Heads In Beds Show - 76% Of Your Traffic Is Mobile. Your Website Was Designed On A 27-Inch Monitor.

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

In this episode, Conrad and Paul talk about all things mobile. Why nearly three out of four organic search visitors are browsing on their phones, where mobile users are dropping out of the booking funnel, the website mistakes that could be costing you direct bookings, and why “responsive” doesn’t always mean “optimized.”From clunky date pickers and buried booking buttons to slow load times and frustrating checkout experiences, they break down what vacation rental managers should actually be testing on mobile and a lot MORE!Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteBook A Call With Us🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Bed Show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host, Conrad. And I'm your co-host, Paul. Red Light Blinking. Recording is starting. What's going on? What's happening? We're dancing on a nice early morning recording here.

This is, I don't know, I told you, I like recording in the morning. It's still a good time. I feel like my voice is a little raspy. I got the radio voice more. It's just a fun time, but this is, yeah, we're taking a little. I see, you don't know. this episode is actually inspired by my wife. This doesn't happen often, so we're going to kind of go with that.

But how are you doing, sir? How are things going in your world? Yeah, pretty good. Can't complain. It's funny. I think I've mentioned a few times about the drought occurring. Now we've got the opposite problem. It just rains every day. So that's going to we flipped it around the other way. And now that's all we're dealing with pretty much every day.

So not great because I'm doing some travel this weekend, nearby travel. But I don't want it to rain the whole time around the beach. But how long until your kids go to school? Yeah, there's a countdown on the fridge right now. It's a little tucked in the thing. I think it's 20 days now, 19 days now, I think. Oh, you see, at least you're closer to me. I feel a little better.

Like, the people who are already sending their kids off the school, they are just frustrated me right now. Everybody says, oh, yeah, first week of school. I'm like, okay, I'll see you in five weeks when I can also enjoy that time. So there's that. Goodness. Go, Minnesota. Yeah.

I guess it'll work sound as fair eventually, but all is fair. and love and war and sending your kids to school. You know what's not fair sometimes, Paul? When we're working on websites, you and I are victims of this, and we have done sort of topics adjacent to this before, but we've not actually done an episode about this, which is the rise of mobile use has just continually gone up, right? I know people, by the way, this wasn't even in the outline.

This is just something I know. I know people who don't own a computer, and these are not people in their 60s or 70s. These are people in their 20s who don't own a computer. They interact 100% with everything they have to do, like, in the world, on their phone. And that surprises me. as someone that's on a computer for eight to 10 hours every day, it feels like.

But that is very much the case of how things go. So it's kind of a review or a deeper dive into very possibly up to 75% of your traffic is on mobile. How often do you actually look at your website and use your website on mobile? And do you design it in that way? So you said it was inspired by your wife. So I'm reading the outline here. I'm giving the hook here. But this is all yours.

So I'm going to kick it your way. What are your talk? This is, I did. I often have my wife go through websites that I, that have recently been updated, that have been recently even change because we do. Even from a, let's not even get into design, the development, everything else, from our SEO perspective, from our marketing perspective, we have specific things that stick out to us like a sore thought. We have specific things that maybe we gloss over because it just doesn't quite hit for us. And I always like that outside eye to just see,

hey, does this run fast enough for you? Does it make sense? Do you have questions about how the website would work because I would think it would be very straightforward and it's funny because I she was like no I shouldn't I shouldn't ask this this is new to nitpicky I was like no nitpicky is exactly what we're looking for because there are plenty of people who are going on these sites who are feeling the same nitpickiness only they don't have someone over their shoulder saying this is where you should go or this is leading them actually to the parts of the website that they need to get to so I do and again my wife is the same way we have it to have at the house. We have a computer. She works on her computer. She operates on her phone. And obviously,

that is not my case. I work up here and designers work up here and developers work up here. And it's easy to do. You should have a good understanding of what your website looks like on a big desktop machine. But I think right there, talking about the developers, talking about the designers, when we think historically about how they have done their jobs, it has. They've developed on computers for computer websites, because prior to mobile first indexing and not all these different variations of websites, that's what you did. That's all there was.

And I think there's been such a major shift in usage and things like that of these websites. And maybe in some industries, it is. There's more of a focus on apps and, mobile design and responsiveness. But I just don't think that's the case where I think that we get sucked into, ooh, it looks nice here. We've got the full. How many times have you gotten on a website kickoff call or a website highlight?

