An attribution model is necessary to track the success of your hotel marketing efforts, and a revenue attribution model is arguably the most important model of them all. At the end of the day, you work as hard as you do to generate revenue for your hotel, so you need to be able to attribute revenue correctly. This article will go over Revinate’s Revenue Attribution Model and how it tracks revenue generated from your email marketing campaigns.
What is Revinate’s Revenue Attribution Model?
Our revenue attribution model tracks revenue from bookings made by guests 30 days from the sending of the specific email campaign.
Why do I need it?
It’s one of the easiest ways to tie revenue to your email marketing efforts. However, there are some technical terms I need to define first to make things easier.
- Touchpoints: The point of contact between a buyer and seller where information is exchanged or service is provided. In email marketing, it’s usually an open or a click.
- Lookback window: The time period between a guest’s initial interaction with one of your touchpoints and their final conversion, such as a hotel booking. In the hospitality industry, the lookback window is generally longer as customers take longer to make a purchase. Email marketing lookback also tends to be longer than something like retargeting (users who visited your site further back in time are less likely to return and convert).
Therefore, the 30-day lookback window is used as an industry standard to measure email marketing campaign performance. Marketing leaders such as Google Analytics similarly use a look back “last interaction” model for campaign attributions.
How does it work?
For each email campaign, Revinate logs the email addresses to which the campaign is sent and the date it is delivered. When a new booking is processed, Revinate’s system checks to see if an email campaign was sent to that email address within the booking window period. This is one of the benefits of direct integration with the property management system (PMS), to be able to connect new bookings with email addresses and correctly attribute revenue.
In order to qualify as revenue attribution of a particular campaign, an email has to be opened by the recipient. Revenue is also only attributed to the most recently opened email campaign in Revinate’s system. To get your own copy of a campaign’s reporting, follow these simple steps:
Once in your account, go to Campaigns > Select a Campaign > Revenue Detail > Download
Best Practices
Guidelines to make the most of the Revenue Attribution Model:
- Google Analytics UTM Links: Google Analytics’ (GA) UTM links allow you to track conversions and web traffic for all of your Revinate email marketing campaigns. UTM links aren’t perfect, though. If a guest calls your property directly to book a stay, GA won’t be able to track that, of course. GA also only tracks link conversions, so if a guest opens your email and decides to book directly on your website later that day, GA can’t track that either. Regardless, it’s still a great tool to use. I recommend sticking to UTM links for exclusive offers and unique booking codes. To optimize their performance, you should add UTM URLs at the end of each link for all call-to-action buttons and images. It’s extremely important that you make sure all links redirect to the landing page. See our Help Desk article to learn more.
- Customization Features: With Revinate, you can exclude revenue from specific fields such as guest emails, domains, and rate codes. You can do this by going to ACCOUNT SETTINGS > CAMPAIGNS. Exclusions will only apply to future reservations, and will not adjust historical campaign reporting.
The example below demonstrates the campaign settings for Revenue Attribution that exclude email addresses and rate codes.
With a better understanding of Revinate’s Revenue Attribution Model, don’t hesitate to use it to improve your email marketing strategy.