Heads In Beds Show - Conversion Killers That Are Hurting Your Direct Booking Progress

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul break down things that many vacation rental managers place in their website and marketing that actually HURT and lower conversion rates. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 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 in 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. All right there, Paul. Good morning. How's it going? Well, you know, it's another wonderful day in the neighborhood. All right there, Paul.

Good morning. How's it going? Well, you know, it's another wonderful day in the neighborhood. Just getting ready to have another fun discussion. As I like to say, there aren't too many better ways to start a week. So how are you doing, sir? Yep, pretty good. Good weekend, great weather out there.

And can't complain. There's times where it's awesome to be here in the Myrtle Beach area the greater you know South Carolina Grand Strain beaches and this is one of them you know we've got that you guys little periods of you know decent temperatures and very low humidity we got them in the fall we get them the spring summer is whoo you know don't come down here in summer but it's all good I'm doing actually a physical media project which I don't do a lot of but we're doing some things for the book and I bought some new post-it notes which is this bright pink color the listener can't see this but you can see

this ball so I have to ask you what is your favorite Post-it note color because I like bright bright colors. I don't like like the off-white yellow like that's not I want it like as bright as possible. What's your take? I mean this is that's a 3M company so we have an abundance of those Post-its around. Is that a 3M? Is 3M based on that in your neck of the woods? Yep yeah it is. We're big on the 3M side of things. The 3M actually for a while and it might be still the 3M open was the senior tournament that came in. I think it's still it might be the 3M open that moved over to the PGA. So yeah, they've been a big thing. I have one year I went

to Target and 3M are like your companies. Yeah, that's for just for long. Best Buy. We got Best Buy too. As we transition out, who knows what's gonna, into a more digital world. A lot of those stores are going away, I gotta say that. But color wise, I like, yeah, a bright green, bright yellow, pink's nice too. Blue, like anything used in blue,

I mean, from right with a blue ink, it's just that I'm not gonna be, nope, nope, nope. Yeah, yeah, I'm okay, I'm not. I don't like red pens either, it just reminds me of school, where like, your teacher would write a red pen at the top of your, I wasn't the best student, you know, I heard.

So I would have, you know what it was? I was a streaky student, which is funny. I'm streaking a lot of things I do, like my personal habits, and sometimes, I'll get like, on a hot streak and do really well. I like, there was semesters and periods in college and high school where like, I crushed it. And like, I was like, I got this, I got it figured out.

And then if I got in a cold streak, you know, it's just like golfing where you just like, go bogey, bogey, double look. You're just like, oh man, I'm on cold streak right now., I got this, I got figured out. And then if I got in a cold streak, you know, it's just like golfing where you just like go bogey, bogey, you're like, oh man, I'm on cold streak right now. You need something to like kind of offset that. So anyways, one thing that the listener does not want to have a cold streak on, I would imagine, is bookings on their website. Certainly when it comes to getting more direct bookings, there's a lot of episodes that we've done in the past about the traffic side of it, but we haven't done a lot to my knowledge, or we haven't talked about this in a while on what actually helps conversions, or in this case, we're kind of flipping the script a little bit, things that hurt conversions.

And obviously, you could use some inversion thinking here and get to the right idea. Well, if these things hurt conversions, you probably wanna do the opposite to help conversions. So we did a little bit of an outline. We spent some time outlining some of these ideas and kind of contributions from both ends here. Kick us off, what's kind of your take on the idea

of how can we get better conversion rates on our websites by taking off these things that hurt conversions? And what are some things that come to mind for you as we get going here on things that do hurt conversions on most vacation rental managers' websites? Yeah, I think, I mean, when we kind of started bubbling up the discussion, it really was. It's those managers who don't have a result on the page. I think that that's something that when people are doing the search, I think the way I posed it is go through and do the search. Select their dates, select the number of people we're gonna go through, do that search, and they find zero results or too few results on the page. Have you lost that guess? I mean is that the be-all end-all that they went through the

process of trying to plan their trip, they weren't able to do it do you get another chance with them and certainly you know with a full-fledged approach you're hoping to retarget to them but I guess that's kind of how I thought about it high level to start what what were your thoughts on that as we as we kind of started off that that thought process there well this is the obvious thing that the single property host might struggle with or the right you know I have two or three properties under management that sort of thing person struggles with it It's not what they think it is. They think it's just a money thing, which is certainly part of it. Don't get me wrong, right?