I know some new features looking on the webinar or something like that. And we're looking at the desktop version of the website. Last time I saw a mobile version of a website on a webinar, I can't remember. So I do. I just think that there's, I think it's a much higher level thing. But when we think about the number of the amount of traffic that comes to your website from mobile versus desktop, we are approaching the conversation of, would you be optimizing your website for AI? Would you be optimizing your website for tablet? We are almost at a point for why are we optimizing our site for desktop?

We're not there yet. And then again, for different industries, it's a different story. But yeah, that's kind of going full circle with that. I do. It's something that we, I want to figure out ways to overcome that blindness because it's not a blindness that's going to serve any of us in the future here moving forward. You bring up AI. So drink if you had a four minute delay or five minute delay on us mentioning AI in the podcast. But it is a good point because we were talking before we record and we have episodes coming on the future about how to be more AI ready, right?

Making your site more AI accessible, which I think we can agree may have some upside right now. It doesn't maybe drive a huge portion of your demand. I think it will in the future drive a lot more in demand. But it's an interesting point, isn't it? If you today worked on your mobile, like, UI, UX and made your site a more pleasurable experience on mobile and improved your conversion rate where probably 70% of your traffic is finding you from, that's going to make a way bigger difference to your bottom line, the manager of bookings you're getting over optimizing for an AI channel that might maybe

chip in a few fraction of percent or a few percent points, excuse me, bookings right now. But that is going to, if I walked into 10 different vacational manager's office and I pitched them, hey, let's make you more AI discoverable, I'd get more meetings than if I pitch them, let's make your mobile website a little bit better. Let's make your bold experience a little bit better. They'd be like, ah, that's responsive. It's fine. Even if they knew enough about it, they wouldn't question. I think that's kind of what you're getting at. They wouldn't question the fact that it's not perfectly optimal. And like, it is revealed when you go use these mobile apps, use the Airbnb app as I did the other day I was searching. And I rarely actually book on Airbnb.

I've done it before, but it's very uncommon for me. It's a good experience. Let's be honest. Like, you open Airbnb, everything loads super quickly, like as you're swiping through between maps and going back to the main property search card view. Everything is really snappy. I remember back when I was at the previous agency that I worked for and we introduced Infinite Scroll on like the new version of the websites that we had done. At the time, it was like revolutionary.

It's like you'd scroll down and fill in four new properties. Scroll down, boom, and fill in four new properties. And then we found one of the worst like kind of UI experiences once we started testing a little bit more where you'd be, let's say, 30 pages deep. I'm putting this in our quote. So you put, you were 30 pages deep on one of these large property editors that we had designed to site for.

You clicked on Conrad's Cottage and you're like, okay, that looks good, but it's not what I'm looking for. You click back and it lost your place. So you had to go back and wait, where was I? Nothing was broken. It was just it came back to the page and it was like, oh, it reloaded the page and then it went back there. So there was versions of it where if you click it, it opens it a new tab, which is okay, but then there's no back button. So if they just close that tab, they might come back to the same spot. But we ended up having to develop at the time when I was working there was essentially remembering, in the browser, in the number of the browser, was remembering where you were. So when you would click the tab and go to Conrad's Cottage, the property page in the website, and it wasn't what you're looking for you and click back. It would actually go back.

There was like this little cookie or JavaScript thing. Don't ask me to explain that I'm on a developer. They just boom, it brought you back to where it was. And that was a huge lift in the UIUX because there were people who were like calling them. And they're like, yeah, I was on your website. But I was just really frustrated. I was looking and then I couldn't figure, remember where I was or whatever. Then we added favorites, which seemed to help.

So there's all these interesting concepts that are mobile friendly. But if you just go and, yeah, try to use the website. And like you said, watch someone else use the website, which is always fascinating. Things like clarity you can do this remotely, as Paul's talked about many times before. In person is way better, though, for sure, right? Because you're hearing what they're saying out loud and that sort of thing. There are services out there. User testing as well that will give you that kind of hybrid approach where you can just hire

random people to give you feedback on your website for $10, 15 bucks, whatever the case may be. And then they're like recording their voice or explaining it as they're doing it. They're like, oh, this didn't work. But I've nicked at this one for years. This is in our audit list where, and luckily this doesn't happen as much as it used to, but there was a long time where I used to go to all these major PMS sites, click the date picker, and it would open the keyboard. and even worse, it would open the keyboard to a key, a key board, not even a number pad.

But that's one of my ones in checkout. If you're on mobile checkout and you're trying to actually book the place and you tap on the credit card field, you better show me the number keyboard, not the letter keyboard, because I'm going to type in my credit card number, right? One, two, three, blah, blah, blah. So all these little things that just are in our notes and, you know, there. But when you actually go back and look at the mobile trend, as we did to prep for this call, I pulled nine random sites out of our Google search console data.

