What yardsticks can hoteliers use to benchmark Website performance?

Benchmarking the performance of a Web site can be challenging. Web analytics, the term given to the behaviour of Web site visitors has no industry standard, one package may record markedly different visitor numbers to another. So how do you benchmark your site?

Performance is relative and one of the best ways to benchmark your site versus a competitor is to use Alexa. This free site ranks your Web site on a popularity scale. The unique feature about Alexa is it allows you to benchmark your performance on a regional basis.

Visitor numbers alone are not an effective benchmarking criteria however as it is the quality of visitors and how they interact with your Web site that matters. Some simple measures can be used to gauge the effectiveness of our site:

• What percentage of visitors who visit your Web site book online?
• What percentage of your business comes from the Internet?

The percentage of visitors who book online is often referred to as "look to book" ratio or L2B. This varies across Occupancy Marketing's customer base from 0.5% to 4% depending on location, hotel type and of course how well you manage your inventory!

As a general rule of thumb, a hotel chain, in a large metropolitan area with similar room types, can expect a L2B at the higher end of the scale. A country house hotel with no two rooms the same can expect a L2B at the lower end of the scale.

Identifying what percentage of business comes from the Internet can be difficult as it relies on the reservations team correctly identifying the booking source. One simple way to measure this is by looking at the value of online bookings via your Web site as a percentage of total accommodation sales. Using this measurement you can expect a range of between 5% and 25%. In exceptional circumstances this can be higher.

Because the above two figures are percentages and do not contain any hard numbers, it is easier to obtain comparative information from peers and competitors.

Another important benchmark is the makeup of your Internet business. If 80% of your Internet business comes from 3rd party commissionable Web sites like Expedia, you need to question if you are capable of selling this directly via your own Web site. A good industry benchmark to work to would be to sell 2/3rds of your inventory direct and 1/3rd via third parties.

How you compare to these standards and importantly how do you compare to similar businesses in your location?

Managing Director - Occupancy Marketing is an Internet Marketing company specialising in the hotel and tourism sector. The company specialises in driving direct, non commissionable bookings via the World Wide Web. www.occupancymarketing.com,