Why the Cendyn Booking Engine is the perfect fit for Google Analytics 4

What happens when you combine an industry-leading booking engine with Google’s new analytics suite? You get best-in-class shopping and purchase insights to maximize your marketing efforts and revolutionize your revenue management.

It’s an exciting time in the world of analytics, and the topic on everyone’s minds is the evolution of one of Google’s flagship products, Universal Analytics. The platform is evolving to fit the new data landscape, with the new version, Google Analytics 4, built around the customer journey and events rather than cookies and invasive tracking methods. While many hoteliers are sweating over the need to update their data stacks, this is actually a great opportunity to modernize how your hotel collects, stores, and analyses data. By taking advantage of the latest technology, you’ll be able to set your hotel up for success for years to come. Among the new technology available to you is your hotel’s new secret weapon: the Booking Engine.

What’s so special about the Cendyn Booking Engine?

The Booking Engine is built to thrive in a cookie-less world. As a hospitality-specific product, it is designed to track data around the events that matter to you and your business. Even better, the tool supports unparalleled granularity, with parameters for occupancy, room code, arrival and departure date, and more. Paired with Google Analytics 4, the Booking Engine gives you more insight into the customer journey than ever before, helping you understand your website visitors and property guests on a deeper level.

Once you understand your target guests, the booking tool will help you get them to convert. Dynamic pricing rules allow you to quickly and effectively create multi-layered promos based on various criteria, without the need for new rate plans. Once your offers are created, you can then convince buyers to book with urgency messaging, time-bound marketing taglines, and strike-through pricing. You can increase ancillary revenue with features such as add-ons and upgrades, and the platform’s Rate Match® feature compares rates with OTA sites in real time and automatically matches lower rates found on third-party channels.

Here is the combined list of events which are tracked by the booking engine for your business

Rooms
Guest quantity
Adult quantity
Child quantity
Promo code
Room name and code
Rate name and code
Arrival date
Departure date

Understand and action shopping trends

In addition to providing a granular look at your customers’ behavior, combining the Booking Engine with GA4 lets you analyze larger shopping trends across the market. For example, you can quickly and easily identify the most searched arrival and departure dates to determine seasonal demand. Similarly, you can see what kind of groups (couples vs. families) are interested in booking, even if they don’t end up converting.

This added insight helps you optimize your marketing efforts to turn more lookers into bookers. Using the data gathered by the Booking Engine, you can create custom audiences in GA4 that share the same shopping habits and plug them into the most popular advertising tools, such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Microsoft Ads. Then you can run seasonal promotions based on demand and fine-tune the messaging for your campaigns so that you speak to the right audience. When guests don’t book right away, the built-in retargeting capabilities will help you capture the necessary email addresses and bring those users back to complete their bookings.

Enjoy increased clarity around conversions

Whenever your website visitors convert, you’ll have the tools and analytics to understand exactly what caused them to click. Traditionally, the effectiveness of a booking engine is measured by looking at the blended (aggregate) conversion rate. With the Booking Engine and GA4, you can go beyond a blended conversion rate. Explore individual conversion rates for each product, as well as your top-converting room and rate combinations. The increased clarity helps you understand which of your offerings are resonating with potential customers and which aren’t.

Leverage those bookings even further by funnelling the data into GA4 and building audiences around your highest-value customers. Connect those audiences to Google Ads and let the AI generate look-alike audiences using thousands of additional data points. With more information available to you around who your customers are and why they book, you’ll be able to lower customer acquisition cost and boost conversion rates.