• News
    • VRM Intel News
    • Latest News
    • Sponsor News
  • COVID-19
  • Marketing
  • Tech
  • OTAs
  • Customer Service
  • Regs
  • Housekeeping
  • More
    • Education
      • Calendar of Events
      • Videos & Whitepapers
    • VRM Intel Live!
    • Reports Login
    • VRM Intel Magazine
    • Subscribe
    • Advertise
    • Authors
    • About Us
    • Contact Us
VRM Intel
  • News
    • 4th Annual #BookDirect Guest Education Day Is February 3, 2021
    • Timing is Everything: The Impact of Seasonality on COVID Recovery for Southeast Destinations
    • Meredith Oskenholt-Meredith Lodging-Bend Oregon
      The Principles That Have Guided Meredith Lodging through the Global Pandemic, Raging Forest Fires and Personal Family Challenges
    • VRM Intel_Christmas-in-New-Orleans
      That’s the Ticket! Register Now to Enjoy Big Savings and Convenient Payment Plans for the 2021 Vacation Rental Women’s Summit in New Orleans
    • Inhabit IQ Gets “Significant Investment” from Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division
    • VRM Intel News
    • Latest News
    • Sponsor News
  • COVID-19
    • Paycheck-Protection-Program-for-VR-industry
      Latest Round of Paycheck Protection Program Includes Up to $2 Million Loans for Some Vacation Rental Business Owners
    • Timing is Everything: The Impact of Seasonality on COVID Recovery for Southeast Destinations
    • Meredith Oskenholt-Meredith Lodging-Bend Oregon
      The Principles That Have Guided Meredith Lodging through the Global Pandemic, Raging Forest Fires and Personal Family Challenges
    • Airbnb Goes Public. CEO Brian Chesky: “Travel is never going to look like it did in January”
    • Short-Term Rental Industry Giants Grapple with Building Brand Loyalty, Democratization, Regulations, and More at Skift’s 2020 STR Summit
  • Marketing
    • 4th Annual #BookDirect Guest Education Day Is February 3, 2021
    • Timing is Everything: The Impact of Seasonality on COVID Recovery for Southeast Destinations
    • Learn How You Can Unleash Your ‘Limitless Female Energy’ During VRM’s Thought Leadership Series Featuring Author/Speaker Amber Hurdle
    • How to Use Website Traffic to Gauge Demand for Your Market
    • Elements of a Property Detail Page: How They Can Make or Break Your Bookings
  • Tech
    • Inhabit IQ Gets “Significant Investment” from Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division
    • 2021 Social Media Game Changer
      Are You Ready to Ride the Wave to Becoming a 2021 Social Media Game Changer?
    • NDAs & Confidentiality Agreements: What to Include and When to Enforce
    • Selling Your Business? Know Your Tech Stuff!
    • Dynamic Pricing: To Adjust Rates or Not to Adjust Rates
  • OTAs
    • Airbnb Goes Public. CEO Brian Chesky: “Travel is never going to look like it did in January”
    • 6 Takeaways from Vrbo’s 2021 Consumer Travel Trend Report
    • Barron’s: Airbnb Set to Price December 9 and Trade December 10
    • Booking.com Affirms Commitment to Quality with Minimum Cleanliness Score Requirement
    • Airbnb is Finally Going Public: Takeaways for Property Managers from IPO Filing
  • Customer Service
    • Meredith Oskenholt-Meredith Lodging-Bend Oregon
      The Principles That Have Guided Meredith Lodging through the Global Pandemic, Raging Forest Fires and Personal Family Challenges
    • Dynamic Pricing: To Adjust Rates or Not to Adjust Rates
    • Repurposing Space: Broadening Your Vacation Rental’s Appeal
    • Booking.com Affirms Commitment to Quality with Minimum Cleanliness Score Requirement
    • New Customers Bring New Demands: Evolving to Meet the Needs of New Customer Avatars
  • Regs
    • Barron’s: Airbnb Set to Price December 9 and Trade December 10
    • Strategic Forecasting Beyond 2021: Are Vacation Rental Managers Changing Fast Enough?
    • Alabama’s tourism economy benefits from Florida Governor DeSantis’ shutdown of vacation rentals
    • Airbnb reaches out to city officials to influence “transitional travel reopening plans”
    • Jeff Paglialonga on FL Vacation Rental COVID-related ban: “We need your support to rectify what I believe is to be the illegal taking of property from Florida vacation rental owners.”
  • Housekeeping
    • Booking.com Affirms Commitment to Quality with Minimum Cleanliness Score Requirement
    • Q&A with Breezeway founder Jeremy Gall about company’s $8 million funding round and more
    • Gatlinburg-based Cabins For YOU acquires Chalet Village and is looking for more. Q&A with owner and founder Greg Plimpton
    • What is the cost of Airbnb’s recommended 24- to 72-hour “buffer” time between stays?
    • The Professional Vacation Rental Manager’s Crisis Playbook
  • More
    • Education
      • Calendar of Events
      • Videos & Whitepapers
    • VRM Intel Live!
    • Reports Login
    • VRM Intel Magazine
    • Subscribe
    • Advertise
    • Authors
    • About Us
    • Contact Us
  • RSS

Education

Measure what Matters: Analytics Planning for 2020

Measure what Matters: Analytics Planning for 2020
mm
Amber Carpenter
December 31, 2019

We are all drowning in data, and most of us do not want to admit out loud that we aren’t quite sure where to start or even what data matters most. Don’t worry, everyone is in the same boat, and the truth is that there are new data opportunities all the time, so your data strategy should be focused but flexible and constantly evolving.