Like you're not going to get as much traffic and you don't have the brand awareness as a large, you know, local competitor or certainly an OTA or something like that. But honestly, even in a vacuum of, okay, we can send 10,000 visitors to your website and let's say you have two listings, or we can send 10,000 visitors to a large local property manager that has 100 listings. Again, even assuming that you had the budget to fund both efforts, you would actually see the conversion rate on these larger websites as better. So that's kind of one of the weird efficiencies

that I've kind of learned over time in the work that we do is that the client gets bigger and our job actually gets a little bit easier with respect to conversion rates. And to see small clients that have small budgets and they're putting a small amount of effort into a lower converting website and getting sometimes predictably relatively subpar results or poor results, then the large property manager puts kind of like halfhearted effort. In some cases, I've seen some PPC builds that are just

make me shake my head personally, but the website converts enough where it kind of is like pretty good deodorant for covering up some mistakes that are made there. So yeah, I think it's one of those things where there's two layers to go down. One is like the number of listings, which is kind of what I'm picking at. What you're picking at was like people using filters or lots of search options to be like, okay, I want an oceanfront property

that has three bedrooms, that has a game room that has this, and then you may have inventory that fits some of those criteria, but not all of them. So people go on the website, they put in too many filters or specific search options, and then you're available, even if you had 500 properties, at some point, someone may put in filters so specific, especially when you tie in dates during a heavily booked week, for example, that nothing comes up.

So I do think it's a battle of like exactly what the right lever is to pull. It depends on your unique situation. But generally speaking, you probably want to give people a little bit less flexibility on the home page. So when they do that initial search, you wanna share a lot of listings if you can, if you have the ability to do so obviously. And then in the search results, I think is when you wanna get more filters and more refinement options.

And I think the double-edged sword there is that it does serve a purpose on the SEO side of things to if you need to, you know, for a location, for a specific city destination, so Destin and Panama City and 30A and all these separate locations, yeah, it is beneficial to have those pages set up or those results pages set up in a way that you are going to build out maybe a larger structure within the website.

However, if you're sending people to a results page that has one or two rentals on it, are you really showing them what they want to see or is it better to keep it a little higher level up? And then just kind of give them more opportunities? Because I think yes, if we look historically over time and look at some of those larger websites, and that perfect comparison that you're making of funding this budget the same way with two versus 100, you're going to see that greater, greater opportunity to book convert more frequently. So yeah, I think just overall that's,

it is a little double-edged sword, but I think most people are gonna be able to figure out how to deliver enough value with each of those page options. Yeah, also this is, I can't prove this, this is just my own personal feelings on it. Having done some of the testing like this before, we have a client who has a lot of long-term rentals.

The area they're in is heavily restricted and only some properties can do short-term and a lot of them are long-term, so they've got a lot of long-termsals. The area they're in is heavily restricted and they only some properties can do short-term and a lot of them are long-term so they've got a lot of long-terms in there. And at one point they said well should we just take them off our website? Like what's the value in having these on our website? And I said, you know, well if they're never ever available like the second you make them open, you know, you have 25 tenants lined up to rent them long-term. Maybe there's minimal value there. But I was like honestly, I think at least having them on the website and even before people put in dates, for example, them seeing a lot of properties on the page will

actually potentially help the conversion rate of your other properties. And in theory, they could be searching for like that address, or they could be searching the name of that property. And even if it's unavailable, they might be on your website. And now they're on our retargeting list. Now we could say, Hey, that property is not available, but these seven other ones are that are nearby. And I'm like, why not just put out more nets, basically, to try to catch more fish, so to speak, with respect to guests? And I was like, what's the downside?

And so they went through the process. And it was kind of a pain on their side, I'll be honest, because they had to go get photos and descriptions done for these long-term rentals. That again, they're probably not going to make a lot of money off their website off of. But the results were pretty positive. And this is where, I don't know if you want to call it

tin foil hat, this is just like too little data for me to say. But it seemed to improve their SEO as well. Just having more content, more pages on the website that were clearly related, you know, properties that could be rented, again, long-term versus vacation rental. But that idea seemed to be something that Google seemed to have some affinity towards.