I say I. Claude pulled nine random sites out of our Google search console data. But this is 150,000 clicks-ish. It's a little bit less than that over the past few months. The data from Google Search Console, there's a client in here who's 80% mobile traffic, and we're talking about 41,000 clicks that they're generating. So this isn't some tiny site. This is a pretty big site.

They're doing a few million a year in direct bookings off this website. 80% mobile, 18% desktop. The small difference is tablet traffic. There's brands in here that is as low as 65%. There's brands in here that as high as 80%, but needless to say, mobile is a huge portion of your traffic, and you're probably not thinking about each of these little friction points is maybe how I would describe it. of we are getting out that can occur in this booking process.

I do. I think that we get sucked into, and maybe it's because the profile of our traffic has shifted. When you look at Google or excuse me, Google Analytics traffic from the 20 teams, the early 2020s, most of your mobile traffic was also probably coming from Facebook, which was already a lower engagement channel. So it was skewing a little more of your traffic. There was as, I wouldn't say, the mobile device proliferation was definitely still out there,

but people were still using the desktop. I do. I think that's just the example you gave of the 20-year-old that doesn't have a desktop, that doesn't have any type of computer there or a laptop or anything, that paints a better picture of not only are just the channels changing, now the users themselves are changing. So before we did, we have channels skew one way or another, but ultimately we have a good profile.

Now it is. Now it's why would I invest the same amount of money in a, I'm picking up my laptop. Why would I invest in that same amount when the phone gives me more functionality? It gets more portable. It's like there is outside of needing it for business, outside of needing it for, again, some of the jobs we just talked about, design, things like that, I don't know.

Like, I don't know why we would necessarily need to have the computer there. So, yeah, we need to follow where the clicks are going. We need to follow where the traffic's going. We need to just follow all of that information. Because it is. It's telling us, it's giving us the clues. It's giving us all we need to know about where that traffic is coming from. And if we're still satisfied with, yeah, yeah, when you look at mobile traffic on average,

Typically, the time on site is a lower number. The engagement time is a lower number. The engagement rate is a lower number. It doesn't have to be the case. It is something that we should be looking at those numbers and not just saying, oh, it's mobile. So that's how it's going to be. We should actually be taking those numbers, addressing them, and saying, oh, our average engagement time on mobile is 45 seconds. On desktop, it's a minute 25.

Why is that? Can we build it better? Do we need it to be longer? And I think that's another thing. It's understanding which of those metrics, which of those KPIs are really KPIs that are moving the needle, that are leading indicators of hopefully a conversion or at least bringing them further down that funnel because, yeah, ultimately I've gone into a lot of those analytics reviews, reporting calls, and said, oh, yeah, Facebook's here and mobile's here. and this and that. And I just explained it away as opposed to saying, hey, mobile engagement for real bad. This is probably something we need to address because it's two-thirds of our traffic.

But again, we get into the revenue, into key events, we get into bounce rate numbers, attribution, all these other things. And then that mobile versus desktop, I don't know. It's not even a secondary item. It's like a tertiary item that we, I don't know. You personally, Conrad, do you have, in any of your reporting right now, do you have a buy device category breakdown in any of your reports? No, I used to. That was something I definitely have done in the past.

I think over time, people just accepted it. I think when it felt like that fever was the strongest was when there were strong pushes from web dev companies to go back to their clients and say, we need to re-factor your website to be very mobile-friendly. And there was all these testing tools that came out at the time. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, responsive. We need to go refractor our website, so it's mobile-friendly, responsive, etc.

Hey, look, here's a tool from Google that'll tell us if we're passing the mobile-friendly tests. Google still has that tool, I believe it's a mobile-friendly testing tool. But I remember using that as a point to, and this was even before we were doing web development, and I was telling clients like, hey, we're not friendly on mobile. It's hurting our conversions badly right now, number one. And number two, this is how Google is going to crawl the website going forward. This was several years ago.

