Why Most Tour Operators Get GA4 Wrong

Do you actually know what's driving your bookings? Not "traffic is up," but which channel, which page, which campaign? In this episode of the Tour Operator Growth Podcast, Nikki and Greg dig into Google Analytics 4 and why having it installed is not the same as having it set up right. They cover what GA4 should really be telling you, the events worth tracking, and the simple setup steps that connect a single visit straight through to a booking.

What you'll learn:
- Why default GA4 (page views, new vs. returning) tells you almost nothing about revenue
- The key events to track: bookings, form submissions, phone clicks, and more
- How to confirm tracking is firing, turn on enhanced measurement, and set up cross-domain tracking with your booking engine
- The common mistakes (double tracking, internal traffic, never actually looking) that wreck your data

If this episode helped, share it with a tour operator who's making budget decisions off incomplete numbers, and subscribe so you don't miss what's next.

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Chapters:
1:38 Why installing GA4 isn't the same as setting it up right
3:26 What GA4 should tell you: asking Claude real revenue questions
6:45 Scenic segment: the May 2026 Google core update
8:36 Setup walkthrough: tags, firing, enhanced measurement & key events
14:58 The numbers that actually matter (without drowning in data)
18:50 Common mistakes that wreck your data
21:12 Your GA4 action plan for this month

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Tour Operator Growth Podcast, where we share the strategies, systems, and rural world lessons helping tour operators grow more direct bookings, spend less time buried in admin, and build stronger businesses. Brought to you by ResMark, the leading team behind booking software, websites, marketing services, and digital waivers built for tour operators by people who still actually run tours. Now let's get into today's episode. Today we are talking about Google Analytics and setting it up the right way. So when you become a ResMark web client, one of the first things we do is get access to your GA4. Just a quick note on terms. When I say GA4 today, instead of just like Google Analytics, GA4 is simply Google's latest version. The old version was called Universal Analytics, which Google retired in 2023. So GA4 is how we understand what's worked for you and measure what is working now. So we're bringing this topic up because a lot of tour operators don't have it set up properly and many aren't tracking the right thing. So think to yourself, do you actually know what's dragging your bookings? And I mean on a very specific granular level, not just like, oh, my traffic is up, but which channel, which page, which campaigns are driving the biggest successes. A lot of tour operators are making budget decisions based off of data that they're finding incomplete or completely wrong. So, Greg, let's start here. Most tour operators have Google Analytics installed and assume that they're good to go. Why is that a problem? And what does set it up properly actually mean?

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Yeah, super excited for this podcast today. Um, Google Analytics is a key piece of each one of our businesses, right? It's what drives decisions. So just because you added GA4 to your website does not mean that it's tracking everything you need it to track, especially this newer version of Google. Universal Analytics work differently than GA4. So it's important to make sure that you understand that and are tracking the right thing. So a default GA4 setup will get you a lot of information, a lot of data, like page views, return versus new user, demographics, a bunch of other things as well that are useful, right? But page views by themselves aren't really that useful. Like if you look year over year and your page views go up, that's cool. But what's your revenue doing? What are your other key events that you want to track doing? If if your goal is to have more, you know, calls into your business, are is that happening? How do you know? Right? Page views does doesn't tell you that. Return versus new user doesn't tell you that. So without conversion tracking set up, you have no insight until it's actually generating more revenue. And this is something that you actually have to set up. Um in in Google Analytics, it doesn't just start tracking your conversion, especially when you're using a third-party booking software. So that's what this conversation is going to be about is really how can we make sure we're tracking the right stuff? And how do we have analytics ready to go so that we know what is driving revenue? With that, what should analytics actually be telling us, Nikki?