So I think having a lot of results on there, even if you can't rent them, is actually a viable idea, to be honest with you. Now don't like put up fake listings and things like that. I'm not suggesting that. But if you have real listings that are just, you know, maybe off the program for a temporary period of time while they're being remodeled, things like that, I usually need to block the calendar, I used to

say like, Apple it down, maybe that's just going to confuse people, as long as they're putting in dates and those searches working properly. I don't know if I feel that way anymore. I think it's actually maybe worth leaving them up there. Because again, it's just another little net out there that you might potentially catch one guest off of. And when you're trying to optimize and get bookings, I think you should be trying everything you can with respect to conversion. I think that'll be the underlying here is that Everything that we're doing here should have a kind of corresponding. We've got a conversion kind of refiller to

Just excuse that and kind of correct it for us. Anyway, so yeah Yeah, but you can always you can always take these things too far, too literally. So it's, as with all things, it's nuance, which isn't always accepted well on the internet, but I digress. All right, we'll go into something that's very opinionated, but certainly something that we come across quite a bit.

I put in the show notes here, clip art logo, which, in theory, you could maybe make a clip art logo decent. I have no idea. Now I guess AI is going to solve all of our clip art logo needs. I don't know. Time will tell. But the point here being design matters. And when you show off a very poor design, it hurts trust right away. And I don't think that you can badge your way into trust. I don't think there's one thing that you can

put on your website that's like, oh, yes, this company is trustworthy. I think it's almost like people just have intuition and they have feel. And there's, you know, I think we discount the reason that one of the reasons Airbnb is so successful is they are very particular about how the website looks, works and functions from a design standpoint. And their competitors, a la Verbo, which we kind of picked out a little bit last week of all the good things these companies were doing, isn't always taking that nearly as seriously, you know, from a design and UX perspective, we'll get to UX and mobile with respect to, or excuse me, we'll get to UX in a second with respect to mobile. But yeah, with clip art, just having the right design sensibilities. And this is my weakness. I'll fully admit that, that I'm not a designer.

I have to hire designers on my team to go and look at this kind of stuff and help me make the right decisions. But I know when I look at a good design and I'm drawn towards something, and it feels like that magnetism versus when I'm repelled by something and I'm just like, ah, that looks a little off, that looks a little sketchy.

And I think guests are the same way. Maybe they can't tell you why this shade of tan is a better background color than this other shade of tan. Maybe the designer could nerd out why that's the case, but I do think they know the difference between good and bad design and bad design without a doubt hurts conversions. We can all identify when we've seen a poor design. We may not be able to identify specifically what it is, but you, you know,

the difference between a positive and negative. I think anytime you're doing any type of design, try to get as many in me though. Don't just keep it to two or three people. Maybe not too many cooks in the kitchen, but you want to have an understanding and make sure there's no biases that are feeding towards creating something that, yeah, I mean if it looks older, if it looks, you looks, we can kind of go down that line. I am also not a designer. I, if something looks like I designed it,

y'all are in really bad shape. So, do the comparison. Just like you do keyword research, do a SERP review and see what's happening there. Look at competitors in your area. See what they're doing. See how they're presenting information. Hey, maybe you want to switch up the font. Hey, maybe you want to switch up this and

that. But if you're working in an area where there are a lot of the kind of the pre-build or templated property management or agency sites, take a look at what they're doing. They're probably, I mean, we've talked about this before. Learn from what other people are doing. Don't copy it, but you know take something on there. Ultimately if your eye likes clipart, that's gonna be what you do and you'll probably see that conversion rate continue to suffer. But I do, I think that that's something worth. Get a second set of eyes on it would be the easiest way to do something. Go to the next level, put Microsoft Clarity on, put in anything

else, put some screen recording software, see how people are actually engaging with the design. But it's, I think that's a, that's hopefully it's the low hanging fruit that you should be able to fix and take care of in, in pretty short order and just kind of improve and enhance that design. Yeah. Yeah. I'm with you a hundred percent with the, with respect to getting more, you know, getting

more eyeballs on it, because like I said, I may not be the bright person to, you know, give you feedback on it, but having the right design in place and having a professional designer work on your website, work on your logo, work on your branding, work on the fonts, colors, all those kinds of pieces, I think too tied together. And yeah, there's just something off putting about bad design. And I think it makes the guest just arose a little bit of trust and they think, Hmm, should I be putting my website in and giving this person, you know, $1,500 right now or $2,500, or we have a client who does $25,000 bookings regularly

on his website. A bad design is not going to get someone to trust you. So you've got to break through that barrier. And especially because you're not able to guarantee, quote unquote, guarantee that stay the same way that they might trust an OTA. Like they've heard of Airbnb. Like it or dislike it, that's a fact, right? They've not heard of the name of your vacational company in many cases before. So there's always going to be that little

