Heads In Beds Show - Airbnb's New ＂Direct Booking＂ Link Isn't Direct Booking (plus What Actually Drives Airbnb Bookings)

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

In this episode, Jeff Brown of IntelliHost and Conrad O’Connell talk all things Airbnb optimization, impressions and clicks, listing conversion, ranking factors, Airbnb myths, direct bookings, Google vs. Meta ads, email and SMS marketing, and a lot MORE! Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesJeff BrownIntellihostYoutube VideoConrad 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.

Hey there, Conrad here. I'm excited to share this recording with you. So this was a recording that I did with Jeff Brown over at Intelahost. It was a live webinar that we recorded. We've got a video down on the show notes. If you want to check that out, there was a few reference points and sort of visuals on the slide. But for the most part, I think you're going to hear everything you want to hear through the audio.

And it was a lot of fun. I think Jeff comes at this from my perspective of having a ton of knowledge and a ton of context on all things, sort of optimization for Airbnb. I obviously come at this more of the context of how to get more optimized with the direct bookings that you're doing. But I think we both learn from each other during this recording and then kind of our pre-planning for this webinar that we did together. We're going to roll this clip right now of myself and Jeff Brown talking. If you want to learn more about Jeff and what he does, I will also pop a link down below into the show notes for Intelahost. I think he's a really sharp guy.

I think where we landed early on in the recording is get more optimized, get everything you can out of Airbnb. Optimize, get everything you can out of your direct booking site and you're going to lead to the best possible outcome. So super enjoyed it. We're going to go ahead and roll the recording now of myself and Jeff. If you have any questions, feedback concerns, let us know to leave us review, feel like this kind of stuff. And I look forward to going back to our regular type of content next week. Thanks so much. Fenomenal. I see the participant list spiking up, which is what we always like to see, isn't it, Jeff? Yeah, excited to be with you here today, man. So we've got a bit of a, we've got some good topics to go through, I think. And it's like, we planned this a few weeks ago,

didn't we, Jeff? And then this little, this little, I don't know what we'd call it. Not a nuclear bomb, maybe a little small, minor bomb was dropped by Airbnb. Oh, we can help you get direct bookings at Airbnb. And I kind of fed the basis a little bit for what we're going to talk about today. So really excited. I know, Jeff, you've got some slides. Maybe we can do intros on both sides and we can get going here. And Chris is here to moderate, which we're super excited about. So it should be fun. Perfect. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Thanks for kicking us off. Conrad. For those that don't know me, I'm the founder of Intel host. My name is Jeff Brown. We, Intel host is the Google analytics for short term rentals. We bring in all the Intel hosts. Or sorry, that Airbnb,

booking.com, burbo data in one place and help you make decisions for listing optimization and everything. but excited to be here. We're here to help with the Airbnb side and help you get more bookings there. And then obviously the flip side is getting you more direct bookings. It's not the goal to stay on Airbnb forever, obviously with a lot of the topics that we're talking about today. And so we're here to help you get more bookings on Airbnb and then help you convert more of those to direct. And that's where Conrad will take from there. Excited about it. Yeah. And I feel like actually, I feel like sometimes people might misrepresent maybe my position on this a little bit or misunderstand my position on it. I've never really been a fan

of someone who says, D-List your properties from AirBank. Airbnb. I think that's actually a really poor decision. I think what you should be in favor of in your company is just building a system that makes sense for you and building essentially like a reliable business. I think that's what we want, right? I own a small business too. I want my leads to be reliable. So I don't think that there's this idea that if you're listening to Jeff and you're really focused on optimizing your listing as an Airbnb, that's somehow it odds with getting more bookings directly. Because who do I ever work with? Who have I ever contacted in the past 10 plus years that has everything figured out on both platforms? I haven't found it yet. Maybe I'll find him one day, but I haven't found him yet.

Yeah. It's like, why not try to get as efficient and as effective as you can at driving results in Airbnb? And then also working on your own marketing so that you have essentially a little bit of diversity or a little bit of mix coming in from both platforms so that if at any moment and these things do change all the time, you are, let's say your direct bookings go down. You better be good at Airbnb so you can make up some of the gaps there. And vice versa, if your Airbnb listings get suppressed, the algorithm sorts to kick you down a little bit. A listing doesn't do well that you launch. It's like good if we have the ability to drive more direct bookies that property. So I think what I guess what I like advocate for is more like marketing. competency more than just this idea of only direct I just that's what I focus on but it's not that I go into a client meeting ever and I'm just like let's unhook Airbnb I could not imagine ever recommending that basically other than like in very extreme weird scenarios so yeah it's just like the more efficient in the more skilled you are at acquiring guests the easier your life is and the easier it's going to be to sign new homeowners by the way if your goal is to sign more homeowners

if you can go in there and prove to them here's my Airbnb system I've got everything figured out and I've got a really efficient system to get you bookings over here here's my email list here's my website traffic, here's my Google ads that I'm running, here's my Facebook ads that I'm running, and those work really well too. They're just going to be so much more well positioned versus someone who's like an Airbnb-only manager, or maybe even, and I encounter them sometimes, these legacy companies that are almost too reliant on direct bookings. There's folks that I work with, and many of them been on for many decades, but they keep Airbnb and OTAs at an armed distance. But if I'm being honest, they generally produce less revenue than a manager that's more, again,

diverse with their marketing, diverse with their thinking. So I don't know, just like, I don't often say that. Maybe it's just a fun thing that before we get started here, I'll go through that to talk to that a little bit. Yeah, I love that you said that. And I get questions all the time from small owners that ask me if they should be spending marketing on their direct booking site. And I'm always like, oh, if you have one property, I don't know. So that's the best move for you right now. You're going to spend, you've got to climb the Google search battle and all of these things with one property that you're just not going to convert on your website. Start with Airbnb. Get your bookings there. And then as you grow, as you have more properties, get those, those Airbnb guests to start

booking direct on your direct website and evolve it that way because trying to go all in on direct bookings right of the get go is just going to be a really really expensive and tough battle. I don't know if you agree with that or not. Broadly speaking, yes. I think the only minor exceptions I would have for that would be like everyone's while we get a single property host that comes our way. But we're talking like they have like $3,000 per night ultra luxury high enlisting that frankly just doesn't. I always feel like Airbnb doesn't satisfy every host as far as demand goes. That's part of it too. So if you're on Airbnb but you're only getting let's just give an example, you're only getting 10, 12 bookings a year from that, but you own this really high-end premium home.

And you'll say also margin to play with, right? Like you have $3,000 a night. You're like, if I can run ads for $1,000 a month and get a few bookings from that, that actually works out well in your favor. If you're a single property host and you've got like a, I live in the Myrtle Beach area and you've got a oceanfront, Mertle Beach condo that's going to do $20,000 a year in gross rental revenue. No, like there's really no upside there financially for you. Like the fees that you pay Airbnb or whatever the case may be, you never really be able to drive or build like a direct booking efficiency from that compared to those fees.

