Best Marketing Analytics Solutions for Travel Businesses
The only thing worse than knowing your digital marketing isn’t working is not knowing why. Which is why we need deeper insight.
In this post, I present some great analytics software solutions for you to review and I think you’ll be surprised at what could be the right solution for your travel company. Because most solutions target the big-money, enterprise space. We’re hunting for affordable, powerful marketing analytics to help you improve all your content from blogs and landing pages, promotions, trip booking pages and personalized guides, to generate leads and bookings.
Any tour operator, luxury travel agency or DMO won’t get far with their content marketing and lead generation strategy without good web and sales analytics. Analytics solutions provide the who, why, and what of your content marketing, email nurturing campaigns, and your advertising performance. To get those powerful insights, all that’s usually required is an affordable software subscription (SaaS) and some JavaScript code inserted in your pages. And one solution might be less expensive than you ever dreamed (involving me and AI LLM GPTs). Oh yes, so much less expensive, so you don’t suffer paying enterprise-priced subscriptions.
Capturing high-quality, detailed data on customer intent, habits and their unique content journey is the holy grail of modern travel businesses — having an expert analytics pro set it up will make all the difference. Most large national brand travel agencies and OTAs already have advanced AI-powered analytics solutions that include predictive and even prescriptive analytics powered by Artificial Intelligence. They enjoy a big advantage, yet as you’ll read here, new solutions can help us build our own cost effective advantage. Learning, building, adapting and winning for your travel company!
Success in this AI Travel era is all about getting to know the customer deeply, beyond basic travel personas, to understand their trip visualization, interests, questions and intent – their preferences. You might start out in your analytics journey by focusing on user content engagement – what is their intent, what content/messaging worked, how were leads generated, and who are the best-qualified visitors?
A Few Solutions are Right for Small Travel Companies
Other agencies are leveraging analytics insights within their travel management software, destination marketing software and travel agency marketing software. These solutions are worth a look, however they have price points which might put them out of your reach. With my assistance, we can work through finding the right solution and working with providers to get it right.
For small travel agencies, tour companies and DMOs, you may be able to use some analytics solutions briefly for specific purposes. For instance, I’ve used Mixpanel, Hotjar, ahrefs, and other software previously to understand visitors better. Some mid-sized solutions are pricey, so using these more affordable software suites mentioned below can play a role in your marketing analytics.
What we’re looking for is a deeper understanding of who visitors are, what they like, and what moves them to become your customer/client.
Google Analytics 4: The Basic Data
Let’s start with Google Analytics. Its original solution has been devolved in favor of more complex solutions Google is selling for a subscription fee. No more freebies! But not surprising given how important visitor/content/sales analytics is.
And the key challenge with its new GA4 for small travel companies is that it needs to be set up correctly by a Google analytics professional. In its basic form, it might not provide the deep, travel-specific insights you need to fully leverage user intent for superior and personalized content. Many other analytics solutions ride on top of Google Analytics, so it may be required by some solutions. In some cases, the analytics provider might be able to help us set up your Google Analytics coding and marketing dashboards if needed.
The nice benefit of some of the solutions below is that they offer unique and extended benefits designed for travel companies, giving you better confidence that they’ll generate relevant insights – insights that lead to personalization, CRM integration, real-time dashboards, and detailed reports with lead scores. All of it helps us to create better content and messaging to for more customer leads and higher conversion rates.
Specialty Software for Viewing Onsite Behavior
Hotjar is an interesting software which one of my clients used to watch visitors live on the site – revealing dwell time on screen, places they moused or clicked, and content paths they chose.
While not a comprehensive analytics platform, Hotjar (often used in conjunction with GA4) is invaluable for small agencies because of its visual insights. Its heatmaps and session recordings allow you to literally “see” how users interact with your website. You can see where users get stuck, what content they engage with most, and whether your calls to action are clear. It’s available on a subscription basis with tiered pricing suitable for small businesses, and offers short-term research capabilities.
Mixpanel is useful if your agency has a slightly larger budget and wants to kick it up a notch to view user behavior funnels and segmentation. Mixpanel offers more granular event-based tracking and is excellent for understanding visitor content journeys, A/B testing and conversion paths. It can provide a deeper understanding of specific actions users take on your site, which is crucial for intent analysis.
3 Analytics Solutions that Use AI-Powered Analytics
Yes, there are increasingly powerful AI-powered analytics solutions, and they are becoming more accessible to small to mid-sized travel agencies, though some are still geared toward larger enterprises.
For truly AI-powered analytics focused on travel intent, we’ll explore these 3 excellent solutions:
- ADARA Travel Intent Marketing Platform:
- AI Focus: ADARA’s strength lies in its predictive analytics using machine learning. It leverages a vast dataset from across the travel industry to predict future travel behaviors, demand trends, and competitive insights. This is precisely what you need for intent-driven marketing – understanding what travelers will do, not just what they have done.
- Value for Intent: Its ability to track real-time travel demand and segment audiences based on deep trip preferences (beyond basic demographics) makes it highly effective for targeted campaigns that align with specific traveler intents.
- Consideration for Small Agencies: As noted in my travel marketing software post ADARA is a heavy hitter and “pricey side” for a small agency that doesn’t have a built content strategy. It’s better adopted when you’re ready for it.