SPEAKER_00 3:26

So here's the thing that trips up a lot of people. GA4 specifically works totally different than universal analytics. The old one basically was focused on um counted visits. So GA4 tracks actual actions. Every little thing we want to set up as an event. Somebody views a page, clicks a button, watches a video, books a trip. But here's the catch. It is only going to track the actions that we've told it to care about, as you said, great. So out of the box, it is going to track that generic, um, those generic things, but it has no idea that a booking or a quote to request is the thing that we actually care about. So we actually have to go in and set that up. So that's exactly why GA4 feels useless for a lot of tour operators. If you log in, you see the sections, you see the bounce rates, but none of that is connecting to your bottom line. What we want to do is tie a visit straight into a booking. So when it's done right, it is going to map your whole growth engine in one place. You can see dreaming. So remember the dreaming phase, where your traffic's actually coming from, the planning stage, so your leads and form activity, and obviously booking the actual reservations in one single source. And what's cool is you can can you can connect your GA4 to your LLM, so like Claude Cowork, and ask it some crazy insightful, cool questions when it is set up correctly. So I did this this morning. One of our clients I was playing with and asking some questions. So when we're going kind of uh based off of this section of the podcast, what it should be telling us, it should be telling us the full picture where our successes are, what campaigns are doing well, where can I be improving? So when you connect it to Claude, and you can actually do this in Google Analytics too, it has an AI kind of overview where you could ask big questions, but I find it so much more uh easy to use in something like Claude Cowork. So I asked, and again, this is for one of our clients, which traffic source makes me, me, the tour operator, the most money per visit? And it said paid search, about $15 in bookings per visit, roughly triple what organic earns and paid social sent nearly 5,000 visitors last month and produced zero bookings. That's a really, really good, that's really good information for us to know. And then I asked it, where am I losing bookings? 1,700 people started checkout, but only 800 people finished last month. About half of the people that came to the website stopped mid-checkout. That single drop-off point is worth tens of thousands of dollars. And that is really important for us to know as an agency because we can look and say, okay, well, what is causing that friction? How can we improve the checkout rates? How can we improve the conversion rates? So it's really good to know these sort of things. And then lastly, I asked it just for fun, how much revenue did ChatGBT generate? And the answer, the output was ChatGBT sent 689 visits and generated about $6,800 in bookings. So when you have your Google Analytics set up correctly, you're able to ask questions and figure out all of these things on a really granular level. Hey, I hope you're enjoying today's episode. But before we continue, let's take a quick scene ground. Have you been looking at your Google rankings lately? Google just finished a core update, the May 2026 core update. It started on May 21st. It ran about 12 days. It wrapped up on June 2nd. As I'm recording this, it's June 19th. It was a bumpy update. I saw a lot of tour operators, actually business owners, frantically commenting that their rankings had dropped dramatically on Facebook. But here's the thing to know if your traffic or rankings jumped or dropped in late May or early June, it is almost certainly because of that update, not something you specifically did. A core update is just Google redeciding across the whole web which pages best answer what people are searching for. It's not a penalty. Sites move up, sites move down. A lot of it is just Google kind of reshuffling the data. So what do you do if your rankings just plummeted in the last month? One, don't panic. Don't make a bunch of changes because of this. The real advice is to keep making genuine, helpful content for real people. And recovery is usually going to come around in that next core update. So do not frantically start tweaking a bunch of things without an SEO expert looking at it. So if you saw your ranking swing up, keep doing what you're doing, keep being the authority, keep being a local expert, keep providing useful information. And if you're not already doing that, make sure that you are because that's what's going to allow you to win when these core updates happen. All right, and back to the conversation. All right. So, Greg, how can tour operators get started on making sure that they have the correct setup so they are able to track these cool insights and look at the whole picture and make decisions based off of that?