So I think that's like the only carve out that I would say to that example there would be like really high in luxury homes that have a relatively small like use case or relatively small number of people looking at them. But you could sustain or you could almost justify spending a few thousand dollars a month in marketing costs if you can get other two, three, four, five bookings every few months because the cost basically outweighs the benefits. But yeah, 100% what is that fraction of the market is. It's in that bucket if we're being honest. Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

Jeff, you've got some slides. I've got some slides. Do we want to go like Jeff Conrad is that kind of what we were thinking? Yeah, absolutely. Let's do it. I'll share my slides and we'll go from there. Like Connor talked about, we're going to, we're going to cover both, right? It's not one of the other. It's both. And the first thing that I want to do is show you how to book more on Airbnb. And everything I'm going to be showing you is based on the data that we have. We, we collect data on over 90,000 listings on the OTAs. And we use that to run studies and analysis to figure out what's actually working. Because what you'll find in the industry is there's a lot of hearsay. Everybody thinks that I can't tell you how many posts I've seen on Instagram or whatever saying, I've cracked the Airbnb code. And you drive into it and it's like a guy with three properties. And he tried something on Airbnb and he got an extra booking.

And now he's the expert on Airbnb's algorithm. So it's really important to make sure that you're one skeptical on the claims that you see on social media. But number two, that you make sure that it's data backed that when you hear a claim about something, always ask for the data. And so how many, what's your sample size on that? Because that's really where you get to the truth of it. And so we've been doing this for about three years. and we've been able to amass amount of data that we're confident with.

And so the numbers I'm going to be showing your data backed and the things that we're seeing actually work. Okay. I've already entered a little bit, but I've spent about 16 years as a data analyst, six years in the vacation rental world. Three, three and a half years on Intel host specifically. I'm crazy enough to have five kids. Conrad, I think you're at four. Five. I do.

And that's it, by the way. So nine kids between us, which is wild. Nine kids between the two guys. And I smoke a mean brisket. So if anybody wants to smoke off in Utah, you're welcome. next time you're skiing in Utah hit me up and we'll smoke your brisket. Okay, so let's talk about, let's talk about the funnel. When we see a funnel is the way you sell anything online.

Okay, basically it's two efforts. Get visibility eyeballs on your product. And number two, you've got to convert those eyeballs. You've got to actually convince people to book. And now it's the same thing whether you're on direct or whether you're on Airbnb. But what I'm going to cover for you is the Airbnb funnel and how it works. So the first question is impressions. and Airbnb reports all three of these, by the way, and this is what we report in Intel

host. So the first question is, am I getting seen? And when I say, am I getting seen? Here's what I mean. Let's see if I can actually share my whole screen or if I'm just, oh man, I was going to go show you Airbnb, but now I can't. No. Okay. You see my screen, okay. I'm seeing the slides. If we wanted to go, yeah, maybe we can do a little bit in the middle. You can show me a little bit what you're thinking yeah so basically an impression is when somebody goes to arivenb.com they type in their location they select the guest count and they select their dates right and everybody that appears in the next result gets an impression that's what an impression is and so that's a different goal like when you did the goal to getting impressions is appearing in as many

filters as possible and you appear in filters by not getting filtered out meaning you don't your minimum night's day that's a big one if they're selecting specific dates and a two-date and you have three nights, you're not going to appear in this search. If they're searching for specific amenities, you're not going to appear if you don't have that amenity clicked. So you need to make sure your listing is really thorough. You can get filtered out for price. People will search for price. They might search for super host, right? Those are all filters that people use, and that's how you get more impressions. All right. The next step is clicks. So once you're actually seen on Airbnb, the next step is to

convince the guest to actually click on you. So this is really important because Airbnb controls who gets seen or sorted in the search results, but the guest controls who they actually click on. And the reason that's important is because it controls the number of levers that actually will affect this. So if you are not getting enough click rate, it's probably either your cover photo, your price, or your reviews, right? Those are the three things people can see on the Airbnb search page that will determine if they click on you or not. So if you're having a click rate problem, start there. It could be guest favorite or super host, but generally from the numbers we see, it's not as impactful as a really good cover photo and really good price.

And then finally, do they book you? So this is, after they click on you, you've got them 90% the way there. Now you just got to convert them. You've got to actually move them to actually to book. And the things that we see stopping conversion rate or killing conversion rate is, number one, any recent bad reviews of somebody's just like destroying you in a review and it's showing in the top most recent six, that can be a big one. Number two, I'd say any like predatory meant not predatory. That's a bad word. Any any really

harsh or strong language in their description. So I was just working with a client recently who has half their description at the bottom is a legal language of like the barbecue and how you shouldn't touch it or like kids touch it and all the risks associated with the barbecue. And so we had got rid of that. Another one is the guess. So this was one that people don't think about a lot is it's the when you go to checkout on a booking. There's a message that you can force people to fill out before they check out. It's called the pre-booking message. And you can, you can change this in the settings. All you have to do is go into Airbnb and remove the messaging that you put there and it will get rid of that step. But we see it really

kills conversion. And I don't know why because it's like it's really hard to type in a message. But if you require the guests to type in a message before they can check out, there's just a drop off rate that's pretty high. So make sure that you do that. And then for obvious one is instant book. Just make sure you have instant book turned on if you want to do that. So those are kind of the big four that we talk about with when it comes to conversion. I've got, Jeff, would you mind actually going back? Yeah, I just have questions on each one. I suspect maybe some people listening might have similar questions. So you mentioned a few things there that I've heard from other people, but I'm curious as you're working with the, let's say,

a client or someone using the Intel host software, what they learned from these things. So do they see you? How often are you going through looking at listings and being like, hey, you forgot to check the box for a hot tub, but you have a hot tub. Like, how often is it more of a technical setup piece where you're just going and making changes the listing? And that's automatically boosting impressions. Walk me through that. that. I guess what I'm trying to get out is like how much meat is left on the bone for people, just to improve their impressions, even if the other two numbers stay the same, how much more bookings could they get just by making their listing a little bit more visible? What are your

thoughts there? It all depends on what's not checked. But generally, it's usually two things. One, it could just be someone who's not super thorough on their listing. For example, I found one who had a condo beachfront and they didn't check beachfront. So that's a huge one, right? Like you know more than that. That is the number one thing people are searching for when they come. So if you don't have that, it's going to kill you. But other ones are doubled double triple that guy's impressions by changing that, right? So like, yeah, could be that extreme of a difference? It absolutely could. Yeah. If it's something like if you're at a beach town and you don't have beachfront, that that's a big deal. But generally what I see is more than

off, more often than not, we see it's more of a technical glitch between your PMS and Airbnb. So for example, I was working with a customer yesterday who it wasn't showing smart lock. That's not a major amenity. That's not huge. As long as you have self-check in and whatever, that's what's important. But hostfully wasn't sending smart lock correctly to Airbnb. And so There's little things that you just want to double check. Even if you have a PMS, I should say, especially if you have a PMS, you want to make sure that the amenities are checking in the PMS are making it to Airbnb and go look at it as a guest to make sure it kind of do your own little audit there. One of the things we do and tell host is that audit. So we actually are, I will look at your photos, description, title and everything and check it against your amenities to see if there's anything that's missing.