- Sojern:
- AI Focus: Sojern is another leader in AI-driven travel marketing and analytics. It uses AI to analyze the “travel path” – search behavior, booking windows, destination preferences, and cross-channel touchpoints – to inform highly targeted advertising campaigns.
- Value for Intent: Sojern’s core value is its ability to reach high-intent travelers at the right moment with the most relevant offers, based on sophisticated AI analysis of their past and predicted behavior. Its dynamic audience segmentation is powerful for aligning content with specific intents.
- Consideration for Small Agencies: Like ADARA, it’s a more specialized and potentially higher-cost solution, but for agencies ready to invest in advanced targeting, it offers significant ROI.
- GoodData Travel Marketing Analytics Solution:
- AI Focus: GoodData emphasizes predictive analytics and unified data integration. It uses machine learning to forecast customer behaviors, booking trends, and conversion likelihood.
- Value for Intent: Its strength is bringing together data from various sources (CRM, booking engines, social media) to create a comprehensive view of the customer, which AI then analyzes to predict intent and optimize offers.
- Consideration for Small Agencies: While powerful, implementing and fully leveraging a solution like GoodData might require a certain level of technical expertise or a dedicated analytics consultant.
The Near Future: Using Google Gemini’s Powers for AI-Powered Reports
Increasingly, AI LLM GPTs are delivering improved analytics insights/reports. They only need the right data in the right format and ask it to provide insights we couldn’t derive on our own.
Google’s AI LLM GPT is powerful and improving quickly. We can take data reports/spreadsheets from Google Analytics (set up with tagging by a Google Analytics pro) or from other analytics software and input them into Google Gemini and ask it to provide for performance insights. We give Gemini some Google Analytics data (traffic, conversions, bounce rates, etc.) for,
🤖 Getting quick summaries and identifying trends: Instead of manually digging through reports, we can ask Gemini: “Which campaigns had the highest conversion rates last quarter?” or “What audience segments are driving the most traffic to our product pages?” Via Gemini’s interface, we can use conversational language to ask it what data it needs, what information we want, and it will advise accordingly. The limitations are Gemini’s, it’s more in that Google Analytics doesn’t produce sufficiently useful reports itself (such as ROI from click events). But these are challenges faced by everyone.
🤖 Identifying ROI Drivers: By combining Google Analytics data with sales data (e.g., revenue from specific products, and customer lifetime value), Gemini can help correlate website activity with actual sales. This allows marketers to pinpoint which marketing efforts are directly contributing to revenue and calculate ROI for different initiatives. For example, you might ask, “Did the increase in blog post views from our content marketing efforts lead to a measurable increase in sales for X product category?” and “which blog post lead to the most revenue?”
🤖 Optimizing Ad Spend: Gemini can analyze ad campaign performance data from Google Ads (and potentially other platforms if you feed it that data) and provide insights on what’s working and what’s not. This includes identifying keywords that convert well, understanding which ad creatives perform best, and even suggesting budget reallocation to maximize ROI.
🤖 Content Optimization: Marketers are using Gemini to analyze the performance of their content (blog posts, landing pages, emails) based on Google Analytics metrics. Gemini can help identify what content resonates with specific audiences, suggest improvements for higher engagement and conversions.
🤖 Personalization and Targeting: By analyzing user behavior data from Google Analytics, Gemini can help marketers understand audience segments better. This insight can then be used to create highly personalized marketing messages and target campaigns more effectively, leading to improved engagement and, ultimately, higher ROI.
🤖 Automated Reporting and Insights: Instead of spending hours manually compiling reports, marketers are using Gemini to generate summarized reports and actionable insights from their analytics data. This frees up time for more strategic thinking and allows for faster decision-making. Some users even create “Gems” (custom AI assistants within Gemini) to automate specific reporting tasks.
🤖 Predictive Analytics (with additional data): While Google Analytics provides historical data, when combined with past sales figures and other market data, Gemini can assist in a form of predictive analytics, helping to forecast future trends and guide proactive marketing strategies.
The AI LLM GPTs have big potential and they’re already being used to improve marketing insights. Will the travel marketing software companies be able to keep up to them?
🏗 Building Your Travel Marketing Analytics Solution
Choosing the right travel analytics platform and tools for your business requires some research.
For fundamental analytics, GA4 (professionally set up) is your best free/low-cost starting point, often complemented by Hotjar for visual insights. We can work with Google Gemini to create deeper insights into engagement, leads and revenue. For dedicated, subscription-based AI-powered intent analytics, ADARA and Sojern are top-tier options specifically for the travel industry, offering deep, predictive insights, though they come with a higher investment.
Mastering website marketing analytics is a fascinating project. Things are changing, and we all have to keep on our feet. With the AI LLM GPTs improving, we’re going to see significant benefits for small travel companies. And by knowing what works, you’ll be more comfortable in investing in travel SEO services, travel content strategy, and social media campaigns.
Combine top creative talent with the right digital tools and achieve significant and improving marketing success. It’s a great time for innovation and market expansion.
Find out more about Gord Collins, travel marketer, and how I can become a productive member of your team.