bit of hesitation. And you don't want to compound it by having something out there that doesn't look optimal or doesn't at least look like it was professionally put together. And the flip side actually, and this in my mind applies both homeowner and guest, it's going to make you look a lot more credible if you do have great design because people are, maybe you're a small company, but if you can, this is something I've heard other people in our industry say, if you can look like you're a little better, a little bigger than you are, then that's going to help you potentially win over some more guests and some homeowner simultaneously, for sure. Because we work with so many businesses in the space that are consider themselves more luxury. I think that's that's another that's a very important aspect that if you're going to put luxury in your name, you have to embody that luxury feel not just the homes you're managing but with the website as well so again if people are coming to a really light feeling not giving a lot of warm fuzzies the white

if your website doesn't feel white glove even though you're offering white glove that people are gonna notice that so I think especially if you're in one of those niche areas of luxury or very specific type of travel, you have to embody that. And that clip art logo or design that's just doesn't match that, is not going to help you convert anywhere. I dig it.

All right, so in different direction here, this is something that I've seen a few people test and I marked maybe on here, but I think it's worth discussing, which is the idea of forcing registration or forcing someone to actually make an account before they can potentially proceed with the booking process or start the booking process entirely. So again, I've seen this go positively according to some data that I've looked at and seeing this go very negatively according to some other data I looked at where basically the idea would be they're on your property detail page. They put in dates.

They said, okay, I like, you know, Main Street property 123. Let me go ahead and click the book now button. And then you say, great, give us your email and you can start the booking process. Sounds like you're great. My marketing brain kind of like some of those elements a little bit with respect to, hey, I'm going to get their email. I can then market to them if they don't make a reservation. They're filling up a list.

I could have my guest reservation team do follow up. So a lot of positives there, potentially, of course, if I can get their email, I want it. Certainly, if they opt into it, absolutely. But I've also seen some data where the drop off can be extreme with respect to, let's say, like we have clients who get roughly 10% conversion rate. That's pretty typical for people who actually go to the checkout page,

that actually complete the checkout page. Five to 10% might be pretty typical. We've had some people that have tested this sort of thing and see their conversion and checkout rates go to like two percent, three percent. So it just like craters it, you know, and they get the contact info of the two or 3% of people that start the process. And the meanwhile, they lose seven out of every 10 bookings they may have gotten because they just, they broke that trust a little bit too early.

So this is one where I kind of mark it as like test. I put tests and exclamation points on our, you know, show us what we put together here. But I think the idea of forcing registration too early, trying to overstep the information you asked for too early can certainly cause some pain and, you know, potentially hurt conversions. A lot of people might say, well, aren't you a big fan of email pop-ups? You know, isn't that kind of a forced registration of sorts? I don't disagree with that.

Like an email registration pop-up is a forced registration of sorts, but we're not allowing people to, or excuse me, we're not forcing people to give us our email in order to keep looking at the website or keep looking at the properties. That in my mind is more of this like forced registration idea, not like, hey, you're on a website, do you want my typical offer as like a promo code or do you wanna download a guide or something like that?

Give us your email and we'll send it to you. That's a different offer in my mind. That's more like trying to add value and they can just simply click close and keep using the website as is. But these forced ideas, I'm a little bit more, you know, careful of. And I think there's some upside there, but you just gotta be careful with it. I don't know if you ever tested these in your career and what your

thoughts are on forced registration. This is something we saw more in the hotel resort in type of side of things where more with the flag chains, but some just some of those independent as well. And the question I always usually posed to them was, what's more important, the membership, or inability to remarket or the conversion? And that was that was that was a conversation that it just made them think about the whole process more. Yeah, we want to be able to market to people down the road.