So we will check that for you. But I don't know if that does that help Conradica? Yeah. The answer is it depends. But yeah. Yeah, like most. I call these lawyer answers. I don't know if you have to deal with lawyers.

If so, I apologize. There's any lawyers in the chat or watching them? I also apologize. But every single question you ask the lawyer, it depends. You could ask the most simple thing. They're like, what depends on this? But no, but I think what I'm getting at is if I was helping someone with this side of the business, which is not what I know as well.

So it's good for me as I'm knowledgeable about what I want to do here, but I don't know the specifics like you do. It'd be interesting for me to think about each of these steps in the funnel as, okay, each of these has to coincide or collect with actions or tactics that we can take to improve them. I can tell you everything you want to know about SEO because they all have attached to them different actions or tactics that we can take to improve things, like building more links to the website generally improves things putting more cons on the website generally improves things that sort of thing so i was curious the impressions piece of it that clicks maybe i want to go there for a moment too if you're open to it's a few questions on that it every a while ago collapsed at this redesign

i noticed where the the title i should say excuse me like that little text that you get is much less prominent than it used to be it used to be years ago that was like really meaningful the title that you had there they also shortened it and they have some other pieces of the puzzle that they've added what's kind of your current like best practices do you focus on amenities do you use emojis, do you make it more emotional? Do you make it more factual? If you had to write titles for someone so they can make their mortgage payment, how would you write those titles in a really compelling way? Yeah, I love that question because from what we've seen in the numbers, the thing that makes the most impact is actually the order. So I would say one, the amenities

or the key selling points that you put in your title and the order in which you place them. So generally, the most compelling piece of your listing should be right at the front, first word and then second word third word fourth word should be in priority order of what what drives bookings for your listing if you want to know this is just a little trick but if you want to know what amenities people are searching one you could use and tell us but two you can actually just go to Airbnb search your area and then across the top they have the pre-selected list of amenities that you can click on they probably populate those because they're specific to that area and so if you have those start from the left go to the right and just to put those

amenities in your title if you have them because that all people are trying to scan they're trying to look for it and Airbnb will shorten titles depending on if there's enough real estate and space so you want to make sure that they see the thing that's going to drive on the most yeah yeah that makes sense I want to go to photos and then I think we had some good questions and chat about conversion rate that I think Chris is clarifying but I suspect we want to get some data on that because yeah we got the data guy here we want to get the data but photos of course everyone says use a great cover photo but that's I don't know that's great advice it's like dating advice be better looking it's like, I don't know what that means. So when you look at photo testing, what makes a photo

potentially more clickworthy? Is it just the setting, a nice color, bright colors? And I see a lot of these Airbnb experts, what you ever want to call it, do these very audacious backyard designs. And kind of their logic is like, if I go and put a basketball court in the backyard that's yellow and orange and things like that, and it's just very colorful, that's going to help me get more visibility on Airbnb because people see this and it sticks out from the crowd versus people having a boring interior shot or a structure shot, that sort of thing. Yeah. I'm sure we can do an hour just on photos, but just like your high level thoughts of photos, how to choose. And if you've got like DUD, how do you try other photos to test it?

Do you always have to reshoot the property? Can you edit existing stuff? Those are so I think it's really important to understand your demographic. So understand who you're trying to attract with your property. So if it's a family group, if it's a family gathering, highlight the thing that a family is going for. If it's the outdoor pool and the seating area around it, that's the thing that they're looking for, put that there first. Understanding your avatar I think is number one. But number two, I think there is, I don't have data about around this.

So I want to be careful to claim that it works. But I do think the lizard brain does help people stop scrolling. So you've got to have, when I say lizard brain, what I mean is what Conrad was just talking about with bright colors, things that stick out. Like when you scan through the listings in your area or your market, look for like colorful patterns and things that are just blending in and try to stick out a little bit. Try to get that bright yellow or that bright orange or something that really just pops. Because all you're trying to do with that cover image is to get people to stop scrolling, right?

If you can just get them to stop and read a little bit more, then you're going to start to convert them with the other things like the price, the reviews, that everything else. So it's that try to just try to get them to hook to go. And how we reason I connected Jeff was you had been you had done some kind of theme properties in the past, right? Like that had been a project that you worked on previously. So and that was when you were doing that, it was very novel, right? Like I know everyone's now seeing these things, but you did this how many years ago, right? when you come up with this idea of like heavily designing the interiors of these properties, them out.

And I imagine this led to all these insights, right? Like people click on it at a much art clip, I would imagine because it was so novel. Definitely. And but what I would say is one of the reasons we started Intel Ahost in the first place was those properties as themed out and as incredible as they were actually struggled at first. And it was because we weren't getting seen on Airbnb. We weren't, we didn't know why we weren't getting bookings. And so we had to hold the right levers to make sure that we were getting

seen clicked and booked because it wasn't we weren't doing a very good job of marketing it on Airbnb itself and that's what Intel host data with what helped us kind of understanding this impressions clicks and conversions helped us diagnose what was going wrong where we were losing the guest and then we were able to fix that so I'm glad it's it's struggled at first because we were able to build the tools we needed yeah last question this was I pulled this from the chat but I think I'm getting it correctly hopefully what this person is asking Alex T which is they kind of want to know what their typical expectations of like conversion rates from each of these steps. So like, how do I know if my click rate is good? How do I know if my click to booking rate is good? Do you have some general

guidelines there? Is it pretty static across different markets? Or is it like in some markets it's way lower or higher? What are your thoughts there? Yeah. So I would say in general, a good first page impression rate is about 45%. I'm saying that because it's the average of all intel host users. But I'm saying that also with the caveat that's that most more saturated markets are much lower. A good first page impression rate in Orlando is like 15%. And you'll generally see a higher click rate in Orlando because the amount of search volume is lower. But for much more competitive markets, expect a lower first page impression rate. And for say, mid tier, you're looking at about 45%. Okay. As far as the next step in the funnel. Yeah, click rate I've seen anywhere from 10 to 50%

click rates. But I would shoot for 10 to 20%. If you're in Orlando, you can get a little bit higher because Like I said, there's that tradeoff between first page impressions and click rate. But yeah, the thing that matters, if you really want to know if you're doing well or not, Airbnb, if you go into their analytics, they have an option to select similar listings. The similar listings is intended to show you the market average. So if you really want to know for your market, if you're doing well or not, you can just select for similar listings and select the next 90 days on the calendar for that analytics, and you can see where do you benchmark.

So that's what I would recommend. And then as far as conversion rate goes, I would say anything above, 1% and above is generally a good conversion rate. I've seen anywhere from 1 to 7%, but that's generally the range that I would be looking for. If you're under 1%, I would consider that an issue. You have. No, it's phenomenal.

