Web metrics for managing quality and auditing Croatian hotel web sites: cluster analysis

Intensive use of e-business can provide number of opportunities and actual benefits to companies of all activities and sizes. In general, through the use of web sites companies can create global presence and widen business boundaries. Many organizations now have websites to complement their other activities, but it is likely that a smaller proportion really know how successful their sites are and in what extent they comply with business objectives. A key enabler of web sites measurement is web site analytics and metrics. Web sites analytics especially refers to the use of data collected from a web site to determine which aspects of the web site work towards the business objectives. Advanced web analytics must play an important role in overall company strategy and should converge to web intelligence - a specific part of business intelligence which collect and analyze information collected from web sites and apply them in relevant 'business' context. This paper examines the importance of measuring the web site quality of the Croatian hotels. Wide range of web site metrics are discussed and finally a set of 8 dimensions and 44 attributes chosen for the evaluation of Croatian hotel's web site quality. The objective of the survey conducted on the 30 hotels was to identify different groups of hotel web sites in relation to their quality measured with specific web metrics. Key research question was: can hotel web sites be placed into meaningful groups by consideration of variation in web metrics and number of hotel stars? To confirm the reliability of chosen metrics a Cronbach's alpha test was conducted. A part from descriptive statistics tools, to answer the posed research question, clustering analysis was conducted and the characteristics of the three clusters were considered. Experiences and best practices of the hotel web sites clusters are taken as the prime source of recommendation for improving web sites quality level.