SPEAKER_01 8:36

All right, I'm going to walk you through a few steps here on how to make sure you have some key elements turned on and set up properly so that you're not just getting the basics of page views and et cetera. So, step one obviously is create a GA4 property. If you haven't done that, make sure the Google Tag's installed either directly on your website, through Google Tag Manager, or via your website platform's built-in integration. So that hopefully you've done that. If you haven't, pause, do that right now. Step two is confirm it's actually firing. I think this is a step that can often be missed. You know, you go and put the tracking code where it's supposed to go, you assume it's working. Sometimes it doesn't. So you can use Google Tag Manager's uh tag assistant, or GA4 has a debug and a real-time report that you can look at. And basically you go and in in the tag assistant, you can actually go and open up a website, your website, with like a debug mode kind of on. And so you can go in and do a test booking, and all of the event data is going to go over to this kind of dashboard where you can see everything that was fired, so all the events that came through and make sure that it's actually tracking. If it's not, then something's wrong with the configuration or the way you set up your events, and you can go and kind of figure that out. Step three is turn on enhanced measurements. So by default, Google Analytics tracks a lot of things. With enhanced measurement, now it tracks even more things, and it's it does it automatically. There's not really setup. You just toggle on enhanced measurement, and now you're getting more data. So in an example here is um Google Analytics default tracking tells you people visited the page. Enhanced measurement starts telling you how they interacted with those pages. For example, how far are they scrolling down the page? So without enhanced measurement, you might see something like 500 people viewed your blog post or viewed this page. With it turned on, you can now see 500 people viewed this blog post, but only 120 of them reached the booking section. That's powerful information to know and a step further toward understanding how successful that content, that page is actually performing, right? Because the ultimate goal is to get bookings. It's not for people just to read your blog post or your content on your page. So this helps answer are people actually reading my blog post, reading the content on my page? It helps understand how important your CTAs are on your page, and if they're too far down the page. Like a test you could do is I'm gonna move the CTA up higher, does that increase or decrease revenue? Does that increase the number of people clicking into another page and going down the funnel the way I want them to go? Step four here is to define your key events. So with Google Analytics, like Nikki mentioned, it's different than Universal Analytics. And so it is all based off of these events, and you can set these key events up. The actions are literally worth money because you can start tracking how many booking confirmations you have, contact forms that are submitted, phone numbers that are clicked, um, gift card purchases, newsletter sign-up. These are just some examples of some of the key events you can track so that you can start associating visits with bookings or with these other key events that you might want to track. The important part is making sure that these are marked as key events. So when you set up events in Google Analytics, they're just set up as events. You can actually kind of mark them as, hey, these are important, you know, call these out a little bit better. And by setting them as key events, it just makes it easier to track the events that matter most to you. And then the last step I'll talk about is filtering out internal traffic. If you're in office, if you're which most of you probably are, right? You have some place that you're probably going. And if so, it makes it really easy. You can filter out the traffic via one IP address. If not, um, this is something that's actually really hard for us on our analytics, is internal traffic is now coming from multiple places and multiple IP addresses that we need to filter out so that every time we visit our website, it's not getting tracked, right? So if you're going to your website a lot and looking at things, make sure to filter that traffic out so that you're not polluting the data and making it you know not true to what's actually happening. If you're using a third-party booking engine, then make sure that you are setting up their cross-domain tracking. Otherwise, you lose the attribution at most at the most important moments. Meaning, if you're using ResMark systems, let's say, and someone comes into the website and they book, and you don't have cross-domain tracking set up, you don't have that connection that is in place for ResMark to really send information to Google Analytics, then you're not going to be able to attribute those bookings directly to those visits, right? The cool thing though is ResMark and many other Tor uh Tor operator softwares have this built in. So you it's easy to set up. You put your in you put some Google Analytic info in ResMark, you set some things up in Google Analytics, and now you have a full picture tracking where you're getting data coming from your booking system into Google Analytics that can be directly correlated to that specific visit and the revenue that they generated. So hopefully these steps are helpful. They're pretty easy to set up. If you do have questions, you can always reach out to us, or if it's a third-party application, you might need to reach out to that other company to help understand how to set that up as well.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

And with that, uh, so whenever you book a discovery call with us, we actually do go over your Google Analytics accounts because we want to make sure that if you ever do become a client, whether that's, you know, you have your discovery call with Red Smart Web and you sign your proposal next week or next year, we want to make sure you have your Google Analytics set up properly. So if you do ever talk with us, that is one of the things we go over in that initial call with you. So even if you don't use us as a service, you'll at least get something out of that regarding making sure that you have the right event set up. And with that, let's talk about numbers, uh, if you don't mind, Greg. So you actually mentioned um a few numbers that I was going to say that actually matter when you're looking and setting up these key events. But the one thing I want to reiterate is don't drown in all of this data because you could set up hundreds and hundreds of different types of metrics. But every business is going to look different. And what's important is that you're looking at the data that matters to you most. So it needs to be meaningful to the marketing efforts that you have going on. But at the very basics, you need to make sure that you have a traffic acquisition set up. So which channels bring in visitors? So is it organic search, paid social, direct, referral, and what channels bring in booking visitors? Those are not the same list. For example, one of our operators gets most of their visitors from organic search, but their paid search earns about triple the revenue per visit. So paid is converting at a much higher rate. You want to know your conversion rate of everybody who visits, what percentage are actually taking a key action? And honestly, I suggest if you don't know your conversion rate, figure it out. We talked with a lot of prospects and we asked what their conversion rate is, and they don't know. So this is a really important thing that Google Analytics GA4 is going to be able to tell us. Landing pages. So which landing pages people arrive on and which of those are actually converting? Engagement rate and time on page. You want to flag content, pulling the wrong traffic. So that means maybe we have a lot of visitors to that landing page, but absolutely no engagement, no bookings. It's not doing anything for us. Lean magnets. Are you able to see how many people went to the page that your lead magnet is on, downloaded it or submitted the form versus how many of those people did that and actually converted? So those are cool things that we're able to tell. So again, that's going to be different depending on your marketing efforts. We're also able to see at GA4 your average order value. So what's a typical booking worth for you? And then we can make decisions based off of that. Then the booking funnel, where people actually drop. This is really important for us to know. So maybe they view a tour, they pick a date, they start checkout, they pay. Watching each step shows where you actually could be losing people. Maybe they start checkout but don't finish, like that example I showed you earlier, about 50% of the people don't actually make the purchase. And then some other key events that we might want to be tracking is top converting tours and products. I said might, but we we definitely want to be tracking top converting tours and products, mobile versus desktop conversion, which I think is actually a general thing that's automatic, and also AI answer engine traffic. So how much traffic are we bringing in through ChatGBT, perplexity, clot, all of those places? What do you think the mistakes are, Greg, that we find tour operators making that just completely wreck their data? Because if Google Analytics isn't set up correctly, we're not able to ask it questions and make decisions off of, you know, the data that we're we're being faced with because it's just inaccurate, which we've seen before.