It's funny, the 1% number kind of lines up well with a lot of paid ads traffic that we send to a client's website. Yeah, it's like, it tends to be, I was on a call right before this, literally with one of our client 300 plus properties in kind of an island type destination in the Caribbean. And his conversion rate this past month we were looking at last 30 days data was like just a fraction over 1%. And it's like, yep, that works out well.

It's nice. It's funny. Yeah. I stopped you there, but that was good for me, like to learn about that. But yeah, keep prepping. I know you got more slides. Yeah, I have a ton more. This was definitely the longest slide.

So I'll just go through it really quickly. We compared the top like 90th percentile properties against the lowest percentile properties and tried to figure out what's the difference between these. And what we found was that when you look at the top performers and the lowest performers, the difference is not first page impressions. The thing I'm trying to get out here is everybody focuses on rank. Everybody's like, I got to get seen more. But the reality is, most people are getting seen already. And the problem, the thing that differentiates the top performers and the lower performers, conversion rate. People are actually getting seen and clicked quite a bit.

The thing that differentiates the high and the low is conversion. People that do a really good job on their listing description and show conversion do much, much better. And we find a higher correlation between those that have a higher conversion rate. Airbnb appears to be rewarding that in their algorithm. which makes sense if you have a high converting listing that shows Airbnb that this is a relevant property and they're more likely going to be pushing that up what we find is that the correlation is it's about the 70 day mark meaning that it looks like Airbnb is is monitoring conversion over about a 70 day time period and at 70 days you kind of max out the benefit of of that so that they actually reward you

in search based on that kind of time frames again these are correlative numbers that they're not causation, but if you really want to differentiate yourself, focus on that detail page and how to improve your conversion and everything else seems to flow from there. So it's the opposite of what maybe we're told, we're thinking about a little bit marketing-wise. It's that if we get our conversion rate up, Airbnb has enough volume, has enough traffic to essentially satisfy our demand that we want to, right? As long as we get our conversion rate high enough, then the people will find us a little bit. So we actually need to focus on our listing and then go back up and look at the metrics

that precede that to maybe get us a little bit of context. but that should be the focus, yeah. Absolutely. Now, everybody still cares about rank. So these are the numbers that correlate the most with ranking. So I'm just going to show them to you so that you can see what is driving that first page impression rate. And by the way, I should differentiate.

Rank is not the same as first page impression rate. First page impression rate is a number that comes straight out of Airbnb and it's the truth. Rank is a number I say because it's something that people just generally understand and I'll just say the word rank because it's, we're referring to the, the sort order in which Airbnb is putting it, right? The reality, though, is rank is not a very, it's not a possible metric to track accurately because rank is different for every single person that visits Airbnb. You and I can visit the same search on incognito windows at the same time and get totally different results. Airbnb is constantly changing that for everyone. So it's a very

subjective metric. So first page impression rate is really what we're looking at here when we're measuring. But a guest favorite badge appears to be the number one thing followed by super host. more reviews, 5% correlation, lifting your review score, 3% correlation, and responding faster. There's a 3% correlation. Those are the biggest things that correlate with first page impression rate. Other things that don't, we can't seem to correlate are things like writing a sharper title, writing a better description, or shooting better photos. That doesn't necessarily help your ranking. People think that if I put the right keywords in Airbnb, that they're going to, they're going to rank me higher. The reality is keywords don't seem to map.

Yeah. On the review thing really quickly, Jeff, I don't know if you ever poked into this before. I've always been curious about this. So I've been on this on the guest side where I've actually looked for places and I've gone like, gosh, I don't know if I want to be the first guest in this property. It makes me a little nervous as a guest looking at a zero one. But is there any grading or I would imagine there is like diminishing returns? Like, for example, if I saw two listing side by side, one had 65 reviews, one at 100, but it's both 4.9. I'm like, I'm good. Like, I'll book either one. Doesn't matter. Yes. But is there like little tears or walk me through? When does it not matter as much? upon the score is good. I'm so glad you asked that question because we literally did a study on this very topic. By the way, all these studies I'm showing you are on my LinkedIn profile. If you want to just follow me on LinkedIn, we publish these studies three times a week. So everything you're seeing is already on my LinkedIn profile if you want to reference it or on our website. But one of the study that you're referring to is we looked at the diminishing returns of each additional review. So you continue to increase in first page impression rate until and convert, I think conversion rate is what we looked at. You continue to increase. It's like an,

If you know what an asymptote is, it's where the increase approaches a flat line. Okay. So you're- That's what I mean by diminishing returns. So the point is at about 30 reviews. Okay. At about 30, each additional review doesn't give you a ton of benefit. So the advice we usually give is get to 30 as fast as you can.

Sometimes that means reducing your minimum night's day and all of those things so you can get more bookings quicker. And then once you get to about 30, you can sort of be more picky about your minimum night's day, your price and all of that. But if you're brand new, get to 30, then evaluate. That's so funny because I've had clients before refer to listings as seasoned, but I was like, I don't know what that means. Like, seasoned is such a non-generic, a generic way to describe it. But like, that is something that we could describe. Does it have a guest favor badge?

Does it have 30 reviews? Are you a super host? And do we have a good review score? All right. So that's my next one before we, I know you have more things to get to. But what is a good review score? Here's my heuristic. Tell me if I'm off on this.

Again, speaking on the guest side is someone that doesn't actually tend to book a lot in Airbnb, despite the fact I'm in this industry. I've taught people in my life, you take the first number and you just delete it. And then the two to the right are the actual grade. So it's like, if it's a 4.27, like, we're probably not checking that because that's a 27, right? If it's a 4.75, it's probably fine. If it's a 4.8 or 4.9 or whatever, we're good to go. We're rocking it.

What are your thoughts on that? So what we see, first of all, there does appear to be an algorithm drop off after 4.5. So anything below 4.5 that we just see this cliff happen where like it's almost like you're being suppressed by Airbnb. I don't have proof on that, but it does appear that way if we look at the number. everything else beyond four and a half appears to be relative to your market so if you are if you're like some markets are just like 4.9 4.9 4.9 and it's really hard to compete in those markets but generally I'd say anything above anything 4.9 or above is pretty safe I think anybody is

looks at that and goes yeah I mean it's a rounding error anything 4.99 is going to make that much of more of a difference than 4.91 I just don't think it's that big of a deal in people's minds but after that for between 4.9 and 4.5 that's where it starts to kind of dip down, just don't go past the 4.5 or you're going to have to relist, basically. And it's stuff. Is that your recommendation? So someone's been at this for a while. They're down to 4-5 or 4-4.

It's struggling. Is it like the nuclear option? Is there a real-list? Or is there ways to save it? It's a bit of a math question too, isn't it? I can't technically recommend that because it's against therapy in these policies. Oh, I got you gotcha. I just don't want to get anybody banned.