That's been the default for some time now. So, actually, funny enough, Google crawls it as a mobile user, not as a desktop user. So if you have some sort of difference in display of text content, things like that on your, on your device, and the way the website lays out and it's on mobile a different way, then that's really what Google sees. I don't even see the desktop version of it. So it's a really interesting kind of thing to think about because I agree. It's like we just faded in the back of our mind. Yeah, this is important and we don't look at it. If they're crawling in index, the mobile version, that's collapsed content, lazy loaded content, that can all be potentially dropped or not shown on mobile. So your SEO team spends a bunch of time writing content, writing a nice little intro for a page. slaps it up there, but then puts it behind some kind of JavaScript hidden interface on mobile. And then it's, oh, yeah, Google didn't even see that. You basically just did that for nothing. You just shouted into the void, if you will, from a, from an SEO perspective. And again, this was another thing that we talked about for you record, but I think it bears repeating. And I've changed my opinion on this after doing some more research. And I think it's always important

to acknowledge when you change your opinion. I was previously not thinking that there was nearly as much benefit to these, like, more AI-friendly versions of crawling a website. So, and it's still up in the air, because like some of these platforms out there have said things to the effect of we're not going on your website and looking for a markdown version of your page. There's no evidence of that. But what I am noticing when I've done some more digging research with multiple AI platforms on this like chatybt and Claude, et cetera, is their crawlers are a bit dumber than Google's crawlers.

So if your site is mobile friendly, but for example, there's a major PM house out there where the search results pages loaded in through JavaScript through Angular, Google actually seems to be able to get it no problem. So Google can go and crawl that page and see everything. It appears from what I can see that open AI, the chat, CBT, crawler or the clawed perplexities of their AI crawlers are not as reliable or not as consistent with crawling in that content. So again, on mobile, they may not see it at all. On desktop, they may not see it at all. Google might be able to see it, but that's only a fraction of crawling, the

activity that's occurring out there on all these major websites now. So it's another thing you've got to think about, which is mobile friendliness. But if we are going to embrace this idea of agents booking, then the agents have crawlers, have bots that go and access the website. And if we think this is going to be as big as maybe some people believe it might be in the future, then we better make sure that we're optimising the site, we should really just make it so that they can just call domain version of the site. Because there's, again, there's very little evidence of proof out there that these LMs are hitting and looking for the other versions of the page, the markdown versions, the text-only versions. So if we get the main one working well, then it's like those become superfluous.

And what I imagine over time is that those crawlers will just get better and better, and they'll get more skilled at executing JavaScript. There's already versions of Claude, like when I do cloud computer use, that actually can execute tasks for you when it gets blocked. So Claude goes to crawl a web page, and it's just blocked even one where, And then called's like, no problem. I'll just open it in your browser. And I'll just get the content from there. Like it's even figured out ways to be like, oh, you put up a little speed bump.

I'm just going to go around that speed bump and get the content I need. So you got to think that's only going to get more robust over time. And the idea of blocking agents or blocking AI crawlers from your site is probably a really poor idea. Nor do I think it's really going to work that well. Because again, they can just open a browser and to make a user anyways. And it's just going to look like a normal request coming from a browser. So good luck. Also good luck putting like a CAPTC up too, by the way.

Like it's an AI that's like a supercomputer can figure out whatever caption. You put up there, just wasting the agent's time, I suspect, for five more tokens, which is just silly. So anyways, I got a little bit off topic there. But yeah, I do think the idea of the way that Google crawls the site and any, now, if we need to think about these AI agents or AI platforms in the same stack of problems that we're trying to solve, which is give the platforms that just maybe we should think of it like discovery platforms. You and I think of that very much like Google, but if we're going to give these discovery platforms access to our website, we want them to be able to index and see everything.

And it's imperative that they understand that's mostly going to be more mobile use than it is desktop you should be going through your site with a fine tooth comb from that mobile perspective. So that brings it back, I think, to where we started. I think that's the LMS text is a big thing as far as being able to read the site. I think that's super important. But I think this is kind of going to dovetail this into just kind of the full question of, I would argue, but there are times where we are so focused on SEO, so focused on content, and so focused on all these things,

that SEO becomes the biggest obstacle on mobile anything, mobile first design, certainly. But it comes the biggest obstacle to the most important part, which is our traffic to booking Delta, the conversion funnel, people actually getting down because if you put all this beautiful content on a website that people can't get through the content to actually list, the actual listings, a huge problem. And I think that's something that we are really good at slapping content on these

pages and making sure that the LLMs can see them and that Google understands that this is answering a question of some kind. But that question is getting in the way of the answer, which is those properties at the bottom of the page. And if you are having to scroll, scroll, to get through that SEO-friendly content, to get to the bookings, the bookings, the bookings, that we've all been trying to get to here. That's where the rubber hits the road a little bit. And I think that's where, that is where, when I'm diving in the clarity, it really becomes very apparent of, whoa, SEO took away from UI, UX, SEO took away from our conversion

path. SEO took away from the funnel. And I will make the argument and you can tear it apart, rip it apart as a bunch of it. that's a product of only focusing on the desktop side of things. Having created, I think where we look more at the mobile is the homepage, is on some of the other subpages within blogs and maybe travel guide areas, some stuff like that. As far as the booking destination pages,

those really critical pages for SEO, AEO, GEO, whatever we're going to call it, we're not as worship. It's slap a map. on there, slap your listings on there, slap the content on there, and just hope for the best. And it does. It leads us to some subprime experiences on some of these really, I would say, good websites, but we've just lost the point once we've gotten past the top level. So what are your thoughts on that one specifically? I'll do a call back to previous episodes, which we probably don't do enough, but we've talked about this concept two times now, one very recently, just two episodes ago,