SPEAKER_01 18:50

Yeah, we've talked about some of these already. Key events. Make sure you set those up, make sure you set them up right, make sure you test that it's set up right, like we talked about. Cross-domain tracking, make sure that's set up with your booking platform or other third-party platforms that you might want to track from, right? And test it. Make sure it's set up right as well. Having multiple tags installed, this is something that can happen really easily. If you install, you know, Google Analytics, and then you also install Google Tag Manager, but in Google Tag Manager, you're tracking Google Analytics. Sometimes that's going to lead to double tracking, and now it's going to inflate your numbers and completely make them unreliable, right? Ignoring data retention settings. So this is a setting in GA4 where by default it has a certain window length of how long it's going to keep this data, and you can extend that so that you can compare year over year and actually use the data longer term versus it just kind of being a short, shorter window. And then one of the most important things here is you set up everything, it's all working right, but you never actually look at it. Google Analytics is a super valuable tool, but it doesn't do anything if you don't look at it and use it for making decisions, right? It needs to be something that you're doing more than once a year. If you're just coming in after your season and looking at analytics and saying, Oh, look, year over year we had more page views. Great, what does that mean? Or year over year we had more revenue. That's great too. But how can you improve that even more? Look into the data, understand the data, and that's going to help you improve your website, improve your results, and improve your conversion rate as well, so that you can really just continue to see success year after year as you're working to really make everything just work together. Google Analytics is just one piece of your entire puzzle. And if you just leave it there, it's not going to ever help you. So make sure you're using it, make sure it's set up right, and you're going to see better results that way.

SPEAKER_00 21:12

And you're adding in additional key events as you are changing your marketing efforts and your marketing strategy. So, like this is something that you should be optimizing. I'm not saying daily, but you know, quarterly or whatever is going on in your marketing. Um, that's important too. So it's not like just set it and forget it for the year. Even if you are checking it regularly, it needs to be updated with the latest things that you're working on and doing. Let's wrap some things up with what you can be doing this month regarding your GA4. So, number one, confirm that your GA4 is installed, which I hope that it is, but make sure that it is actually firing correctly on the key events that you want it to fire on. At a minimum, make sure that you're able to see the booking revenue come through in the leads that you're bringing in. Filter out your own team's internal traffic. Greg mentioned that one in detail. Check whether your checkout needs cross-domain tracking. So if booking happens on one domain, this is why your data might look broken. Make sure that you have your GA4, your Google Search Console, your Google Ads all connected. You could utilize something like Claude Cowork so that it is all connected in one place. And lastly, build a dashboard so that you can see at a glance what is working. You can look at it regularly because at the end of the day, the best analytics setup in the world does absolutely nothing if nobody is looking at it and making decisions based off of what the data is showing. That's it for today's episode of the Tour Operator Growth Podcast. If you got value out of today, follow the show wherever you listen and leave us a quick review. It's the best way to help other operators find it. And if you want help putting any of this to work in your own tour business, book a call with the team at resmarksystems.com. Thanks for listening. We'll see you on the next one.