New Google Analytics Features

Here's an example of the custom reporting example I mentioned above. The attached screenshot shows a custom report:

This report shows how many visitors from each country performed a desired action (goal) based on the traffic source. You can also click on a search engine name in the report to see which keywords led to the action.

For example - you could use this kind of report to see that x number of visitors from the USA made a booking in the last month because they found the website through keyword y on Google. Keyword y would then have a certain value (you could even track the exact monetary value of specific keywords if you have the right booking system).

This screenshot shows the settings to create this custom report:

Metric: Total goal completions
Dimension: Country/territory
Sub-dimension: Source
Sub-dimension: Keyword

This sounds interesting! By which booking system do you mean right?

It depends on the system the hostel uses to take bookings through their own website. The system would have to output the variables into the Analytics tracking code.

It wouldn't be exactly like this, but something like it:

The website booking systems would have to dynamically add that to the Google Analytics code based on the website visitor's choices.

That might tell you a visitor found the website through the keyword "new haven hostels" in Google which led to a $120 booking ($15*8).

If hostels ask for it, maybe the companies will make it available :)

Some website booking systems allow you to at least track Google Analytics goals, so you can assign a value of "1" to each booking. The more complicated ecommerce example mentioned above would assign an exact monetary value to each booking instead of just "1".

It's valuable information, especially for large hostels that take a lot of bookings. I've seen one hostel that was buying AdWords that were costing as much as $80 to acquire each booking through AdWords. As soon as that was discovered, things could be fixed and AdWords started being cost effective.

You could also use this kind of tracking with regular search engine keywords to find out which keywords might be worth buying traffic for, or doing SEO on...

google analytics is great. We also use quantcast.com, which is similar, but it has more detailed demographics of the people that visit your site, how old they are, how much money they make. It's an amazing system. There is a great media planner too for buying media that targets your target market by the parameters you set.

We use the code on our site. Being a small hostel (50 beds) we get about 3,000 visits a month. I find that the quantcast and Google results are pretty close.