I cannot confirm or deny that we have maybe done that on our own properties. We'll cut that out of the recording. No worries. From our live attendees, we're rocking out. Exactly. So I want to make sure you have enough time for your slides coming, but I appreciate the questions as well. So there's an interesting study we did about photos and number of photos. We found that there's not too many. What we expected when we ran this analysis is that we would find a curve,

that there's kind of like an optimal point of which how many photos you should put in your listing and then it will kind of drop off after that. Maybe assuming that guests just get overwhelmed by too many. many photos. That's not what we found. Actually, what we, there was kind of like, said that same like increase and then there's diminishing returns, but it never goes back down. The more properties, it seems the better. Now, I'm not saying that you just add duplicates of photos because Airbnb is giving you more rank. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that being thorough and being complete with your listing appears to correlate with higher revenue. The photos are the things that people

almost always will look at every single one. Take that space to take pictures of specific amenities that you have so that they can see them, they can think, okay, yeah, it has this, confirm that for them in their minds and be detailed with that. Again, speaking at the guest side for a moment, my wife and I haven't booked a stay not too long ago. Saying there's a crib is one thing. And again, people don't read these descriptions very much. And every single host, manager on the call is going to nod their heads right now and go, yeah, people, I put stuff my description, no one reads it or they don't read it with enough detail to remember everything. But if you say you have a crib, that's one thing. If the crib is in the photo gallery,

in the bedroom and hey, here's what a crib is, et cetera, it's like, oh, cool, there's a there. Don't need to worry about it, right? It checks off in your mind a little bit as you're going through the gallery. Yeah, very much something that makes sense. Yeah. So anyways, more, we're talking about reviews. It just doesn't help you get seen, but it also helps you convert. And this is, it helps your conversion even more than your search. It does help your search, but helps your conversion even more. So four things, there's some myths out there that we've killed with the data. People think that if you change your listing really frequently, that will automatically just rank you in Airbnb's algorithm because they like active hosts or

whatever, we don't see any data to back that does not appear to check at all. I think that comes from something Google used to do with ranking on pages where stale pages they would punish or whatever. Anyways, doesn't seem to check out. Cover photo itself is not a, it's not going to lift you, but the fact that it's an amenity that people want can help. Guest favorite does help and it helps both search and conversion and then getting as close to you can to five stars. So anyways, That's my full presentation. I hope it helps. And if you have any questions, you can reach me directly, Jeff at intel.com. So if there's anything about this that was confusing or you need help with your listing, just reach out to Jeff at intelahost.co.

Back to you, Conrad. Yeah, phenomenal, man. All right, let me see if I can knock my screen share up here. And that's smooth and easy or if we need to rock with it. Yeah, I can see your screen. Okay. Presents, presenter. How do I actually? I want to just go into presenter mode. As you can tell, I'm not a PowerPoint guy, as it were. Okay, either way. It is all good. Hopefully you guys can see on the screen, I'm assuming.

So that's good enough, even if it's not the cool, super cool full screen mode. Oh, the full screen, you can just go on the bottom. It's a very, very bottom of PowerPoint. There's a little button. Yeah, right there. That's the one. Gotcha. As you can tell, my PowerPoint skills are minimal, but that is okay.

We're rocking with that. Again, we'll clip that out. So the recording ones, yeah. All good. Okay, so here's my thoughts. First of all, love that last blog. I think hearing Jeff's thoughts on how to get more on Airbnb is awesome because I think that I get a lot of the principles that you just discussed apply pretty linearly or pretty logically

to what we're talking about over here on the on the building your own booking side of things. So let's do the same thing. Let's win the guest. That's what Jeff just talked about. We want the guest. We all agree there. We just got to keep the commission for us. So if I wanted to help you keep more commission, it would be ultimately here's what

you need to focus on, right? We got a brand that people search for that people want to stay with. We got a proof that we deliver on our promises. So that means good reviews. That means lots of little examples or little fractals you're leaving out there online that people can find. So an active Facebook page really helps. An active Instagram page really helps. A professional-looking design on your website really helps.

So something that people get there and it's pleasing to the eye, that sort of thing. Sometimes a template website from your PMS doesn't really cut it, doesn't really do the job well. So you might need to consider investing in that. Once they get there, everything works efficiently. Like the website has a smooth UI-UX. Jeff talked about the Airbnb algorithm for a few minutes there. And what I would say is that's an advantage that you frankly don't have. You can't hire 80 data science engineers, I'm sure, like Airbnb has done and said,

let's figure out every single piece of our website and the algorithm. You just don't have the budget for that. But we can at least take the things of like how the flow works, of how people work the booking process. And we can mimic a good amount of that. So when we're building a site for a client, our kind of template our approach is mimicking a lot of what Airbnb is done with respect to search results, dates added, filters added. They get a two list of properties. They go to a property detail page.

They start to checkout to finish the checkout. That's same whether you're Airbnb and your multi-billion-dollar company or whether you're a host with one property. It's still the same thing. We got to get them to add in dates. They got to go look at a property page. They got to start the checkout. They got to finish and checkout. So those things are pretty much the same, no matter how big you are. And really, a little bit this stem from, we didn't spend a lot of it in that last block, but a little bit of stemmed from this kind of Airbnb test that's out there right now. I guess we don't know how widespread this is. I haven't seen a lot more people. I have not seen a lot more people posting about it since we, since we saw this when

you and I were putting these out this kind of outline together a few weeks ago. But Airbnb's out there saying, hey, use this link, send over a referral over here and to your listing. If you drive a listing or booking to your own listing through this link, we're going to charge you a lower commission rate. We've seen a 6% number thrown out there in testing. I've also seen a 10% number thrown out there in testing. And yeah, that's a pretty enticing offer, right? But they're calling a direct booking. And let's just say it. It's not a direct booking. It's when someone makes a reservation on your website, when these things actually kind of go in there. So the reservation is still going to go from Airbnb. Think about this. You're doing the marketing. Because the only way you're

actually getting that link out to people is you're going to have to go do marketing on that link. So you're going to have to send that to, sure, maybe you might pick up three or four by sending it to a friend or a family member or a few past guests. But the way you're actually going to move the needle on getting that link out there and you're going to drive a lot of reservations is you're going to have to go run Google ads to that reservation. You're going to have to go create an Instagram page and drive traffic to it that way. You're going to have to email. I don't know how you do that, given the Airbnb doesn't actually give you the email, but you'll have to figure that out and then send the link that way. And at any moment, Airbnb could stop this program and then your sort of direct booking strategy run Airbnb is going to go away. But we'll take that for what it is.

It's not direct booking no matter what it was. So the reservation is still running on Airbnb. Again, it can be withdrawn, change, eliminated any moment in time. One thing I'm very curious about with this Airbnb shift that they're talking about and this direct booking kind of link that they're touting is no one actually knows what the rules are going to be. So let's go through this scenario. And if anyone has spent any time in their life or thought about affiliate marketing,

you'd be very aware of what attribution means or what that looks like. Because if you're an affiliate for, let's say, a brand or a company like Amazon is very transparent rules and parameters about how you are an affiliate for Amazon in a compliant way. So in the past, I've actually owned and operated small Amazon affiliate sites. And what's unique about Amazon in their affiliate program is that if you send a link, click over to Amazon, and let's say you're selling someone a T-shirt that they're wearing. And they click on that. And then there's four or five other things in their cart in that moment.

