Our team can provide you with more accurate reporting by properly filtering out the irrelevant website traffic that’s coming from inside your hotel.
Many hotels use their Vizlly website as a Wi-Fi landing page, which means every single guest who logs in to your Wi-Fi will be directed to your homepage. While this is a powerful tactic for advertising your website, it’s important to be mindful that this will also inflate the number of unqualified visitors to your homepage and can misconstrue your Google Analytics reporting.
What’s Causing this False Data?
Consider this scenario: your front desk manager is looking at your website to see what special offers are currently up. This counts as a visit to your website, but there is no intent to book. When our team analyzes your Google Analytics, it appears that more people are visiting your website but not converting.
This also means that every time a guest logs onto your Wi-Fi and views your homepage it counts as a visit to your website, even though they have no intent to make an additional booking. This isn’t the usual behavior of the traffic we are organically driving to your website.
We can avoid this issue and provide you with more accurate reports of your website performance when we filter out your hotel’s personal IP address.
Leveraging Your Landing Page
Your website landing page is the first page your guests see once they connect to your property Wi-Fi. This is an excellent opportunity to share information about your hotel. Make a good first impression and draw your guests’ attention to:
- Helpful information about on-site amenities and services.
- Advertise promotions and special offers.
- Entice guests to leave a review and return again.
Using your website as a Wi-Fi landing page is an important advertising tool, but it’s important to remember that this also appears as traffic in Google Analytics.
Eliminate Irrelevant Clicks
Be mindful of how many people are viewing your website from inside your hotel. When you view your traffic in Google Analytics, every guest that logs into your Wi-Fi will also count as a visitor to your website, even though they’ve already converted! This is what we refer to as ‘unqualified traffic’ as these visitors have no intent to book.
This is why it’s important to avoid inflating your conversion metrics and eliminate irrelevant clicks by filtering out your hotel’s IP address. By removing website impressions coming from your own property’s Wi-Fi, you’ll increase the accuracy of your metrics and reports.
Why it’s Important for SEO
More accurate reporting allows our SEO team to make more qualified decisions and better recommendations for your website. It’s important that our team can see true conversion metrics and realistic page performance.
When guests view your website as they connect to your Wi-Fi, it’s likely that they click away fairly quickly to accomplish their initial online intent. These website visitors don’t have the same intent as a travel shopper who is looking to making a booking. This not only inflates the number of visitors to your homepage, but it also increases your bounce rate as these visitors don’t stay long and don’t book a new reservation.
An accurate report of your website’s organic traffic and booking behaviour allows our SEO team to make better recommendations for your SEO strategy to help improve your website performance.
Creating a Filter in Google Analytics
Our team will create a filter in your Google Analytics to filter out any website traffic coming from your hotel. Simply send us your IP address and we will create the appropriate filter.
Tip: It’s easy to find your IP address just by Googling “My IP Address”.
If your team manages your Google Analytics, you can also set up this filter yourself!
How to create a filter for your internal traffic in Google Analytics:
- Select the view you would like to remove traffic from.
- Go to Admin.
- Look under Views and select Filters.
- Add Filter.
- Add a filter name such as “Remove Internal Traffic”.
- Let the Filter Type be “Predefined”.
- Select the Filter Type to ‘Exclude’ “traffic from the IP addresses”
- Enter your own IP address.
- Hit save. Your internal traffic is now excluded!
Keep in mind that any previous data that may contain your internal traffic will still remain in the Google Analytics dashboard. Make an annotation to remind yourself of when you started tracking without internal traffic to compare the changes in numbers.
Note: Some properties use a separate IP address for their on-site Wi-Fi. If this scenario applies to you, simply reach out to your hosting provider for that secondary IP address so our team can filter out both!
It’s important to leverage a Wi-Fi landing page to showcase your Vizlly website while also being mindful of the inflated traffic it creates. Setting up a Google Analytics filter to remove this traffic will provide you with more accurate reporting and allow our team to analyze the true behaviour of travel shoppers on your website.
Send your IP Address to your Customer Success Manager today to improve your Vizlly reporting!
Written by Katrina Fowler, Content Specialist