But at what cost are we going to be able to bring how many of those people that we are getting to that forced registration area are converting? Or how many are we converting in the remarketing efforts? And I think that's something that we have to think about that full funnel down the road. It's I didn't ever like it, but that's always what at least what I wanted to put it back on the individual property or anything like that was, OK, why are why are we doing this? Because X, Y, Z flag chain says we have to. OK, then we can't do anything like that was okay why are why are we doing this is because xyz flag chain says we have to okay then we can't do anything about that what is more important is membership in your list more important do you have more lifetime value there are you going to

have more lifetime value if they stay with you have a great experience and you're able to remarket that to them down the road so it's yeah i don't know well I'll say I sit in the middle there, but yeah, I don't, I'm not a big fan of it. Um, generally just in the reporting, I would say I've seen a 10 more trend downward. So that's kind of what I Yeah, I think that's ultimately the way to think about it is like all these things sometimes do take some testing and some budget to look at them and look at this for you and see what makes sense. But I think one thing we agree on this next one, I think we're pretty aligned on it, um, with respect to the idea itself, slow loading times. Now I did say there were some nuance in this one when we were kind of putting this together because a lot of people will, and there was this like trend for a little while, I saw it at VRMA and other events and things like that,

where people were getting up on stage and referencing studies and data. For example, Hey, every third of a second, we shaved off this loading time. Amazon or these large e-commerce websites are able to show a lift in conversions. I'm not necessarily disputing that data or that research. I've just, in my own experience since then, have not found that there's this linear improvement as you get down to these lower loading times.

So let me define that a little bit. Once you seem to get over three or four seconds of page loading time, I don't really seem to see any difference between trying to get faster than that. There's diminishing returns. It's kind of a classic idea that I have there. That being said, and you mentioned this well

in the outline, the pre-show that we were recording beforehand, if the website is so slow that people notice it, if they're like, man, I'm just waiting for this property gallery to load, I'm waiting for the search results to load, and so on and so forth, you're going to hurt your conversions for sure. So that number may be 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 seconds up in that range.

If things are that slow, then I think you're going to hurt conversion rates. But I don't think it's page speed at all costs. Like I have a client who kind of went down that path a little while ago. They were almost, I almost believe this is like a cult where people are just going to get obsessed with page loading times and they just like try to make them as low as possible, even at the expense of like chopping out tracking scripts and chopping out other stuff. I can't get on that board with that. If you're loading three or four seconds, I think you're fine. I don't think you're going to see much marginal gain or beneficial improvement by making them a little bit quicker.

But if you're loading in 10 seconds, it's going to be a crap shoot, in my experience, as far as actually getting people to book on your website directly. So you may have some data on this, and you spent some time working on these sites as well. What's your thoughts on page speed? It's the noticeable thing. Now, on the reporting side of things, we fought a lot from resource and lodges trying to get that referral to come through and trying to explain to people,

hey, if they have slow internet, if your website is loading at six seconds, seven seconds, plus analytics is coming on after that, yeah, the chances of us seeing an analytics session coming through are not great there. I mean, that's certainly something to consider here. Like your reporting does have some factors into the time of how everything loads. Now shouldn't be affecting it too much. But I think if you've got, this is one of the reasons to have Search Console in place, among many, many other reasons, is just to have an idea of where Google sees your site speed at. I don't think it should be the end all be all to optimize for page speed, but take into consideration that if someone is in an area that has maybe slightly slower speed, try

to access your site maybe via mobile device or something else in a lower internet speed area or something like that. If you do have high speed in your office or at your home or something like that, that might not be the best place to test. Maybe try to find somewhere where there is some slower speed just to see how your website is going to load on different devices and doing things like that. It's kind of tricky to do that, but I think that's something where it's gonna give you a better understanding. Again, I think it's one of those things where as marketers, we look so much at screens that

we forget about the mobile side of things. I think the other thing is that a lot of us work in places where we do have a lot of high speed internet and we don't have to worry about slow load times. So trying to put ourselves in the shoes of the average traveler who maybe has average speed and trying to figure out what the, how the website loads from there. I think, I think that's important to take into consideration at the very least. Yeah, no, that makes complete sense to me. I think the, um, the mobile thing is what I touched on earlier, just kind of go in that direction.

There's a huge difference in my mind between sort of passing a mobile responsive test and actually a user experience actually being made or set up properly for mobile, right? Look no different. Honestly, go to these social media platforms and look at how different the interface is, for example, on the iPhone, Facebook app or Twitter app or X, sorry, those types of apps versus how it looks on desktop. It's radically different. They don't just take the desktop version and then just compress it down and say, all right, we're going to put this in a menu and so on and so forth. There's like a completely different interaction kind of

differences and things like that. And of course, you would imagine these large social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram being the best example, have the best user experience people that money can buy, so to speak, right. And Basecamp is an app that we use for our project management tool. And even their mobile app has to have all the same functions as the desktop app. And it does, but it's organized completely differently. And they've chosen things to be set up

in a very different way. So a lot of mobile responsive design is that we take the desktop version, we kind of compress it down. All right, this will be under a menu. This will be over here, et cetera, et cetera. But it's not actually different. And I think that that's clear. You know, when you start to use some of these sites,

you find that getting to a filter, or we had one where when you would add in a dates, you'd put in dates, you click on that little date picker and the keyboard would open up and they're like, oh, it's a field you could type in the dates. I'm like, no one types in dates, you click on that little date picker and the keyboard would open up and they're like, oh, it's a, it's a field. You could type in the dates. I'm like, no one types in dates.

