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New feature: multiple account managers, new roles

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We're pleased to announce the availability of a new feature, which was a very popular request.
You can now create multiple manager users for your account!
As of today, there are 3 user roles in Bookeo:

  • owner: there is only one user with this role. He/she is typically the person who owns the business, and is the default user created when you create a new Bookeo account. The owner has full control over every aspect of the account
  • manager: a manager can manage most settings of the account, but excluding subscriptions, billing, account cancellation, payment gateway setup, and the creation or changes of other users
  • user: a person that is only authorized to manage bookings and customers.
As usual, you can set fine-grained permissions for users (none, read-only, read-write), so that you can restrict which schedules they can see, and which schedules they can create bookings for.

For example in a busy practice you may want each therapist to be able to manage his/her own bookings, but only see bookings of others (or maybe not even see them). Whereas you would want your receptionist to be able to manage the schedule and bookings of everyone.

How to create a new 'manager': simply click on the account link at the top right, then on Users. Click on the 'New user' button, and then tick the checkbox.



Bookeo available in more languages thanks to our volunteers

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Bookeo was designed from the start to be fully multi-language, multi-currency, multi-format.

It can even be personalized to support the different date and time formats, currency and decimal formats, and country conventions such as the first day of the week (Sunday in the US, Monday in most other countries!).

It's a big world out there, and we don't want to leave anyone out.

Although Bookeo is already fully translated in 5 languages, we want to support as many as possible. We encourage volunteers to help by submitting a translation, in exchange for a free subscription. Only the customer-facing pages need to be translated by volunteers. The full translation, including the manager area, is way too big, and we leave that to professional translators.

This week we introduced the first two translations, Greek and Norwegian (Norsk), and more are under way. So a big thanks, and a handy reward, to our volunteers.

If you're interested in seeing Bookeo in your language, drop us a line to get more information!

your familiar Bookeo interface... now in Greek!

Bookeo Help Portal officially launched

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As of today, the new official Bookeo Help Portal is launched!

We've been working hard in the last few weeks in writing a ton of documentation articles and step by step tutorials, with rich screenshots and usage examples, and the result is an extensive portal that guides new and existing users through the many features offered by Bookeo.

The address of the portal is: help.bookeo.com and you can also reach it from your Bookeo account by simply clicking on the 'get help' link at the top.


the new Bookeo Help Portal


What's more, most pages in Bookeo will now show direct links to specific articles that provide detailed help about the page / feature you're viewing. Make sure to look for those 'Learn more' and 'Help' links everywhere!


help right where you need it


Obviously our direct, personal support is always at hand, and will now be based on a professional ticketing system. This will help us to keep a full history of every interaction we have with you, so that our support will be even more precise and personalized - we will always have full view of your full history of questions, requests and answers. You can contact us through one of the contact methods offered in the portal, or at help@bookeo.com .
The old support email address will still be working too.


you can always contact us


So please take some time to explore our new help portal, and as usual do not hesitate to contact us directly, through the portal or via email at help@bookeo.com, for any question.

Again, the address of the new Bookeo Help Portal is:

New features, small and big

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We continuously work to add new features and small tweaks to Bookeo.
However since Bookeo is a web based application, and users do not need to do anything to upgrade the software, sometimes many of the smaller improvements are not noticed.

Very often they're too small to merit a full blog post, so we'll try to keep a weekly post to summarize the smaller improvements that were released during the week.

In the last 2 weeks we released the following:

  • option to show the number of available seats of a class/tour/workshop, when they're shown to the customer as listing . This was a popular request from tour operators, thanks for the heads up! Note that Bookeo will automatically hide the Book button if there are not enough seats for a tour, but sometimes it's nice to see the availability anyway.
  • more customization options for the booking interface. You can now change the color of the black title bar, the color of the buttons, and hide the icon from the buttons. This in addition to all the customization options already available
  • now all custom fields are always included in booking reports
  • non-manager users are no longer allowed to import/export customers
  • post-to-facebook and post-to-twitter now work even with accented characters
  • on rare occasions, on slow computers, the bottom lines of the booking widget may have been cut off. this is now fixed
  • printing of a class/tour manifest now fixed for IE9

real-time tour availability

How often do we upgrade Bookeo?
This is a question that we're asked often. The answer is... very often! Sometimes even every day, but more commonly at least once a week.

