sign up, we've reallocated a little bit the data that's just in, in some cases, some people are putting it into customer boards that way.

But the numbers themselves, like the, the data points themselves really haven't changed, even though the customer journey has changed pretty monumentally over that time.

So I think how we're evaluating performance of the website, and again, there's other complexities that analytics brings into things too, but when you're just looking at it like that, of just how the travel journey, travel, the, the booking journey has changed, and we're still looking at the same metrics, then maybe we, we have to kinda shift that focus.

So today, again, looking at how you are evaluating.

One of the things that I've seen in some analytics is that we are, we're getting the different parts of the funnel, but we're falling out at very important parts of the funnel, and then those, those bottom of funnel moments where you never want leakage at the bottom of the funnel, and it is.

It's something that it's not, like, one specific website provider, one specific anything here, one specific destination.