They just want to click it. And then they want to tap on the dates on their phone. And the, and the, then when they fix that, then what was happening is the calendar was loading and it was going to the right of the screen. So like you would tap on it and then like, you'd have to, you know, so it was just like, it didn't work kind of, but like you were just struggling your way through it, you know what I mean? To actually get it to work on your phone.

And it was pretty frustrating as a user. And I was like, I'm getting mad at this and this client is paying us money to like help the market their website. People that are just going on here to look for dates or vacation rental are not going to be, you know, not going to be there. So I think doing a UX test from that perspective, from the user experience standpoint, not putting it into the Google tools to tell you if it's mobile responsive or not. I'm sure any decent developer can get their website to pass mobile responsive. That's fine. But looking at it objectively and saying does a keyboard come up when it shouldn't? When I click on these

filters, and I add in two filters, for example, on the search results page, does the search button go away because that happened recently, where like you put in two filters, and then it pushed down the page to where the search button wasn't there. And I'm like, the search button just gone, like, you know, I can't find it. So anyways, I could go all day all day on that one. But I think there's this huge gap between mobile enabled or like, that's kind of the basics and actually optimized and set up well to work well on mobile. And I think you got to clear that cap as much as reasonably possible and work with your web team to make that as smooth and effortless as it can be when people are on mobile, because that probably is to your point earlier, the majority of your traffic, and we're very pigeonholed in our little world of spending a lot of time on computers computers when the person using that website at the end of the day is probably on a phone. You remember those good old days of M.DOT mobile sites. That was a thing of beauty back in the day.

It was almost more optimal in a way. You know, we almost went in the wrong direction. You know, because then it was like, oh, let's take one and make it the same. But they're not the same. Like, it's not the same thing. So the M.DOT thing was kind of like, you're right, it was a different era and there was like two different sites and crappy in a lot of ways, but it allowed you to like the freedom to like, okay, this is for a mobile phone. I'm going to break apart the notion that it's just, I'm taking this and compressing it down. So I interrupted you, sorry, but I don't know.

It's not the worst. It's not the worst frame of thing. So before I got into the marketing space, I didn't know UI UX. Those terms didn't mean anything to me. And I think that's the, like it is, we focus so much on the UI, the user interface. We want to see something that's pretty, that's clean,

that looks nice, that does, has all the bells and whistles. Forget about the UX. And I think that's, it's another blindness we get to there. And just because it works over here, people aren't going to use it the same way that they, you know, they use devices that different. I mean, that's, people do. Look at user habits. We can clearly see that that's the case.

So I think it is. It may look pretty. Just make sure you're doing that on the UX side of things. And make sure that the experience that the anticipated experience that you're trying to have on desktop is mirrored as closely as possible, however you need to do that, so you're increasing now, ultimately increasing that conversion rate here as with everything else we're doing.

But that's the key. Look at the UX. Don't just look at the UI. Pretty is not always functional and functional need not always be pretty, but in our case it probably should be. Usually there's some correlation, but I think it's, you know, we have clients who are so obsessed with like a clean, minimalistic look. People say, oh, I want it clean.

I want it simple and so on and so forth. That's fine. But I'm more of the school of thought of like, make it as simple as it can be, but no simpler. And there's certainly people who will chop out important bits along the way. And that can certainly happen on mobile where it's like, oh, let me just make this as small as possible. It needs to fit on a four inch screen, right? Like that's different.

Yes, that's different. But it doesn't mean that we should chop out things that really matter, or we should hide things that make it tough for people to use it. So we could beat that one up all day, but you get the point, right? Testing on mobile is critically important. Yeah. For sure.

This is like almost a pet peeve I threw in here just for fun. The search remembers where you are was what I put in the outline, which sounds simple, but what I'm on a proper, a vocational website on the search results page. So I put in dates, I put in certain criteria, and then I click to a property.