They actually can, if they check out that whole cart, you get the commission on the whole cart, even though you sent them through on one item. So that's very unique about Amazon. Now, what they pay out is very low. So it's not the best affiliate program to be in. But the conversion rate high, the volume of checkout is very high. But the actual volume of what you get is a percentage is very low. So there's like all these pros and cons about doing Amazon affiliate.

But that's essentially what you are. You're not driving a direct booking to your Airbnb listing with a 6% 10% test they're talking about. You're basically an affiliate for your own listing. And then your savings and commission is kind of what the tradeoff is. Hey, you pay less commission. And that's you're almost getting paid for driving a booking to your Airbnb listing directly in exchange of them. So it doesn't really create demand. Let's be honest, right? It's just that you're just taking demand you might have already had. And hey, use my link and you'll get a discount from it. So as you can see from this thing, this slide, I'm not really a big fan of people investing a lot of their time, effort, and energy into this. Now, if a guest is already reaching out there on AirBee, and they're just like, oh, I'm a past guest. Could you give me a special deal or something like that? You can grab that link and you want to comply, as we talked about earlier, always with Airbnb's terms of service. I am a fan of that. You could pop that in there and kind of build that from there. But it's not something I think you build a strategy around.

So I wouldn't be like going to anyone right now and saying, stop doing your direct booking marketing. We'll say this is a pretty compelling offer to offer such a low rate, but it's not something that I think is actually going to be good for you or your business long term. So could not be something I recommend. Can I ask a question on that? Yeah, of course. And I should have done my homework before asking this question.

So I apologize. us. But as far as if you use this link in the book with that link, how does that apply to all of Airbnb's terms and conditions for the booking itself? Are you covered by air cover? Or is there, like, all of that stuff, are you still covered? Or is that like, oh, it's all on you now? Do you know how that plays out? Yeah, for my understanding from everything I've seen published online is like, that's one of their hooks. Hey, you're still covered on air cover. You're not losing anything from this, right? You're only getting a little bit lower on the commission side of things. There's no downsides that I can see from what's been published early on. Now, that could change or modify or

go differently down the road, but that's my understanding right now. Because one of the things that they were trying to do before was like trying to keep people from inviting that guest to book direct next time, right? That was for a while, they were like saying, if you try to do that, you're against terms and policies and whatever, is that still, do those rules still apply to these direct bookings? Do you know? Yeah. So I think that's part of their hook, too, is, oh, now you have a tool in your tool belt that

you can potentially use again. This is not like fully out yet. But a tool in your tool, you can potentially use that would allow you to, because Airbnb wants direct bookings too. or excuse me, Airbnb wants rebookings too. That's a good thing for Airbnb. And people keep coming back to a platform and booking on Airbnb. So it's kind of a win-win, right?

Now, it's interesting that like, that cut their price by a third, right? That's a pretty significant. Not how many people would like, would you cut your pricing of your software by a third? Like, would I cut my rates of what I charge by a third? Not really. Like, that would be a very, that would ruin my business model from being honest with you, right? There's not that much margin in it. So they must see this as like incremental.

I suspect they're going to be going back to that number three point for a moment. I suspect they're going to not pay out as many as you might think they pay out. because let's go through a scenario. Let's say you click on this Airbnb link and then you go back to the search results and say, before I book with Jeff again, Jeff was a good host and I liked him. Let me just do a little digging

before I come back and book this one again. You might go and poke around and say, let me look at four or five their listings. I mean, then said, okay, yeah, I'm happy with it. Jeff listing is still the best fit for me. You click back on the listing in the search results and then book it.

They're like, oh, it wasn't a dark booking anymore. Right. You went out. You bounced around. You looked at other stuff. So, hey, here's your 15.5% commission bill just like always. Now, again, I don't know that for sure.

So like caveat, legal, whatever the case may be. I don't know that. But like, you could see how that would be the case, right? Like, there's no published guidelines or parameters on what that's going to look like. So it would be very transparent for everybody to say, yeah, if they click on that link in the book right away, we'll give you this discount commission. Other than that, like, we're not going to do it. So, and it skips a lot of what we talked about earlier, like Jeff was talking about, this idea of like first page impressions. In theory, they never see the first page or they never see search results.

If they're clicking on a link and then going straight to your listing, they're just going there. But, yeah, I mean, they've structured away where it's very friendly on the surface. Natasha had a quick question. She said, by commission, you mean the host fee, right? Yeah, post fee, lower host fee, commission, whatever word of any is there. Yeah, same. I want to interrupt you anymore. Keep going. I know, good. Like I said, like we said earlier, like, it's a conversation for sure. I got some thoughts, but I don't think anyone wants to hear me ramble for 25 minutes because I'll just meander every which way. Yeah, like, what does Airbnb be optimized? As they should, they optimize for the guest and

some agree to host, but your site is going to optimize for you. So like, I've seen this happen over and over again my career. Everything we just talked about thumbnail, photo order, amenity, reviews, all that kind of stuff. Airbnb. wants to do that because they also have to serve a marketplace for Airbnb's business model to work well. You've got to be able to start an Airbnb listing and have success, right? So they can't just give all the bookings to all the established listings. Otherwise, like, a new house would have no chance. So they got to figure out in their own system, like, how in the world do I make this fair? How in the world do I make this equitable as they come through and serve the gas? So they have to do that. I understand that. That's the Airbnb model. But that's not your model, right? Like your business model as a

property manager, if you're trying to get direct bookings is you're trying to figure out efficiency and volume and you're trying to figure out, like, what's a good mix of those things. So if like, I set up and run a bunch of Google, Google ads to my website and I'm getting direct bookings. Your question is, how much can I spend so that I'm driving a good return of my investment so that my ad dollars are leading to a high enough volume of Google ads, revenue, bookings, et cetera. But you're not exactly necessarily always worried about the sort order or the exact click-theory rate of those sorts of things, unless it meaningfully improves your conversion rate. Then you might want to look at that and say, how can I improve it? But that property manager I was talking about a few minutes ago that got the 1% conversion rate this past month, the data that we have this morning is like,

he's happy with the results. We want to figure out how to get more efficient with our advertising, but it's like we've got to realize part of it is the traffic and the volume that we're sending over there. And the part of it is that flow of information of how they come in on the website. And let's be honest, you're limited on time, you're limited on bandwidth. You're doing your own direct booking marketing. No matter what your budget is, I promise you it's not unlimited as much as I wish that was the case. I've worked with large property managers. And at some point, we reached the limit of their budget. We've got to figure out how to make it more efficient. So I think what's unique about this is there's good and bad things here about this. Like, for example, this is a sort of fictional thing of like the Smith owner calls you and they're really upset because their property was added to your website a month ago.

and it's gotten no bookings, and you're like, I don't want to lose this homeowner. I just did a lot of work to sign him or her. So you go in there and you say, all right, we're going to take the Smith house or Jeff's house. We're going to put at the top of the search results for 30 days. I've seen our clients do that. If it's going to convert, then I'm fine with that. But you'll still got to realize there might be some downsides to that as well.