Most likely however you will never notice it...

New! 2-Way sync with Google Calendar

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We're happy to announce the public availability of 2-way synchronization with Google Calendar!

Your can now synchronize in real time, and hands-free all your Bookeo appointments and classes, tours, workshops directly with selected calendars in your Google Calendar account.

At the same time, you can view in Bookeo your appointments from your calendars in your Google Calendar account. The integration is complete, flexible, and completely automatic! Just set and forget.

Google Calendar (either standalone or as part of Google Apps) is by far the most popular web calendaring application out there, so it was only natural that we integrated your appointment scheduling directly into Google Calendar.

This integration goes well beyond the old iCal-based synchronization, because:

  • your Bookeo appointments appear in real time in Google Calendar, without delays. On the other hand, iCal sync to Google can have delays of up to 24 hours (a well known Google issue, unfortunately)
  • the synchronization is 2-way
Of course Google Calendar is also tightly integrated with all Android phones, which means that this new feature will also let you sync Bookeo with your Android device. A big bonus for mobile workers.

So, how does it look?
The looks are those already very familiar:


the same events in Bookeo and Google Calendar


How does it work?
For full details on how to configure your 2-way synchronization, see the dedicated article in our help portal: http://help.bookeo.com/customer/portal/articles/104371-2-way-sync-with-google-calendar

This was an important feature, which required extensive beta testing before public launch. We wish to thank all customers who volunteered to beta test. Good job!

New features for the last week

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Here is a list of new features introduced recently to Bookeo.
All features have been added following your suggestions - thanks!


  • more customer details for personal appointments are now included in the iCal feed, making it easier to check your schedule from your phone
  • new Slovenian translation - thanks again to our volunteers
  • more details in the events synced to Google Calendar for tours/classes
  • when syncing tours/classes/workshops to Google Calendar, you can now hide those events that have no bookings
  • it is now possible to create coupon codes valid for multiple bookings. Ex an instructor offering a GroupOn deal for 6 lessons
  • you can now set custom Terms and conditions for each service, tour, class, etc. These are in addition to the business-wide T&C
  • you can now set Terms and Conditions for memberships - customers must accept them to enroll in a membership
  • improved validation of Discover credit card numbers, accepting new number ranges
If you have any question regarding these new features, or would like to suggest more, please contact us!

Women Book Online Appointments More Frequently Than Men, Survey Shows

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Keeping an online appointment calendar is all about organization. After all, what good is an online reservation system if you can't figure out how to use it? But according to a new survey, female entrepreneurs may have a new incentive to go digital: profit.

According to a recent survey released last Tuesday by PRWeb, 65% of all appointments made online are women. From nail and hair appointments to veterinary check-ups to massage appointments, 67% of businesses that accept online appointments are owned by women. In a world where women make 80% of household purchase decisions, the viable customer base for most businesses has spoken. They want online appointment scheduling and they want it now.

This gender-trending is not exclusive to booking online. A 2010 survey from the Neilsen Company found that women shop online more often than men, with women leading in almost every online purchase category. This addiction to online shopping amongst the fairer sex has led female entrepreneurs to give the people what they want, outstripping their male counterparts in digitizing the old appointment book.

As mobile devices become more prevalent, so will digital business tools like online appointment booking and other, faster booking solutions. Some businesses and online booking systems even offer cloud-based appointments and text appointments, which should help female businesses increase profits further still. According to Neilsen, women send 30% more text messages than men per quarter.

More anti-spam measures to get your emails delivered

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Bookeo can send emails to you and your customers in many occasions, such as:

  • booking confirmations sent to your customers
  • appointment reminders
  • booking notifications sent to you and other selected users
  • notifications of changes and cancellations
  • notification of new membership subscriptions
  • etc...
It is then essentials to ensure that emails are always delivered on time to the intended recipients.
Bookeo uses a dedicated mail delivery company, SendGrid, to deliver all these emails. Using a dedicated company rather than sending emails ourselves has many advantages. These companies typically receive preferential treatment by the large ISPs and mail services (GMail, Hotmail, etc.) because they have stringent controls and reputation systems to block spammers. This means that messages sent through these companies are less likely to be delayed, blocked or sent to the Junk folder by the mail service providers.