I think it was, where we went back through the booking funnel, which is homepage, date search, property detail page views, start, checkout, finish checkout. Very simple, right? To everything you just talked about, go and look at that through a mobile lens. Go flip a segment on in analytics, go look at that, and then compare to desktop and go, wow, we have a massive drop-off after people put in dates. The search results page is probably not very good. Or, wow, a lot of people come to a property detail page, very few of them start the checkout on mobile compared to desktop, which again, these numbers are probably going to be a little bit lower. That's not uncommon. But if you have a 4% conversion rate of property detail page view to complete checkout on desktop, and it's a fraction

of 1% on mobile. There's probably a problem there. And the problem may not be that it doesn't work, by the way. I think you were hinting at this, but just be clear. It doesn't mean that it's not working. Everything could be firing and working. It could just be that it's slow. Again, you go to tap and add in dates and the calendar takes a second to pop up. Those things aren't a great experience. It could be that when you go to tap, check out the button's too small or it's hidden or you have to scroll down to see it. So you get to realize a little real estate we have on the phone. I'm holding up in iPhone, what is ever this is the new. newest one. 17. I get a new one every two years. I don't even know the difference to be honest with you.

I just get them for new batteries, I feel like. But what's the, we've established this is the size, because I think this has been the size now for X number of iPhone iterations at least. I don't know as much on Android. We'll see about these new kind of foldable devices that are coming out. I think Android's already got one. We'll see if iPhone, Apple kind of goes down that path where it's going to be a bigger device. But okay, let's picture it's two phones side by side, basically. So we've agreed this four and a half, five and a half inch window is pretty accessible to the human hand. That's basically what you're designing for, right? It's like a human hand. So if that's what we're doing, then we've got to think about every decision

if how that page lays out, not just the fact that it's there, but like how should the photos look on mobile? Should we make the logo smaller in the top left corner and have it there, but just kind of tuck it up in the top left. Again, if you want to go look at good design, go look at these mobile apps that have billions of users,

go look at Instagram, go look at a Facebook app, go look at an Airbnb if you want to get inspired from them, go look at a verbo, that sort of thing. And you'll see, okay, they do cards. They're very scrollable. They have buttons along the bottom, which most sites don't have. Very few sites that I go to have any sort of sticky menu

or anything like that at the bottom. but every app you go to has that for the most part. So it's an interesting kind of thing to think about of like, all right, why. We always talk about the frustrations we might have with the OTAs, but in this case, you might want to copy them and say, I can lay out my site there similar to how it is over there. And I'm raising my hand here.

We haven't done a perfect job of this on our side. All of our designs work on mobile, of course. But I think this brings me to the chance, and this was your podcast idea, but it brings me the chance to come back and say, if we were going to make a really awesome mobile site experience, that's very performative from a conversion standpoint, what are all the things we'd add in there?

It's almost like, too, you can just mimic other UIs. What I'm envisioning here, now that I'm just having fun with this idea, is that you're up there. And on the top of the homepage, maybe there's like stories for different featured properties.

So you tap up there and it's like, go check out this listing, go check out this listing. What a very familiar UI to people to use Instagram. Oh, there's stories up there. I think Facebook has the same thing on mobile and of course Snapchat inventing that UI probably a decade and a half ago at this point.

So it's an interesting kind of thing to think about of what if I just took things that were familiar in other places and popped them onto my website and made a very mobile native, not just mobile friendly, but like native to what a mobile. typically looks like and built off that and there's probably a lot of interesting things you could build from there. Yeah, and it is. This is something that like when we look at, it is, we know, designs are not perfect, but the things we see most frequently and the things that certainly are the biggest obstacles to that

converting path, it is, that day picker. Who, ho, is that the, the be all and all of the mobile side of things. I've got that fingers. I openly admit that. I know I'm not the only one. And I think making sure those clickable elements are indeed clickable. That date picker being the most important one, because when I look at heat mapping, usually that first date picked or whatever, whatever, that is the most clicked item on the homepage. So if that's not giving people a really good experience, you're going to be in some trouble. Same thing as with those photo galleries. I will say clarity probably overindulges the dead clicks theory, but there's also a lot of websites. When we get to our destination level pages.

