If you’re marketing your short-term rentals through different channels—social media, email marketing, influencer partnerships—you need to know where your traffic (and bookings) are coming from. Simply running campaigns without tracking is like driving with your eyes closed.
Why Traffic Tracking Matters
Understanding your traffic sources lets you:
- Measure ROI – Know which campaigns are bringing in guests and which ones are just burning your budget.
- Focus on What Works – If Instagram stories are driving bookings but Facebook posts aren’t, you can double down on Instagram.
- Cut What Doesn’t Convert – Save time and money by ditching channels that aren’t bringing results.
- Optimize for Conversions – Once you know where traffic is coming from, you can better optimize those pages to turn visitors into bookings.
Different Traffic Channels to Track
- Organic Search – Traffic from search engines. If your blog posts are bringing in traffic, you’ll know.
- Direct Traffic – People typing your URL directly. This is a sign of strong brand awareness.
- Referral Traffic – Visitors coming from links on other websites.
- Social Media – Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn—track which platform is performing best.
- Email Marketing – See if your email blasts are effective at bringing traffic back to your booking page.
Not sure how to actually set up UTM tracking for your campaigns?
👉 Check out our step-by-step guide on using UTM parameters in Google Analytics
The Role of Conversion Tracking
Traffic is only part of the equation—you need to know which visits actually turn into bookings. Google Analytics lets you set up conversion events that track when someone:
- Views a property page
- Clicks “Book Now”
- Completes a reservation
When you map these events back to their traffic sources, you get a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not.
A Real-World Example
Let’s say you run an email marketing campaign with a special offer for spring bookings. In Google Analytics, you see that your email campaign drove 200 visitors, but only 5 of them actually completed a booking. Meanwhile, your Facebook ad drove 150 visitors with 10 bookings.
That’s data you can act on—you’d know to allocate more budget to Facebook and rethink your email strategy.
Quick Tip:
If you want to go a step further, you can create conversion events in Google Analytics to see when someone visits a property page or a checkout page. This way, you’re not just tracking traffic—you’re tracking actual bookings.
Understanding where your bookings are coming from gives you control over your marketing budget. You can scale what’s working and cut what isn’t, making every marketing dollar count.
Want to learn how to optimize your Google Analytics setup for direct bookings? Book a demo with CraftedStays to see how we help hosts fine-tune their marketing strategies.