We also adhere to the most relevant protocols in terms of anti-spam, and all emails sent by Bookeo are digitally signed using the DKIM standard, and further pre-authorized using the SPF standard.

A note about the From address in the emails sent by Bookeo 
By default, Bookeo sends email to your customers using the From address of "noreply@bookeo.com".
If you want emails to be sent using your business' email address, simply set it in the Settings/Business details and logo page of your account. These details will also be included in the header of every email, so it's the perfect place to list your street address, phone numbers, etc.

If your email address domain uses SPF records to identify emails sent by you, make sure to 'authorize' Bookeo to send emails on your behalf.. To do so, simply add the following to the SPF record of your domain:
include:_spf.bookeo.com

Example of a complete SPF record:
v=spf1 mx include:_spf.bookeo.com ~all



As usual, if you have any questions about how Bookeo sends your emails, simply drop us a line on our help portal !

To get paid or not to get paid...

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One of the highlights of our job in Bookeo is that we get to know many, many small business owners, from the most diverse backgrounds. This gives us a chance to learn about the different ways in which people like to do business.
And there are many different ways!

In the recent weeks a feature request was coming up quite frequently: the ability to let customers to choose between paying online at the time of the booking, or paying later.

We've worked hard to implement flexible online payments, with deposits, cancellation fees, multiple card charges, and so on, so we were a bit surprised by this request. After all, we thought, if given the chance, who would prefer to pay now instead of paying later?

Well it turns out that there are many reasons. Some people are just not confident in paying online. Some do not have a credit card. So they prefer to pay at the time of the visit. Others are just paying for someone else (ex. a music lesson for their children), so they prefer to pay online.

Well, problem solved! You can now accept online payments/deposits and leave your customers the option to pay later instead. Simply enable the option to 'Allow deferred payment', input your own custom message, and... give your customers the extra choice.

allow deferred payment

the customer can choose

Organize Worker Off-Days This Holiday Season

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Ready or not, the holiday season is upon us, and that means days off for your employees. Starting with Halloween, the fall and winter months bring appointment calendars at businesses across the norther hemisphere full of requests for days off. Halloween parties, ski trips, Thanksgiving celebrations, Christmas vacation and New Years plans should give your workers cause to abandon you every week until the end of 2011.

This torrent of sick days and PTO requests has caused many employers to tackle the problem head-on with online appointment scheduling, mobile time-off requests and an online approval process so that employers are not left in the lurch this holiday season.

With online appointments, employers can get a real-time view of their calendar by day, week and month, including how many people have requested days off. This should allow business owners to see when they are short-staffed and prepare for it ahead of time.

Many online appointment calendars also can be synced with e-mail and allow access to employees. Never again will your employees be able to claim they didn't know their work schedule. This increased transparency and alert system will reduce missed shifts and increase employee accountability. When you are done creating your employee-facing calendar, online scheduling software programs allow you to take customer bookings and arrange them based on the days you have the most staff. If you are short-staffed, try to schedule appointments on days when you have more employees present. This way, you will not be unprepared to handle the busiest retail season of the year.

New features for the last week

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We've been quite busy in the last week with many new features.
Some of the things we've done are not visible, but are important changes in the back engine.
However others are very much visible and include:

  • new option to ask for credit card billing address, separated from the customer main address. This is useful for those payment gateways, such as Authorize.net, that can perform validation checks using the billing address of a credit card
  • possibility to hide prices until the confirmation page. This is useful when you offer services whose price varies with days of the week/times, so that customers only see the final price without getting confused by sudden changes
  • a nice 'spinning wheel' image is now displayed while your booking widget is loading. especially useful for customers on slow connections
  • Dutch and Danish translations
The new translations were contributed by volunteers. Thanks for your help!

We have more things to release for next week, stay tuned...

Mobile Revolution Puts Calendars In The Clouds

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It is hard to believe that just a decade ago, the cell phone was little more than an ardent luxury for the self-important busybody. Today, smartphones are everywhere and have evolved into entirely new breeds of mobile connectivity. Once a small business staple, the personal computer acted as a command center for all things organization. But today, that one-stop-shop method is dead. We need our info on all screens all the time.

