Marketing Services Organization (MSO) Overview and Costs
BookingCenter’s Marketing Services Organization (MSO) costs $15/mo and enables all of the following (or any portion you care to utilize):
- Better understand your guest traffic patterns, and your revenue sources
- Track and analyze the effectiveness of your marketing efforts — discover who just looks and who books.
- Develop and promote packages, discounts, and specials through your most profitable booking channels.
- Integrate seamlessly with Google Analytics and Facebook.
This page describes how to add MSO features that make your online marketing efforts trackable – and actionable. It is divided into the following areas:
- Adding Source tracking to your online booking engine.
- Adding Agent and CRM_ID fields to your online booking engine.
- Adding Google Analytics (or other 3rd party tracking system) to your Booking Engine.
- Adding the Facebook Booking Engine to your Facebook business page.
Integration with Google Analytics
Use Google’s free conversion analysis tools to track the ‘look to book’ ratios,
BookingCenter has designed the ‘Booking Engine’ work with ‘Google Conversion’, allows your Booking Engine to send Booking Costs and the ‘Campaign Return on Investment’ (ROI) provided as part of Google Analytics. This allows a webmaster to use Google’s free conversion analysis tools to track the ‘look to book’ ratios from our Booking Engine. For details on how this works technically, please review this article. For overview documentation, and how you should use it, see the online Manual section on SMS and Web Tracking Code. View a sample screen shot here for what the GA code looks like in practice.
Facebook Booking Engine
Any BookingCenter customer can create their own Facebook engine via use of the Facebook coding tools. See an example of our Facebook Booking Engine – feel free to make a booking.
Source Tracking
By adding a Source code to your online ‘Book Now’ buttons, you can automate the Source analysis used in the Desktop or MyPMS systems – allowing you to analyze your internet sources and automatically assign commission payments to Sources that send you actual bookings. Very much like an Internet ‘affiliate program’. The program is easy to do – follow these steps:
For tracking ‘Book Now’ buttons per source:
- Make Source codes in your Desktop, Channel Manager, or MyPMS that you want to use online in tracking URLs. See the Reference Manual that came with each product to do this.
- Link the ‘Book Now’ buttons to your online reservation page using your Site ID and the Source Code you made. The Link Structure for a Booking Engine request looks like: http://requests.bookingcenter.com/enquiry.phtml?site=
For example, the booking URL for a property with a site ID called DEMO would be: http://requests.bookingcenter.com/enquiry.phtml?site=DEMO
If you had made a Source code in your management system called “DIRECTORYA” then you would place the Source ID after the Site ID as follows: http://requests.bookingcenter.com/enquiry.phtml?site=DEMO&source=DIRECTORYA
- Each time a booking came through the BookingCenter CRS, it would retain the Source ID for the source that clicked it. Instant tracking!
Adding Agent and CRM_ID fields to your online booking efforts
Agent allocations are a way to assign rates and availability to a specific Agent (or URL) and then track bookings to that agent and manage the payment of commissions in your PMS. Results for an Agent URL query are unique to each Site, and we have detailed information for building and managing these programs here.
CRM_ID is a feature of a Booking, and can be passed into an enquiry to track and match bookings to a CRM system that is tieing a unique CRM id (Customer Relationship Management system, such as SaleForce.com sends) to the results of a booking. Results are associated to the Guest table of the database. No rates and avail are allocated (unless also passed with an Agent URL identifier) so this method is simpler to manage than an Agent and can give you a ‘hook’ into your CRM marketing success at making bookings.