You are. You've got maybe 10 images. That's not, this isn't a bad idea, but they've got 10 images and then it stops. I don't know how to necessarily improve that, but I've certainly seen a lot of people who try to keep clicking that right arrow to get more images and then they leave. What's the right answer? I don't know for sure, but that is certainly something that is going to frustrate people. The map.

How many mobile or desktop websites for that matter? Have you gone to where the map is broken? It's too zoomed in. It's too zoomed out. It's not giving you anything of any value there. It is. It's nice. I love map search when it works effectively.

But when it's not, man, it is the biggest pain in the butt there potentially could be. Booking widget position. That's something that we do when on that, when we can get it just sit in that right sidebar. Everybody likes that right sidebar. Oh, it's a beautiful place to just put something. But that's gone on the mobile side of things. So making sure that it is sticking around somehow and it's difficult to do. Having it follow you on a smaller screen without feeling like it's overwhelming the screen or doing anything or it's more of a nuisance.

We don't want it to be a distraction, but how do we make it better? It's 2026. Phone number not being tapable is simply unacceptable. Now, Apple takes care of that for you. But there's still plenty of people. I'm one of them using Android devices, and it is not automatic. If I click on that number, it doesn't automatically generate. So you got to link it.

I'm sorry, this should be pretty straightforward here. Form length, certainly we've talked about that. We've worn that out on the owner acquisition side. You don't need to know 12 things about everybody. If you can get three or four, that's great, because they're not going to give you much more than that. Same thing. Pop-ups. We've seen some bad pop-ups on some sites.

And they look great on desktop, but then you put them on mobile and then Google really gets frustrated when it's overwhelming the screen, and then they give you a manual action and that's curious. And then the fold. Again, I think there are a lot of these things that they make a lot of sense, having stuff above the fold. You don't want a huge image just like you don't want a 700-deep pixel image on your homepage that pushes the availability tracker, everything else down the page. So why would we want it on the mobile side of things? But yeah, of those of that list, what are the things that you point out most frequently? Or what are the things that people point out to you most frequently? Yeah, I think it's a great list.

For me, it's always the interaction of date search property page. I think that's where the number one issues occur, particularly galleries. And when I flipped on clarity on guest demand sites before, photo galleries, it's so funny. That's the number one thing. People look at the photos more than anything on a property detail page. And like we all acknowledge a nod of it. But then when you see it in action on a clarity recording, you're like, they don't look at the description at all,

which is, of course, a funny thing as someone that used to sell description work a lot. And now I still think it's important to have these good descriptions, but it is unfortunate that the minority are reading them from what I can tell compared to looking at the photos. So the photos are most important, especially on mobile, like how they swipe through it. Is it easy to go through? I was on a site recently where like I went to go swiping, it was just like glitching. It was just like kind of skipping. I'm expecting this like smooth sort of transition from photo to photo.

instead I'm getting this like glitching type experience. And it's, again, it's not like doesn't work, but it's just not smooth enough. Can we make that better? And you almost need someone on your team, the website, web design team, who's just got a little bit of that intuitiveness, you know, built inside them. I think some web developers can be very technical, which it is technical work in a way. But it's also like human work where it's like, okay, my mom is going to use this. I always give that example right.

And my grandma's going to use this. How are they going to interact with this page and understand what they have to do next? And okay, step one, step two, step three, all those kind of things. And when you see like really good design, it always draws you in. Airbnb to their credit, that's always something they've been very adamant about or very public about that the design of this interface and how it works is important. I think when they, I forget which release this was, if it was one or two releases ago, basically Brian Chesky said, we printed out every single screen in the onboarding process to list the new Airbnb, to list new property. And we ripped everything

apart and said, I think they put 40 or 50 screens up in a room, like sitting in a room in their office. And they're like, what can we make better about each and every screen? They went through 50 screens or 40 screens or whatever it is. And they made all these different changes. And it's, yeah, you kind of kind of have to be that level of obsessed. Like every step in the process or in the journey, sorry, I'm dropping my pen here. I'm so excited is part of that. It's part of that little kind of, I think of it almost like the ski slope concept or like the slippery slope concept where it's like, if I get them searching and I get them looking at properties and they like the photos and they click the book now. And then boom, now I'm only one credit card punch in away from getting a direct