This revolution is not small in numbers. In 2011, 41% percent of workers used personal technology to access business applications, up from 31% in 2010, according to a March report released by IDC and Unisys. While the study included personal computers, a Nielsen survey found that consumers who owned a tablet were less likely to use the traditional computer.

That's why traditional business programming like appointment calendars, class scheduling and billing software have all moved online, into the cloud. This method of online appointment scheduling allows your employees access to information from anywhere, making your increasingly mobile business as speedy as your customer base.

These more agile solutions will continue as these mobile devices get more powerful and access to wi-fi becomes more universal. Until then, you can keep your post-it notes on the office monitor. But if the numbers are any indicator, their days are numbered.

New feature: taxes!

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With the New Year we have launched an important new feature: Taxes.

This was one of the most popular feature requests form our customers, and we listened!

You can now easily set up sales taxes, VAT, GST, or whatever the name for it is in your country/state. Bookeo will apply and calculate the correct taxes to your prices, and display a clear breakdown of the total price.

Since Bookeo serves customers in many industries in many countries, we tried to design the tax feature as flexible as possible, considering the needs and conventions of every country.

Taxes can be a percentage of the net price (ex. sales tax) or fixed (ex. a entry fee to a national park). Moreover, in some countries the custom is to show prices net of taxes (example: USA). In others, prices are normally quoted inclusive of taxes (example: Australia). We support both models: you can specify if a tax is to be considered included in the item price, or if the price is before tax. Bookeo's behavior, the way it calculates taxes and the way it displays the price breakdown, changes accordingly.

Finally, in some countries multiple sales taxes can apply (ex. federal tax, state tax...). In some cases, they both apply to the base price of the item. In other cases, they are applied in sequence (compound taxes). Bookeo supports compound taxes too!

How it works
To set up your taxes, head to the Settings/Taxes page, and click on 'New tax' to add your first tax.

tax set up

That's it! the sample settings above are enough to set up a sales tax.
When your customers book, they will see this price breakdown in the confirmation page:

price breakdown shown to customers

You can see the same price breakdown in the booking window, when editing a booking as manager. Just click on the 'question mark' icon in the price panel:

you can access the price breakdown as manager

To learn more about taxes, head to our help portal: http://help.bookeo.com/customer/portal/topics/132176-taxes/articles .




Your customers will love online bookings!

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Tips from Bookeo: let your customers know that they can now book online

Online booking can play a crucial role in the success of your business, especially by attracting more customers. Remember, once you add Bookeo widget or booking button to your website, you can accept bookings 24/7! Your customers will love the convenience of booking online!

So what should you do to inform your customers about this exciting news? How can you let them know?
  • send out an email or letter to our customers announcing your online booking facility
  • update your website and put a "Book now" button next to your phone number. Busy customers looking for a contact number will be able to click on the button and go directly to your booking page

  • update your voice mail recording andcreate a sign for the front desk to announce that you now accept online booking from your website
  • update your business card, brochures, price lists, to include the web address where your customers can book online. You can print labels and attach them to your promotional material
  • post the news on social networking sites, including a direct link to your booking page. You can also integrate Bookeo into your Facebook page, and your customers can book online from your Facebook page

Also, as an introductory offer, you can set a discount for online bookings. As for payments, Bookeo is very flexible, and you can also let your online customers pay at the time of booking or later, if they prefer.

New feature: WordPress Plugin

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We've recently launched a new plugin for WordPress.
With the new plugin, it is now extremely easy to integrate the Bookeo widget in your WordPress web site!



The Bookeo WordPress plugin can be added like any other plugin to your WordPress installation, and comes with a custom configuration dialog to easily link your Bookeo account to WordPress.

new Bookeo item in WordPress menu


Once the plugin is configured, you can use a simple placeholder to place your widget in any page or text element.

placing the bookeo widget in your page


For full details and setup instructions, see our help page: http://help.bookeo.com/customer/portal/articles/347548-wordpress-integration

New features

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A new group of features has been introduced in recent days across our server regions.

All these features come from your suggestions, so a big thank you for your ideas!

