TripAdvisor’s switch to HTTPS could be impacting your Google Analytics tracking

In early April, TripAdvisor switched its site from an HTTP designation to an HTTPS version and this change has affected how you can track traffic coming to your site from your TripAdvisor Business Listing.

Before the switch, a potential guest would click on your hotel website link and be directed to your website and when looking at Google Analytics, you could see that that visitor came directly from TripAdvisor and that you were getting the traffic from the site that you were paying for.

Unfortunately, when TripAdvisor went to an HTTPS version, that tracking ability was lost as HTTPS sites don’t want to share that tracking with HTTP sites. Essentially, when that guest clicks on your hotel website link now, all that tracking data is stripped once that user clicks the link and you can no longer attribute that visitor back to your Business Listing.

What can you do to counteract this change? Add additional parameters to the link you put in your hotel website section with the help of Google’s URL builder.

For step one (website URL), enter your website’s homepage. For example, www.temp.rezstream.com.

For step two, you’ll enter the source as: tripadvisor.com. The medium is “referral,” and the campaign name is “tripadvisor.com.” You’ll generate your URL, which will look something like: www.temp.rezstream.com/?utm_source=tripadvisor.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=tripadvisor.com. Use this URL on your Business Listing so you can accurately track visitors coming from TripAdvisor in your Google Analytics as these extra parameters will stay with the visitor as they click away from TripAdvisor and onto your site.

So far, we haven’t noticed any losses in referral traffic for clients using TripConnect as long as your booking engine’s “thank you” or “confirmation page” is HTTPS.