Web analytics are a great place to start when taking a fresh look at what is going on with your business. Google has many different products these days and has rebranded its platform as the Google Marketing Suite, including both its enterprise (paid) and free versions of Analytics, Tag Manager, Survey, Optimize, and Data Studio.

One of the most powerful sets of data you can analyze going into the 2020 season is your website booking funnel. Hopefully your webmaster has set up a goal in Analytics to track the different pages encompassing an online booking, but even if that is not set up, all is not lost.

On average, most vacation rental websites convert less than one percent of website traffic into online bookings. That is not a typo, and the number becomes even more alarming when you segment mobile traffic to less than .5 percent of traffic that converts on a mobile device.

A great goal for your 2020 website is to double online conversions on both full-size browsers and mobile devices. That may seem like a stretch, but it is achievable and something that your revenue-generating teams can work on together that is measurable and highly impactful for your brand and guest experience.

Here is a list of items to analyze related to the booking process that can get your team thinking about a website conversion strategy heading into 2020. Remember, the booking process starts on your property details page. Given that most vacation rental websites present the full price on the property details page, that is the first page of your booking funnel and probably where you are losing 80 percent–plus of your opportunity.

  • Do your fees have clear descriptions with tool tips that help explain why they are being charged? No one wants to pay random, unexplained fees.
  • If you show the entire price on the property details page, do you also display the amount required to book online today? If not, then most consumers will assume that you expect full payment when booking online.
  • Are cancellation policies hidden in the terms and conditions? Being clear about your cancellation policy is so critical in driving online conversion that some OTAs even put the cancellation policy for each property in the search results. Burying your policies in a long, legalese terms and conditions box can make even excited buyers hesitate.
  • Are you hiding the company phone number in the booking process to try to drive more online bookings? Stop doing that immediately. Even Google has emphasized that making the booking process as easy as possible will drive the highest conversion. Why do you care if the booking occurs online or over the phone, as long as you get the booking? And for most of you, your phone channel converts at over 30 percent, so if you can get them interested in a property and on the phone with an agent, the likelihood of converting the lead will be much higher than it would be if you leave them doubtful and confused on your website.

Google has added a lot of functionality during the last year to both Analytics and Optimize. Optimize is a tool that your team may not be using, but it’s free and incredibly powerful! In the past, Optimize was only an A/B testing tool allowing you to measure the effectiveness of different page designs to help measure messaging or design changes that would lead to better landing pages or higher goal conversion.

Optimize can now be used to provide a personalized site experience! That’s right, you can segment traffic and show different personalized content on your website, such as specific promotions based on geographic location or marketing source. The code is simple to install, especially if your webmaster uses Tag Manager. Once you have the code installed on your website, your team can get creative with testing personalized content without expensive third-party tools. A 2017 study commissioned by Salesforce showed highly promising results whereby personalized recommendations and content increased conversion by as much as four times.

In the world of Analytics, there is so much more to the tool than the out-of-the-box reports most of us are familiar with when we review website benchmarks. One of the most underused free tools in Analytics is called Custom Dimensions & Metrics. Free accounts can set up 20 custom dimensions and 20 custom metrics.

Here are some examples of what can be measured with Custom Dimensions & Metrics to get your team thinking about what to ask your webmaster:

  1. What are the dates and length of stay being searched on my website?
  2. How many properties am I returning in search results for different queries?
  3. How many different searches/dates do my prospective guests usually search before entering the booking funnel?
  4. How many properties do my prospective guests usually review before entering the booking funnel?

Depending on how high your website traffic is annually or how many dimensions and metrics you want to measure, consider upgrading to the paid version of Analytics so that you are not getting results from a limited data set.

Once you have this data in hand, the questions your team can answer are endless. Instead of only knowing what dates are being booked (conversion data), you will have the dates being searched (demand data) to help you make more proactive revenue management and marketing decisions.

If I had to pick just one thing to tell all of you to implement as soon as possible that would have a huge impact on your business going into 2020, it would be to try shopping cart abandonment (with a twist). It’s called shopping cart abandonment because it was developed in the online retail industry to drive conversion from the high number of “abandoned carts.” In the travel space, we generally just have a booking flow and not a true “cart” experience, but the premise is the same. We want to take the consumers that enter your booking funnel but do not complete the entire booking process and remarket to them to help drive conversion. Considering that more than 97 percent of the prospective guests entering your booking flow probably abandon, this is a huge opportunity to capture lead data that would otherwise remain anonymous, engaging your entire revenue-generating team (revenue management, sales/call center, and marketing) to drive conversion.