Integration of prepaid packages and memberships
Many trainers and schools have actually suggested this very good idea. When a customer pays for his recurring membership (weekly, monthly, etc) Bookeo can now assign to his account a number of prepaid credits in different packages. For example you can offer to your gym members 2 free personal training hours per month as part of their gym subscription. Neat! For more information, see http://help.bookeo.com/customer/portal/articles/82099-memberships


You can now hide prepaid packages, or make them available only to members
Sometimes you don't want to let everyone to purchase a prepaid package, but you want to assign it manually to selected customer, or only let members access it. Now you can! See the new 'Accessibility' settings for prepaid packages. http://help.bookeo.com/customer/portal/articles/383859-prepaid-packages-for-members-only-or-bookeo-users-only



You can now enable a 'pay later' option for customers that use a special promotion.
Very useful for tour operators who have many booking agents, with this feature now you can let your booking agents (and only them!) book without paying online. You can then use the existing promotion reports to invoice your agents every month for the bookings collected. This is the way most booking agents work in many tourist areas! For more about booking agents, see http://help.bookeo.com/customer/portal/articles/90124-booking-agents-tour-operators-tour-agencies-etc-


Now stricter checks to prevent duplicate records
After listening to many requests, we've finally slightly relaxed our privacy concerns, so that now Bookeo will prevent a customer to sign in twice with the same email address, creating duplicates in your customer database. This will keep your records more organized! And of course you can still merge customer records if the same person books using different names and email address.

Many users? Now less clicking
Now you can change user's permissions over all your classes, tours, workshops much faster. A new control lets you change permissions in block, with just two clicks.

More columns in your reports
The Booking report now contains more data, including total due and paid, gift voucher used, your custom booking status....

Filter your language(s)
Bookeo now supports 19 languages - and counting. You can let customers choose their preferred languages, but too many choices can quickly become confusing. No more! You can now decide which languages to make available to your customers, so that their choice is easier. In Canada for instance you may want to enable only English and French, in Switzerland only German, French and Italian, etc. For more information, see http://help.bookeo.com/customer/portal/articles/220873-default-language-and-language-selection-in-booking-page




New! Manage and Publish customer reviews

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We've just launched a new important marketing feature for all Bookeo users: customer reviews.

Customer reviews are a complete overhaul and extension of the old 'Feedback' system, and now let you do much more.

How do reviews work?
At the end of a visit, Bookeo can send out an email to the customer, with a fully customizable thank you message, asking to leave a review.


The customer just clicks on a big button in the email, and leaves the review (rating and comment).

You as manager are notified of new reviews in your Home page. You can also view all past reviews from all customers. Each review is also accessible from its associated booking, and you can view all reviews left by a customer.

When editing a review, you can now publish it. To publish a review means to show it to other customers, when they make a booking or even directly in your web site.



When publishing a review you can also select part of the comment as summary, which is very handy when customers leave long reviews and you only want to show your favorite snippet of text ("Great experience!" etc).

You can automatically show reviews in the booking page (at each step of the booking process) and even in your own web site. Automatically showing reviews in your own web site is a feature unique to Bookeo which we think is extremely important for marketing. After all, you want to use reviews to convince your customers to make a booking with you, so it is very important to show them even before they reach your booking page.



So you can easily insert a small review widget in any page of your web site, in the position that you prefer. You can customize colors, styles, backgrounds, size, end even how many reviews to show. Customers can easily navigate in the widget to view all your reviews, or to expand a review to view the full comment.



As usual we're very sensitive about privacy, so you have full control about how many details you want to show about the author of the review. First name? Last name? City? Country? etc. You can reveal as little or as much as you want.


Finally, you can now export your reviews to a spreadsheet, for your own marketing purposes, exporting to other systems, etc.

Using Bookeo Reviews you can now easily attract more bookings, and convert web site visitors into paying customers!


New feature: booking cart!

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We're pleased to announce a new important feature, vocally requested by many of you: the booking cart!

You can now let your customers book multiple tours/classes/appointments in a single transaction, with a single payment.

This greatly simplifies the life of your customers when your type of business offers many services (ex. tours to different destinations) or services that can be repeated (ex. multiple classes on different dates).

How to enable the booking cart
The booking cart is disabled by default. To enable it, simply sign in as a manager, click on Settings/Booking preferences, and enable the option 'Booking cart'.



