Building Your Site's Digital Foundation in 2023

As a Glamping business owner, you are most likely familiar with OTAs (Online Travel Agencies). In the last decade, we have seen sites like Booking, Expedia, and Airbnb overtake the traditional travel agent and become trusted sources for adventure seekers. While OTAs can be helpful in filling up your glamping sites, they also may dominate digital searches, making it seem impossible for your websites to show up in search results organically.

This article will provide a step-by-step guide on building a solid foundation to minimize your company’s reliance on OTAs and funnel more traffic through your website in 2023.

Step #1: Data is Knowledge and Knowledge is Power

When it comes to making strategic marketing decisions for your business, analyzing online data is the key to success. Setting up an analytics foundation enables you to gain valuable insights. Learning how to understand that data empowers you to make decisions that can lead to increased efficiency, effectiveness, and profitability in your direct online bookings.

Whether you are running your marketing inhouse or have hired an agency, understanding the data will empower you as a business owner to ask the right questions and make the best decisions for your business.

Step #2: Own Your First Party Data

First-party data is the information obtained about your users while they are visiting your website or other digital properties. This can be as simple as demographic information, commonly visited pages, email addresses, etc.

Another way to collect first-party data is by taking action when your guest is on your property. Gather as much information as you can including emails, names, and phone numbers. Many like to capture this information through a guest form at the signin or Wi-Fi log-in page.

Step #3: Build a Digital Foundation

Here are the tools you should take control of as soon as possible to ensure you are controlling your first-party data:

Google Analytics: Confirm both Google Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 are installed and running on your site. As of July 2023, Universal Analytics will no longer track traffic from your site. It is imperative that GA4 is installed correctly on your site as soon as possible so you will be able to see historical data as your 2023 season ramps up. Unless you are savvy with Analytics, you may need to reach out to your marketing team or an agency to be sure GA4 is in place and tracking data on your site.

Direct Booking Systems: Confirm your booking system is integrated with Google Analytics. At our agency, well over 50% of the audits we do show that user data is either misaligned or flat-out wrong. Most reservation systems have an integration available with Google Analytics. Taking the steps to confirm your booking data is reliable is the main building block to informing your future marketing decisions.

Directory Listings: Confirm you have a directory listings management/reputation monitoring system running and that you are receiving notifications regarding your business name, including reviews. Keeping a close eye on what the market is saying about your business is crucial to maintaining the positive reputation you’ve worked so hard to achieve.

Google Business Profile: Make sure your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is up-to-date and is consistently monitored for new features that are consistently released by Google. Keep in mind that a recent article from Google stated that in 2022, over 10% of search queries will come from voice searches. This highlights the importance of keeping your Google Business Profile updated and optimized for voice search to stay ahead of the competition.

It is essential to ensure that your foundation is set up properly to enable you to collect accurate first-party data.

Step #4: Balanced Traffic Sources

Now that your data is in a place where you feel you can trust what you’re seeing, it’s time to start analyzing. One of the larger mistakes we see small businesses make is applying too much credit or too much blame to one particular marketing channel.

Imbalanced Traffic Sources

A healthy marketing plan will be well-balanced and allow space for prospective customers to come from many channels. In other words, if Facebook is sending your site a ton of traffic, while PPC and organic are almost nonexistent, you have an imbalanced source of traffic and are too heavily reliant on that one source.

Balanced Traffic Sources

Step #5: Embrace Multichannel Attribution

Multi-channel attribution refers to the practice of identifying and assigning credit to different marketing channels that contribute to a customer’s conversion or purchase. This allows you to better understand which channels are most effective and allocate your marketing budget accordingly.

An example of this would be; a customer who clicks on a Google search ad, then clicks on a Facebook ad and finally makes a purchase on a company’s website. With multi-channel attribution, the company would be able to identify that both the Google search ad and the Facebook ad played a role in the customer’s purchase and could assign a portion of the credit for the sale to each of those channels.

A good rule of thumb is to plan on creating between 4-7 touchpoints before expecting a new reservation or conversion. There are so many ways a potential customer can be influenced by your brand, both online and offline, that it’s increasingly important to monitor and measure each channel for how they assist in driving the conversion.

In conclusion, Glamping business owners must take a proactive approach in order to compete against OTAs in the digital landscape. By investing in a solid digital foundation and understanding the data collected through analytics, businesses can gain valuable insights and make data-driven decisions that can lead to increased efficiency, effectiveness, and profitability in direct online bookings. By taking these 5 steps, Glamping business owners can minimize their company’s reliance on OTAs and boost their visibility in search results.

About the Author

thexcitegroup.com

Michael Klabon is a Partner at The Xcite Group, a digital marketing agency based out of Denver, Colorado. They specialize in partnering with small to medium size businesses and helping them navigate the variety of services available in the digital space. They have a passion for the outdoors and are proud of their work with more than 40 outdoor service providers. If you have any questions, reach out to michael@thexcitegroup.com.

Michael Klabon