The one caveat to retail is that to truly optimize your abandoned cart strategy, you also need to have a property details page abandonment element. Given that we show the full pricing on the property details page, a large percentage of abandonment occurs there instead of in the booking funnel, and if you don’t have a strategy to capture abandonment on the property details page, you are losing a large percentage of leads. Property detail page abandonment performs at 10x or more of cart abandonment in the vacation rental space, although data is limited, based on the small number of managers who implement this solution.

Once you have the abandoned property details page and cart data, your marketing team can set up remarketing email and social media campaigns, your reservations team can perform highly effective targeted outbound campaigns, and your revenue managers will have invaluable data they can use to spot patterns with conversion issues.

Abandoned cart leads in the vacation rental space convert at approximately 35 percent or more when teams are cross-functionally engaged.

Don’t take my word for it on all these suggestions. Do the math on what would happen if you doubled online booking conversion and if you supplied your reservations team with more leads from traffic you are already generating. The return on the investment is huge, and these are all highly actionable strategies.

Related Items2020 marketingamber letodataFeaturedgoogle analyticsmarketingunderstanding datavacation rental marketing
Click to add a comment

Leave a Reply

Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Education
December 31, 2019
mm
Amber Carpenter

Amber Leto Carpenter has been part of the vacation rental industry since 2003. With an early start in the operations and owner relations side of the business, she has spent most of her career on the technology side of the industry. In the last decade, Amber built and sold a web marketing company to Instant Software (now HomeAway Software), she was the VP of eCommerce for Wyndham Vacation Rentals, the Chief Marketing Officer of The St. Joe Company, and most recently was the VP of Product for NAVIS before transitioning back to consulting with global hospitality software teams and tech-enabled vacation rental companies in early 2019.

Related Items2020 marketingamber letodataFeaturedgoogle analyticsmarketingunderstanding datavacation rental marketing

More in Education

4th Annual #BookDirect Guest Education Day Is February 3, 2021

Amy HinoteJanuary 24, 2021
Read More

Short-Term Rental Industry Giants Grapple with Building Brand Loyalty, Democratization, Regulations, and More at Skift’s 2020 STR Summit

Zandra WolfgramDecember 9, 2020
Read More

Skift Short-Term Rental Summit, Dec 9 with Vrbo, Vacasa, Marriott, Expedia, Sonder, and more

Amy HinoteDecember 7, 2020
Read More

Women Need to Raise Their Voices . . . Just A Thought

Zandra WolfgramOctober 13, 2020
Read More

Vacation Rental Women Professional Development Series: Growing as a Thought Leader with Author and Speaker Amber Hurdle

Amy HinoteOctober 5, 2020
Read More

Free DARM Software Session: Changing Pricing in your PMS, Sep. 17, 11:00 am ET

Amy HinoteSeptember 9, 2020
Read More
Scroll for more
Tap

Sponsor News

  • Inhabit IQ Gets “Significant Investment” from Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division
    Latest NewsDecember 18, 2020
  • You Are Your Best Revenue Manager
    Revenue ManagementNovember 30, 2020
  • How Email Helped Save Vacation Rental Companies During the COVID-19 Pandemic
    AdvertisementNovember 21, 2020
  • Booking.com Affirms Commitment to Quality with Minimum Cleanliness Score Requirement
    Customer Service for Vacation Rental ProfessionalsNovember 18, 2020
VRM Intel
Calendar of Events
Videos & Whitepapers
VRMintel Magazine
Subscribe
Advertise
About Us
Authors
Contact Us

Recent News

  • 4th Annual #BookDirect Guest Education Day Is February 3, 2021
    EducationJanuary 24, 2021
  • Paycheck-Protection-Program-for-VR-industry
    Latest Round of Paycheck Protection Program Includes Up to $2 Million Loans for Some Vacation Rental Business Owners
    BlogJanuary 20, 2021
  • Timing is Everything: The Impact of Seasonality on COVID Recovery for Southeast Destinations
    BlogJanuary 18, 2021
  • Meredith Oskenholt-Meredith Lodging-Bend Oregon
    The Principles That Have Guided Meredith Lodging through the Global Pandemic, Raging Forest Fires and Personal Family Challenges
    BlogJanuary 12, 2021

View Current Issue

VRMintel Copyright © 2016-17 | Click HERE to Subscribe | Privacy Policy | Disclaimer | Copyright | Jobs | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn

Opinion: Beverly Serral—I Went to Skift’s Short-Term Rental Summit and Here’s What Happened
Connecting Systems: APIs in the Vacation Rental Industry
We use cookies and similar technologies to recognize repeat visits, as well as to measure the effectiveness of campaigns and analyze traffic. By clicking "I Accept" you consent to the use of cookies unless you have disabled them.Accept