booking. It's every little improvement I make there is like the sled going down the hill and us like knocking down a little rough spot or a little rough patch and it's just every bit smoother. And that's where in my experience too, you go and make these like small changes and you may not see a significant improvement right away. It's like, all right, you make things a little bit better, like that photo gallery glitching thing that I described earlier. Look, if we fix that tomorrow, it's not going to boost the conversion rate from a fraction of percent to five percent overnight. It just doesn't work that way. But it's just that editor process so that, okay, every new visitor I'm getting, they're going to get a little bit better experience. You're going to get a little

better experience. And then that's where we have some clients who do get a lot of mobile traffic and a lot of mobile conversions because I think they've just worked on it over an extended period of time, which is more so my methodology for working on a website. Well, by the way, is get a version out and then iterate on it, which is not what most they educational managers do. What most frontal managers do is get a new site, are relatively happy with it, wait three to five years and then say, all right, this old one's crappy and then get a new one. So that's another kind of layer to all this as well, I would say. Yeah, I think even when we're talking about like trying to get against three to five years between

doing any updates and doing anything like that, I think being able to, what you were talking about there, having someone who has that little bit of sense, I think when you're sending a support ticket into anybody, your dev team, technology team, whatever that is, I think you're hoping that developer has a little bit of design experience as well because I think that that, like you need and there is, that those are two very different sides of the aisle there. You have to make it look good versus make the functionality, but those who can bridge that gap there, that's that logic. Those, they're in there and they are unicorns. They are not a whole lot of people out there because when I have had conversations with some of those people who are more technical,

it is. It's they are just very cut and dry that this is the way the job script needs to be run. This is where the site map needs to be. This is where this, X, Y, and Z. But when you think about, like, on the front end, what needs to look nice and what needs to work so that people can. Like, those technical people have a very hard time stepping into the shoes of the end user. they just know how to build what, how to make it come to life.

They can visualize hopefully and make it come to life. That is, it's just very difficult. I think it's where our impacts, our insights are so important. And I think that's, I think part of it, anytime you're dealing with, bringing it back to the high level here, when you're dealing with websites, whether it's mobile desktop, anything, I think there are some people out there that they see a designer who, was put days and hours and weeks and months in some cases into the design, and they don't want to be hypercritical, which is silly. Because you're paying for the website, it's a product you're buying.

If it's not going to work the way you wanted to, it's not being presented the way you wanted to, it doesn't matter what they say. And I think that's maybe that's part of it as well, is that we default to the experts. They wouldn't build it this way unless it was going to be more effective, unless it was going to perform better, get us better. traffic, convert at a higher level, something like that. But at the same time, if it doesn't look right, if it doesn't pass your own sniff test, you should be the first one waving that flag and saying, hey, I think, and there's more of a 50-50

split up there. Some people were very happy to do that, and there's some people who are not. But those people who are not, then they need to find someone who's going to help them and help point out or be their voice because those two companies both need to succeed. those they both need the right actions to be taken. So I do. I think that's something that, I don't know, is that something that I think that timing also alludes to that as well, is that you do have people that have a website for a year, two years, and they don't say anything about it. They might, like the support tickets that they request are, there's a misspelling,

or we need a special, or we need to add a page here, but it's not actually evaluating the performance of the current website and making a decision based on analytics, based on clarity, based on some of those other things. So it's tough. I'm happy to be on this side of it and not on that side where you're actually doing, making, building the system. Yeah. It's a good point. I think I have a few thoughts as we kind of come to a close here. One would be most people don't know how to evaluate this site other than just their own lived experiences or opinion. So it's just I think this is good or I think this is bad therefore I want to do it that way. So of course for a while, clients were obsessed. There was a slider era for sure when I was entering the industry and it

extended on for, I think, quite a while and everyone's while you'll hear it, but this idea of, let's put everything in a slider. But then at some point, you get nine opinions to get nine slides up on this homepage and then it's wait. And we have too many slides. No one's looking at them. And yeah, they were really never looking at them. The death of sliders thing, I think was a battle that the Yost people fought a long time ago, which was kind of funny, five, six, seven years ago. But it was a way to make everybody happy. If I have a slider and everybody has their slide in the slider, then I can check off the box in my head and say, I gave everybody a slide in the slider, you know, so then therefore this team can't yell at me or this group of properties

