Digital Audit: The Secret to Increasing Direct Bookings

As hoteliers, we all know that the goal is to generate as many direct bookings through our own channels as possible. With the ongoing prevalence and popularity of online travel agencies (OTAs) such as Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, and Booking.com, and competition from vacation rentals, travelers have a plethora of choices in how to book their travel accommodations.  

While the “billboard effect” has demonstrated that listing with an OTA helps drive direct bookings through the hotel’s website, it’s certainly not a replacement for direct bookings. Hotels that struggle to convert bookings directly on their websites lose out on both the commissions paid to the OTAs and customer loyalty. In today’s economic climate, where hotels are continuing to make up for the lost revenue incurred by the pandemic, every dollar counts. 

There can be any number of reasons why visitors are bouncing from a property’s website and choosing to book elsewhere. The trick is figuring out what those reasons are—and that’s where a digital audit comes in. A digital audit will help your hotel determine precisely where and why a potential guest goes elsewhere in the process of booking.  

What is a digital audit? 

A digital audit is only part of a complete health check of your digital assets, but it’s the first step to understanding the effectiveness of your digital marketing. Simply put, an audit is a comprehensive, customized assessment of a business’s web and mobile experience. The insights are assembled into a report designed to help businesses leverage digital channels more effectively to meet strategic goals. For hotels, digital audits help identify issues and opportunities to improve their online presence, especially when it comes to generating direct bookings on the property’s website.  

Any robust digital audit evaluates what you can see (content) and what you can’t (metrics) to determine your hotel’s digital effectiveness, compliance, and performance. While any agency, tool, or marketing expert performs digital audits differently, a comprehensive audit includes both a qualitative and quantitative assessment to get the complete picture. The quantitative analysis takes a holistic look at your hotel’s digital metrics to determine what’s working and what’s not. This provides the data that the marketing team can leverage to help evaluate digital efforts. On the other hand, the qualitative component involves experts taking a critical look at your hotel’s digital landscape, providing you with insights and recommendations based on the latest best practices.  

More specifically, the digital audit will help you gain insights into what and where your digital marketing efforts are effective. The audit will answer things like:   

• How effective is your website from a user experience? 
• Is your website optimized for performance? 
• How does your website rank in search engines? 
• Is the content on your site appealing to end users? 
• Does the design of your site impact booking conversions? 
• What’s your property’s online reputation? 

And most importantly, a digital audit will help uncover why your website is not converting bookings. Any of these things can impact a user’s experience, so if you, or your hotel’s marketing team, don’t have answers to any of the above, you should prioritize a digital audit. 

What your website says about you 

Today, a traveler’s entire journey is impacted by the digital world, from pre-booking to post-departure. Research by Fuel & Flip shows that 87% of people will visit a hotel’s website before booking a hotel stay and will likely visit the site more than once.  

Your hotel’s website is the online representation of your business and should reflect what your guests should expect from your property and how you operate. For example, if your website features less-than-ideal images that fail to show the quality of your property, it may deter potential guests from your location. Similarly, if your booking system is clunky and churns out too many options for the happy traveler, they’re likely to get overwhelmed and unable to decide and book elsewhere for their stay. 

Digital audits evaluate a website from the perspective of your hopeful guests to ensure the site is up to date with the latest online best practices. It factors in the site's “attractiveness,” or its appeal to a potential guest, how the content is organized so that it’s easy for them to navigate, and the overall speed in which the site performs. It evaluates everything you need to know—and things you might not even be aware of—to identify the issues and gaps so that you can address them to ensure guests want to book directly on your site.  

What’s next? 

At Shift Digital, we know the value of a digital audit because we’ve seen the results they afford. We work specifically with hotels to execute and assess digital audits so that we can help our clients transform their digital landscape—and ultimately increase direct bookings. If your hotel is struggling with increasing direct bookings from your website, contact us today.