If you pay TripAdvisor in order to have the "Hotel Website" icon and link, link directly to your website, you should have received the email below.
The Back Story:
- In the middle of March 2016, Scott Crumpton at White Stone Marketing noticed that TripAdvisor traffic to his clients Google Analytics accounts had vanished. He contacted both InsideOut Marketing (Pat McCauley) and Acorn Internet Services (Lisa Kolb) and we all verified that yes, TripAdvisor Traffic had indeed gone missing.
- The culprit causing this loss of traffic being tracked in Google Analytics is what you see announced above in the E-Mail from TripAdvisor.
- The bottom line is that TripAdvisor has moved from http:// to https:// so now all their data is being encrypted.
- The problem is when referrer data is passed from an https:// to an http:// website, the Google Analytics account for that Website won’t receive the referral. IE: It’s miss-matched.
So… You have 3 Options:
1) Do Nothing!
But remember, you won’t have any data to use to justify what you are paying for your TripAdvisor business listing.
2) Install a customized URL on your TA listing. *
This will allow you to continue to track when a guest clicks to your website from TA. **
See Instructions from TripAdvisor
3) Convert your own website from http:// to https://
Look into the cost and implementation of this effort with your web hosting company. This isn’t a free option.
* If you are an Acorn IS client, and would like to have our Support Team do this for you, please contact Mark Hall at 877-226-7699 x 1 or E-Mail at markhall@acorn-is.com. This work is billable at our normal support rates.
** A note to all Innkeepers: You need to make sure you are tracking your revenue in your Google Analytics account with E-Commerce tracking properly installed. That way you have even more quality data when your TripAdvisor Business Listing Invoice comes due. With actual booking data you’ll know if your Business Listing fees from TripAdvisor are worth it.
Finally, the REALITY of this situation...
TripAdvisor could have made this change on their system from http:// to https:// seamless, to you, the client. This technology exists. They could have used the meta tag coding option provided by Google to allow Google traffic to pass data from https:// to http:// with NO CHANGE TO YOU!
- In Layman’s Terms:
https://moz.com/blog/meta-referrer-tag
- From Google’s Webmasters Blog:
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2012/03/upcoming-changes-in-googles-http.html
None the less, you see the E-mail you have received. It's telling you that that YOU need to make the change to track their data. Makes you want to go HUMMMMMMM!