When I go back to that property, on like when I go back to the search results page, it should remember where I'm at. Nothing more annoying than me personally, when I'm searching, I go back to the search results and my order gets changed while I looked at these five homes already, why are you showing me those five again and so on and so forth. All the big sites do this well.

I get it's not the easiest thing to solve, and I know because we've tried to solve this on our own side of things with our developers. It is tricky, but it is critical in my mind. There's nothing worse than just like, again, that clunkiness feeling. And that's how I feel, clunky is the word I feel when I do search results, go to a property page,

come back to the search results, and everything's all jumbled up again. And I don't know what I looked at. Super frustrating for me personally. It's more clicks. Anytime you're including more clicks in the ultimate conversion, and more clicks is to refilter everything.

So you're further complicating it. And at some point people aren't gonna wanna go back and select those same filters that they had before. They're probably gonna try a different site where they can find better filters that stick through the whole booking time. I think anytime you're adding more clicks, you're just increasing the likelihood

that someone's gonna drop off and you're gonna lose that conversion. So. Yeah, a hundred percent. So we'll go in a different direction here. More talking about the booking process itself. to drop off and you're going to lose that conversion. So, yeah. 100%. So we'll go in a different direction here. More talking about the booking process itself. So fees and what Paul and I were joking about

before we record today was like, no one wants your fees, man. Like people don't want the fees. Now I get there for a reason. And I've been like a proponent in the past for adding fees on there. Certainly we've had a discussion recently, I believe about, you know, if a guest is willing to pay Airbnb 12%,

if it's under that model, then why are they opposed to paying you 8%? The answer is they're not opposed to paying you 8%. If you're delivering the same type of service and professional management that you might be if you were listening to this, I would imagine you deliver on those things. So not not saying remove fees, although to be honest with you, you can remove a fee, and you don't need that fee, or there's a way to make it, you know, more

efficient, or like, make it more like baked into your nightly rate and not have to have a separate line item, I think you should do that to be clear. You can remove a fee. Now, if that harms your business model and the structure of you actually building your business, then you probably shouldn't remove the fee. But explain the fee. We've noticed some very positive tests and we have gone through down this rabbit hole with a larger client a few times now, and we've refined the copy around the fee significantly.

And that does seem to have a meaningful difference. So instead of calling it what a lot of clients might call like an admin fee or reservation fee, sometimes it's fixed, sometimes it's a percentage, but no one likes that fee. Like they're just, they already don't like, they already know that when they're booking a short term rental vacation on a property, they're going to see fees. And the more they see, the more like, you know, their blood starts to just boil a little bit. That doesn't mean they won't book like again, they probably will in many cases, statistically speaking, but explain it. You know, like Airbnb does a good job of explaining their fee.

This fee allows us to provide 24-7 customer service for your stay. We can go down a rabbit hole with the quality of that customer service, but you know, you call or you message Airbnb, there's someone there who can respond to message you back in some reasonable timeframe for that caller message. So they explain the fee. And people have used Airbnb before have seen that, that service be there for them in some cases, hey, a door code, hey, my host isn't responding,

hey, this bad thing happened. Again, we could go down a rabbit hole of what that actually means for the professional property manager, but we'll save that for a different episode. And not explaining the fee, I think is the mistake here, that's the conversion killer. If you explain the fee and charge as little

as you possibly can to make it clear what they are for, our data tells us that's going to help your conversion significantly. I think that's ultimately it. We've now become accustomed to paying fees. I think that's unfortunate, but that's the reality of the consumer is that we know there are some convenience fees and some surcharges that need to happen. I mean, if we're talking about sports tickets and stuff like that, $100 in service fees on a $100 ticket, that's like, we have brainwashed ourselves into thinking this is a good idea. So clearly we're willing to do it if the value on the end of it is right there. And I

think that's the thing, that clear, concise messaging and making sure that people understand that yes, this is what this fee is for. This is what, you know, this shouldn't be a, ooh, gotcha moment of why am I paying $80? No, this is what it's for. Making sure that messaging is on brand with everything else you're doing, and we're gonna transition that right into that being, I mean, copywriting and professional messaging

across your website. It really is so important. We have all been on that website where the descriptions are thin, skimpy, or just not very representative of what this property is actually delivering. Certainly just the overall content writing on the website is very important generally on an SEO side of things, But where are the biggest pet peeves you see, Conrad, for the copywriting and professionalism side of things? I think it's a clarity thing.

