Setting Up Google Analytics (GA4) for Your Hotel Site

You know how many bookings come via Booking, but not how many people visit your own site and click the booking button. You close that blind spot with Google Analytics, and it costs you nothing.

The Problem

Most accommodation owners know exactly how much comes via Booking.com because it's on the monthly overview. About their own site they know almost nothing. Do 50 visitors come per month or 500? Does anyone click the booking button or does everyone drop off on the pricing page? Do those visitors come via Google, via your Instagram, or via a link in your newsletter?

Without measurement it's guesswork. You change something on your site, a new photo, a different heading, a button that stands out, and you have no idea if it makes a difference. You invest in social media or in Google visibility and don't know if it brings visitors who actually book.

GA4 (Google Analytics 4, the free tool that measures what visitors do on your site) solves that. It records every visit, where it comes from, and what the visitor does. The numbers are there. You have to pull the insight out yourself, and that's exactly what this article is about: not every graph in GA4 says something for an accommodation with 6 rooms.

The Math

Say you run GA4 for a month on the site of a B&B with 6 rooms. These are the numbers you get back and what they mean for you.

That last number is the most important. A click on the booking button is called a "key event" in GA4 (formerly called a conversion). That's the difference between knowing how many people visit and knowing how many are about to book. How to set up that measurement and connect it to actual bookings, read in measuring conversion on your hotel site.

Action Plan

You set up GA4 via Google Tag Manager (a free tool to set that measurement without touching your website code). It's one-time work of roughly an hour.

1. Create a Google Analytics account at analytics.google.com with your existing Google account, the same one you use for your Business Profile. Follow the steps, enter your accommodation as the name, and select your country as the region. You get a measurement ID (starts with G-).

2. Create a Google Tag Manager account at tagmanager.google.com. Add your website address as a "container." Tag Manager gives you two small code fragments.

3. Paste the Tag Manager code fragments into your site. In WordPress you do that with a free plugin like "GTM4WP" or via your theme's header settings. One fragment in the header, one right after the body opening tag. This is the only step where you have to go into your site, and then never again.

4. Connect GA4 in Tag Manager. Create a new "tag" in Tag Manager of type Google Analytics, paste your measurement ID (the G-code from step 1), and set the trigger to "all pages." Click publish.

5. Test that it works. Open your site in another tab and look in GA4 under "Realtime" to see if your own visit appears. If you see yourself coming in, it's measuring.

6. Set up your key event. Mark the click on your booking button as a key event so you see each month how many people show purchase intent. This is the step that makes GA4 useful for an accommodation.

Common Mistakes

• Waiting until your site is perfect before you start measuring. GA4 doesn't measure retroactively. Every month without measurement is data you'll never get back. Turn it on today, even if you change your site next month anyway.

• Counting your own visits. If you and a colleague open the site every day to check reservations, that contaminates your numbers. Exclude your own IP address in GA4 settings, or use a browser extension that doesn't count you.

• Not setting up a key event. Without marking a click on your booking button, GA4 only measures visitor numbers. That's nice to know, but it says nothing about whether people actually want to book. The booking button click is the number that matters.

• Wanting to understand every graph. GA4 has dozens of reports, 90% of which aren't relevant for an accommodation with 6 rooms. Look at four things: visitors, source channel, top pages, and booking button clicks. Ignore the rest comfortably.

• Confusing GA4 with Search Console. They measure different things. GA4 measures behavior ON your site. Google Search Console measures how people FIND your site in Google. How to set up that second one, read in Google Search Console for hoteliers.

What You Can Do Now

GA4 isn't a week-long project. It's an hour to set up and then it measures automatically, forever, free. The difference between measuring and not measuring is the difference between changing your site on gut feeling and changing it based on what visitors actually do.

Create the two accounts today (steps 1 and 2). Paste the code this week and set your booking button as a key event. Look back in a month: then you'll have an initial picture of how many people visit your site and how many show purchase intent.

Want an overview afterward with only the numbers that matter, without wading through dozens of GA4 reports. Read how you set up a KPI dashboard for your hotel. And want to know what a shift to direct bookings brings you. Then calculate it in the savings calculator.

Would you rather have us set up the measurement for your accommodation and deliver the numbers in understandable language each month. We arrange that at marketing for hotels.