Sometimes the answer is when you put a listing like that on the top of your search results, you're really harming yourself because you're giving it, you're giving less clicks and less visibility to your listings that are doing well. And it's like, does that listing deserve to be at the top? Or are you just doing something to appease an owner? But again, at least it's a tool in your tool belt that you have. Whereas when you're on Airbnb and you're not doing well, I've always said this before, Jeff, I'm curious your thoughts on it.

I've always told people, what can you do? If the listing itself is not doing well, you can tweak your photography, you can lower your pricing, you can lower your night minimums, all things you probably don't want to do, those last two at least. But that's it. On your site, at least you have a little bit more control to say, let me run an email promotion to this property. Let me get a Google ad going to this property. Let me generate a Facebook ad and then set of this property.

At least you have tools you can run, things you can run. But Jeff, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's not as many plays you have if you have if you're launching a listing on Airbnb that's not doing well, like prices the main lever, I would imagine. That's probably the thing that works the best in most situations. It's definitely the most effective. We always try to push people to optimize the listing first if you can because it works harder for you. But you're right. There's just not as many levers you can pull on Airbnb because they hold the cards.

Yeah. So that's definitely a key piece of the puzzle for sure. Yeah. And when they hold the cards and they have the traffic, like you kind of have to bend to their rules. Let's be honest. And that's always not the best fun there. So this is another one thing, thing that we talked about in our planning calls well, Jeff, but this idea of do we actually deserve it?

Do we deserve the listing or do our ads deserve to convert? And I think that this is an unfortunate conversation I've had to have probably a dozen, two dozen times in last few years, which is if you have a really poor product, guess what? There's nothing really you can do on the listing side that's going to save you. There's not really much you can do on the rec booking side that's going to save you. The property, the product you're actually selling has to be good, right? You cannot convince someone that a low-end property is actually going to be a great fit for you,

like the best thing in the world for you. So everything we just talked about that I think applies to Airbnb applies to your own website. I don't think you should lower your standards for your own marketing for your own website, because if it deserves to be at the top of Airbnb, and it deserves to be on your website and it deserves to get a good conversion rate, then there should be like proof points or evidence along the way that would justify that. So great-looking photography, some amenities that are complete and that compare well or look well compared to other listings in the market.

Good reviews like Jeff talked about. Same thing applies in your website. Price to value. We're not jacking up the price because the owner said, I want to get 400 bucks a night for this property. Sure, like I want a Porsche 9-11, but they won't sell me one for less than $200,000, so I don't have one. location, response time, all these things still apply.

So I do think there is, and having worked with like legacy property managers in the past, I think there was a wave that's washed out a little bit of people that have said, we've always done it this way, son, we're not going to do it the new Airbnb way. And I think a lot of that has gone away over the last few years. But pre-COVID, that was very much a mindset that I was fighting a lot in the middle, early part of my career was people that are like, we don't want to do it that way, this is how we've done it. And these smaller time hosts are going to come in and try to compete with us,

good luck, because I don't think they're going to be able to match it. And what's happened over time, if we're being honest and just truthful here for a moment, is the standards have risen. The standard of what the guests expects has gone up. The price are willing to pay has gone up as well. There is some upside there. I know hosts will complain about that and say, oh, I can't make anybody happy.

That's not true because what they're willing to pay is gone up. But it means that you have to hold your properties and your marketing and everything on your website to a higher standard. So if you go out there and put out a mediocre property on your website, guess what? You should expect very mediocre, click the rates on your ads. You should expect very mediocre conversion rates on your traffic. Expect it not to do well because those things are going to be on the backside of it

and not delivering the results that you want there. So can I ask a follow up question on that one? Yeah. So you're saying because you mentioned that the standards have gone up and we've seen that definitely in our business as well. What are some of the things that you're advising people to do now to reach the higher standard versus what you had to do before? For example, in our side, it was like, get professional photos. That's now you have to be a little more strategic. Now we're telling people to focus on a guest demographic and all these other things, right? So what are you doing to give hosts like that next level of advantage? So I've had two projects that I've worked on

recently to this effect and it was super eye-opening, which is booking your competitors. I've had two clients do this process recently, and it was fascinating. So booking the competition and actually watching their process end-to-end and seeing where they have certain communication layered in, is a really eye-opening thing, because you can go look at the best-reviewed, the best-rated listing properties. I am a fan of AirDNA. I do think that's valuable tool in Toolbell. I suspect in Dela who has some competing functionality, but I do find AirDNA is great because you can go in there and you can say, show me the best performing listing in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and then filter it based on two bedrooms and oceanfront and stuff like that and say why is this the best performance listing?

And even if their data is not perfect, it's accurate enough where it's like, all right, this listing is doing pretty well. We can see based on volume of reviews and things like that's doing well. And I think it's a study of that and a study of looking at that and saying what are they doing from a what that I can see? And then I think doing actual test booking with your competition is super interesting because then it's like, what am I not seeing? When do they ask for reviews? How is their communication? How do they reach out to me if there is a problem? Let's say there is a problem. Is the home in good condition? Are you actually doing all the things stacking up there that would lead to that. So I think it does shift a little bit depending on the client. There's one of those

lawyer answers. It depends. But I do think I see over and over again that people are like in that motive. We've always done it this way. Or they kind of want to push responsibility back on the homeowner. If I could be somewhat self-critical for a second of some of the property manager clients that we work with, it's not my fault that property doesn't do well. It doesn't have a hot tub. And the owner doesn't want to spend the $4,000, $5,000 to get a hot tub. And I'm just like, then you need to make a more persuasive case, right? For to make that hot tub an amenity because then it'll improve your results and then the property will do better. Otherwise, we're just all, what are we doing here. We're just treading water in this environment with this property not doing well. And if we're not

willing to re-photograph the property, if we're not willing to push more ads to it, if we're not willing to increase the amenities, if we're not willing to improve our own operations and processes, getting better communication in there, that sort of thing, then it's like, again, do we deserve it? Do we deserve to be at the top of Airbnb? Because in theory, in a market with 2,000 listings, getting to the top of Airbnb or being a very common first page ring to go back to Jeff's metrics for a second should be pretty hard. It shouldn't be easy. It shouldn't be something we could just kind of roll out of bed, launch a listing tomorrow and be the top property. Otherwise, guess what? I always say this about SEO. Your competition.

would do the same thing. So if it was easy for you, it's going to be easy for them to knock you off. Like when you get a good ranking on the SEO side of things, on the Google side of things, which is where I have a lot of experience, I hope it's somewhat defensible. I hope it's going to last for a while because it takes a lot of effort and energy to get at the top of Google. But when you get there, it should stick a little bit. It shouldn't just go away instantly. Otherwise, your competitor would wake up tomorrow and say, I want to be at the top of Google and then they'd knock you right off. And then here we are in that world. So it should be a little bit challenging, but there should be some actual results there for sure.