How does it work
Once the booking cart is enabled, customers can make normal bookings as usual. However before completing the booking they will be asked if they want to checkout or to add another booking.



If the answer that they want to add another booking, they can do so immediately - over and over.

At any time during the booking process customers can always review their booking cart, and change or delete any booking in the cart.


When ready to checkout, Bookeo will calculate all pricing, discounts, required deposits, etc. - according to the rules you set up that apply to each booking.



Bookeo is smart enough to apply the correct prepaid credits, money credits, coupon codes, promotion codes, across all the bookings. All the relevant terms and conditions are condensed and displayed in the correct order.

Finally, once the payment is successful (or the booking confirmed without payment, if you do not require payments), a confirmation email is sent out for each booking. This allows the customer to print the individual tickets/receipts, to review and change individual bookings, and so on.

The booking cart is a useful feature in many circumstances, yet designed to be extremely simple to use for your customers - we hope you'll enjoy it!

New feature - more reports!

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We're happy to introduce new and improved reports that will help you manage and analyze your business better!

Now you can access the following reports.

Bookings
This is the familiar bookings report - make sure to explore its many options, including aggregation by promotion, service, resource, etc.



Customers
This is the familiar customers report, with options to filter only customers whose last and/or next appointments were in certain periods. Useful to find out who's coming soon, or who needs a friendly reminder!



Payments
All new, all important! See what payments you received, for what (including prepaid package purchases, memberships, gift vouchers, anything), and by what mean (credit card, cash, PayPal, manual transfer, ...).
This is invaluable for your accounting, and to reconcile your figures with your merchant account.



Coupon codes
After you've run a deal-of-the day promotion on GroupOn or similar, get a list of all coupon codes redeemed in a single click, with details abut the customer, the time it was redeemed, the booking it was used for... makes GroupOn integration even easier, and error-free!



Gift vouchers
Get a list of all gift vouchers sold, filter if used, unused or both. With this report you can quickly monitor how your gift voucher program is working, and how much credit is left out there!



From day one we always knew that accepting bookings is only one step in the business, and a complete solution must offer tools to manage every aspect of the business, including accounting. These reports were designed exactly with this goal in mind.

Thanks to everyone who has left comments and suggestions to improve and expand our reports!

New feature - Google Analytics integration

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During the last few days we've been rolling out a long awaited new feature: integration with Google Analytics.

If you use Google Analytics (and you should, if you're serious about marketing!), you can now integrate your Bookeo data straight into your Analytics account.

What you can do

  1. "follow" your customers in your web site and your booking page, and see where they come from, where they go, where they stop... even in real time!
  2. see what traffic sources bring you traffic that is converted in actual sales (bookings, voucher purchases, etc.)
  3. measure the conversion rate of your AdWords campaigns (Analytics is obviously integrated with AdWords)
  4. thanks to Bookeo's integration into the "E-Commerce" side of analytics, you can also measure not only traffic and conversions, but actual revenue generated by each campaign
  5. see what are your most popular products, how much revenue each product generated, and see trends over time (most of this data is also already available in Bookeo, using our integrated reports, statistics and charts)

How does it work

Setting up Google Analytics integration is fairly simple, if you have a bit of familiarity with editing your web site. All you need to do is to add a couple of lines to your existing Analytics code that you already use, and tell Bookeo about your account ID. For full details, see our tutorial in the help portal.

simple set up


What do you see

The standard Analytics interface is available, now with Real-Time analytics, and E-Commerce conversions...




A small tip for existing Bookeo users: to aid analytics and reporting, we've now introduced a 'product code' that is assigned to each product you offer (anything that can be purchased, such as a service, a prepaid package, a membership rate...). This is then reflected back into Google Analytics as "SKU". You can obviously customize the product codes assigned by default, if you wish.

Conclusion

We believe that measuring your traffic and marketing performance is essential to grow your business - and optimize your marketing expenses. If you use AdWords, the benefit of measuring the actual revenue generated by each campaign is simply invaluable to make sure you're spending your marketing money in the best possible way.

So if you're not already familiar with Google Analytics, get started today - it's completely free.
Familiarize with the product, then use the new Bookeo integration to realize its full potential!


And what if you already use a different conversion tracking product? No problem! Bookeo now supports custom conversion tracking as well!

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