can't yell at me or this owner can't yell at me because, hey, I've got your group of homes in the slider. So that's one concept that I've seen before. So they don't know how to evaluate it. They just have an opinion or they're just trying to make someone else happy. They're not actually trying to look at it. They don't know how to look at that data and evaluate it and measure it, that's sort of thing. So I think that's a core problem is what you're highlighting there. I think the other piece of it is, even if you do have a bit of opinion how it should go, I do find that can creep in a little but too much. They're an expert. I think you can be an expert, but just realize, too, that there's nuance and there's differences between different companies and how they operate and their customer

base and what that customer base looks for. And what works for one client, if I copy and paste that exact same strategy and paste it over in a completely different destination or a completely different market, it may fall flat on space, right? So if you know your guests and you know what they ask about, now what they add, this would be so easy, but go and export every single inbound lead that you've gotten, you know, email to your reservations inbox and say, what are the top 10, 20, 15 questions that guests are asking when they're reaching out to potentially book a property. Let's think about those. Do any of those have design implications or relevance there? Is it that we need to change the way that we communicate information because people aren't seeing it.

Maybe it's there, but it's buried or hidden in an FAQ page or a contact us page or something like that. Where it's like, oh, yeah, our cancellation policy should be front and center because it's actually very generous. I have a client where we did that recently. We put the cancellation policy directly under the quote. So they got a quote. And then it said, you have a, I forget exactly what theirs is off top of my head. But it's something like you book now up to seven days before we'll give you a full.

refund, which is pretty generous. And they're leaning towards a more and more friendly cancellation policy, very much not the strategy from a while ago. But it's actually reassuring to be like, oh, if I do that now, then I'm going to, that's great, because then I have the ability to get this, get this booking and cancel if I need to. People like that about the OTAs that they have all this flexibility. So it's a good thing where in some markets, maybe people don't care about that as much or it's not as big of a thing. When people book very large houses, I think they don't expect to have early flexible cancellation policies. So if you've got an inventory of a bunch of dead bedrooms homes, sure, you should have your cancellation policy somewhere, of course, but it may not be

front and center in their mind. You may want to pitch travel insurance to that person. You may want to pitch, hey, ads and upgrades, whatever the case may be, there's other times and places. So your needs are different. I think you should 100% speak up in this scenario that you're describing and go from there for sure. Odds of ends, Paul, we got to pick up here before we, if not, do you want to hit the highlights of what we've gone through so far? And if not, we can, yeah, I think we see that. Here's the thing. We've acknowledged this. Approval happens on desktop. Everybody's looking at the desktop. That's where it is. It's agencies presented on desktop. We, I present everything on

desktop. This is this I would say if we're if we're asking the right questions moving forward, it's anytime you're having someone present something to you on the desktop say, hey, what does that look like on mobile? Can we just take a look at mobile real quick? That's the one action item I'm going to tell you to say anytime you're doing anything. But it is. I think it is we've really tried to hit on mobile is where your traffic is coming from. We are so not focused enough on mobile that it is. It's something that maybe we've gotten into the story of mobile is not where people, but mobiles are the lookers, desktop are the bookers. That might have been the case years ago. And the numbers maybe still support it, but it is. That's the number of support it because we're

not focused on the mobile side. We're focused on the desktop side and we're optimizing that side of things. I think we've given you a laundry list of things, ways to look at your website, hopefully. And ways it is. Don't. just take it for granted that people are using your desktop website and test your mobile website take your phone to a slightly remote place where the website where the web traffic isn't great or the your mobile speed isn't great and test it out see how long it takes is it take five seconds does it take 10 seconds does it take a second to get for your website to load because at that point you're going to have an understand just from a user usability standpoint is my website usable

on mobile or not and then go from there again instead of making some other action I am from there but do some of these tests on your own we all have our phone on us all the time that's a good option to even if it's a part of your morning routine just look at the mobile site take a look scroll through for 30 seconds a minute and a half do something because ultimately you're going to catch more you're going to be able to give more advice to the designer developer you're working with the agency you're working with and ultimately I think you're going to hopefully see some improvement on your conversion rate, your traffic, all these things because you're giving it the attention it deserves because it's getting the attention from travelers. That's getting the attention

from homeowners. I'll back it up with some some more buying the scene as well. Yeah, yeah, couldn't agree more. Man, you know what the stats tell us, by the way, Paul? If they're listening right now when they made it all the way to the end, odds are on, odds are they're on mobile. odds are they're downloading through iTunes or Spotify. And they need to leave us a review before they depart for the day. So go ahead to your podcast app of choice iTunes, Spotify listeners. We know you're mostly played on mobile right now. We know you're listening all the way to the end.

So you owe us a review for doing so. Click five stars. We appreciate it. And we'll catch you in the next episode. Hope you have an awesome rest of your day.