Love that makes sense. No. Awesome. I got two more slides. And then I want to get to the chat here and I'm looking at our time here and I think we're decent but I want to get to as many chats as we can. Some examples, just some kind of case studies or things that we've seen before. So being more specific with your ads is very much a valuable tool in your tool belt. You want to have that. Here's a client that we have that did $30,000 of gross revenue on a $700 ad campaign last month. So they're in South Carolina. They did one geo-specific ad campaigns that are bidding on market plus vacation rentals and they've done really well with that. Google ad search is your highest intent channel. What I'm telling people, hey, where can you get a lot of direct bookings from?

search when I go look at analytics is almost always the case of where the biggest volume of reservations is coming from, direct, because people search when they're ready to take action when they're ready to book. So that's super valuable. Narrow beats broad, too. You don't probably want to bid on a very broad concept, like beach houses. You want to bid on very narrow concepts like pet-friendly ocean-front beach houses in North Myrtle Beach. If that's what you happen to have, of course, make sure that's what you actually have. And I get some results there.

So meta-facebook Instagram ads, you want to, there was a question in the chat. Maybe I can kill two words at one stone here. A strong example of a Google ad and a meta ad would look like you start to finish. I can at least explain it. I don't have any examples in the slides here, Jared, to see, but I can definitely give you some high-level examples. The quick answer would be, it's a video on meta, so Facebook, Instagram, that shows the interior and exterior of the property,

and it's between 25 seconds and a minute, somewhere in that range, and it has quick cuts, so people are interested in what the property actually has to offer. So that could be combining a bunch of three-to-five-second clips of interiors, exteriors, amenities, what people look at, and it's sending them straight to that booking page, and it's getting them to actually click on that and make a reservation. So think of meta and Facebook Instagram as, like, very good at discovery, generally very poor conversion right away, but it doesn't mean that they

don't convert. It just means they don't convert on that first browsing session. So with meta, what you always want to look at is your how many people click on this ad and then convert at some point in the next 30 days, 45 days. That's a more strong metric for you to compare to. Whereas Google, people will absolutely Google click on an ad and then convert very quickly. Like within one day, two days browsing session after their first browsing session, they will convert because Google is buying mode. Meta is discovery mode. So plan appropriately because if you have very uninteresting condo rentals, meta is not going to do very well for you. people aren't going to see that and go, I'm so inspired at this very plain condo that I want to go and book it

because I saw a Facebook out about it. Not going to do as well there. On search, though, they're searching condo rentals, oceanfront in Panama City Beach, Florida. Your property is there. You're going to have a much better chance of getting conversions there. We've seen the same thing for Intelios. We've, we see a direct correlation between impressions on Facebook and searches on Google. But getting for them to go from Facebook to Intel host and purchase is almost like zero. But as soon as they Google us, they buy. So yeah, the 100% agree with that. Yeah, and it makes your metrics and your numbers that you look at a bit frustrating at times because you're like the report I was just talking about earlier. I think they had 7,500 sessions last month from paid social and like one conversion.

And on paper you'd be like, that's a horrible performance, right? 7,000, 500 people that like fills a small basketball stadium and no one booked. And it's one person booked because they clicked right away and booked. But I'm like, look at the other 47 that booked after they looked and then came back and then made a reservation. So people also sometimes I think are too channel narrow. Like they only think about one channel, but it's also like an ecosystem. Like the way people are going to interact with you is going to span different devices and different platforms and things like that. As like this third example, email, if you have someone's email address and you get that from their visit, whether it be from Google or Facebook doesn't really matter.

But if you get their email address, then you can market to them, that's where a lot of your bookings are going to come from in follow up, right? Like you message out to them, hey, check out the property. Hey, check it out. That sort of thing. The larger the property, the longer the lead time, the more email and SMS can play a big role in that because people will plan this over a three, four, five, six, eight month period, that sort of thing. So email can be a really valuable tool to like kind of screw. stretch out that communication and have a reason to reach out to them so definitely big a fan there did you have to do you want to do the hundred dollar gift card i wasn't sure where we landed on that but

yeah yeah yeah we need to do that how do we do just randomize this and just pick one yeah i think we'll grab someone here from the live list so i see 88 live attendees we actually talked about this in our planning session i think it was in our promes yeah maybe we could have chris assist us we'll pick someone at random of this one through 88 and go in and scan it in there should be good all right i'm going to do a random number generator and accelerator for this two nerd fashion yes stick with us here folks that are with us for the next few minutes then we'll get to a few more questions. Rand between 1 and 88. Yeah, random between one and 88. Number seven. All right, one, two, three, four, five, six. All right, see, Angela Sims is who I see. Angela Sims.

Congratulations. Yeah, Angela Sims. So we'll have to, so Angela reach out to Jeff. I think Jeff is connecting that or hooking that up on his side of things. And yeah, we will do that. So your credit, your idea for attending live. So Angela Sims, awesome. She already said, thank you. So email Jeff and we'll go from there. Questions? Anything we didn't get to, Jeff that we should have. I'm scrolling back up in the chat here and and I think we ended up buttoning in everything. If not, maybe other pending things of Jeff will worry but a bow on this. If not, we get people five minutes back. No, I think that people are really interested in kind of what makes a good ad. I think we covered a little bit of that. And it sounds like something we could probably maybe schedule a time with you to go over

in more detail. That's a loaded question. I think we'll probably prefer for that to be on an session if that's okay. But otherwise, I think, let's see, any other questions people have? Let's see. Oh, there you go. That's a good idea. Yeah, Jared, I brought my email in the chat there. reach out to me. I'm happy to send you. I'll send you some ad libraries of both clients we work with and clients that we don't. And I get some that over. But I think we did a pretty good job of answering while we were alive there. So I don't think we had anything else. But if anyone else has any other questions, drop in the chat. If there was a recording of this. Jeff, I think you're going to post that up on your guys's YouTube channel if memory serves. Yep. Yep. It'll just record it. So we'll make

sure and put that on YouTube and send that out. Phenomenal. Perfect. I love it. Jeff, this was fun. Maybe we'll do it again down the road. I think we had a really active chat and a really good attendee list. So we super appreciate that. If you guys have anything else, definitely reach out to. I know Jeff's going to have some ability to reach out to you folks there. If you want to reach out to me, I'm probably most active on LinkedIn. If you want to reach out on social, LinkedIn, just Conrad O'Connell. I think I'm the only Conrad O'Connell on LinkedIn that looks like this. So it should be relatively easy to find.

Otherwise, just go to buildup bookings.com. You can click the Getting Started tab on the top right. And you can reach out and schedule call the member by team. And we'd love to see if we can help you with something. Awesome. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, so. Appreciate it.

Thank you, Jeff for us. Appreciate it. All right. All right.