I was picking at the SEO pieces when we were putting this outline together, because obviously that does matter. If your homepage headline says, book our vacation rentals, that's not going to help from an SEO perspective if you're trying to rank for San Diego vacation rentals, for example. But it's also disorienting to the guest, right?

Like there's there's a reason that Google evaluates a web page based on the text on it. It's because that's how people get to a web page and they know what it's about. Right. They know what they're looking at, so to speak. So you and I've been critical of people in our industry that launch these websites like left and right. And that's awesome. But they do no effort whatsoever on the copywriting and even on the homepage. Never mind the about us page and some of the deeper pages.

But just having like a clear h1 tag that just describes like what your value prop is, what do you actually offer? What location are you in? Like wild that we have people that launch these websites nowadays and they had one h1 excuse me, the headline on the page will be something to the effect of again, like stay in the most clean, comfortable vacation rentals in the world or something ridiculous. It's like where like you probably aren't everywhere like you're

probably in one location. So there's a little bit of SEO play but that's not really my when's like where like you probably aren't everywhere like you're probably in one location So there's a little bit of SEO play but that's not really my when I look at it I don't think like oh this person is harming their SEO because you really don't have any like organic search traffic coming in every once While they do but it's more about just like orient the guests so they know that you are what you say You are you have a clear value proposition You can deliver on whatever you're gonna say try to as you get deeper down the page try to you know communicate that Messaging and the way you word things, you know, the guest looks at pictures and so on and so forth, they do. Yeah, but they're going to skim. They're going to read certain information

and you want every word to be buttoned up so that when they skim and read that piece that they are interested in, and guest number one might have a different objection to booking with you directly versus guest number three, and that's fine. The guest number three might be worried more about the fees. For example, going to our last point, guest number one might be worried more about what's your cancellation policy, whatever it is, though, it all needs to be thought of. And I think taking copy or, you know, writing and just, you know, pushing it down to an intern, pushing it down to someone low inside your company, I think is a mistake that a lot of our clients have made over the years. And just sitting down

and like, here's a good one. They'll tell a story here really quickly. What this client who I think listens to the podcast, so he may know who I'm talking to. But we took a copy from his website, copy and pasted it and put it into a Facebook ad and then launch that Facebook ad. And he didn't like the copy on the Facebook ad. And he said, Where'd you get that copy from? And I said, it's on your homepage. And I screenshotted it. And he and I joke around. So it was kind of a friendly sort of thing. But he was like, Oh, like, I don't like that. And it's like, well, let's

go back to your homepage really quickly. And let's say, Yes, we'll fix the Facebook ad. I'm happy to do that. But like, let's this is what you're showing to, you know, 5000 people a month that are coming to your homepage. Let's go through it and make sure that you love that messaging and that it represents you accurately. And we were able to make some changes and now all as well in Facebook ad and homepage world. But yeah, going through and reviewing those pieces occasionally with respect to the copy on fees or with

respect to the checkout copy with respect to about us about our company, the property descriptions you picked those earlier, all these words do matter. And I think skipping over them or trying to do them very inexpensively or trying to just click an AI button and just copy and paste that put on the website, I think is a road to kind of a crappy website that's not going to convert well. So I think investing more into and it's not I'm not saying investing in a company or an agency just like your time like think think thoughtfully about the words that

you're putting on the page, I think will make a meaningful difference the number of conversions you're gonna get my experience. So you got one more Paul to bring us home. This was an action packed episode. But yeah, you want to go down anything else on copywriting and then bring us home with your your final message to the listener? Well, it is I'll kind of I'll bring bring it down just to the owner side for a second there on the copywriting and then bring it back down to the owner and the guest side. It just like I

mean, we do we have have people who are trying to manage in multiple areas, obviously. And I think it's that same thing of stay in the finest properties in where? Same thing. Like you have to, if you're managing multiple locations, especially, tell people where you're managing homes. That is so important because if they're coming to a page

that just says vacation rental management, short term rental management, Airbnb management, that's not, they know Airbnb management, that's not that is that's that's not something that's going to that they need to know where it is and especially and you'll probably see a boost in conversion rates. Yeah, you probably see a significant boost in conversion rates where it says vacation rental management in I'll just a fake line one is in Breckenbridge and then they manage and tell you that so like you're you want your tell you write keywords to go to the

tell you write page you want your Breckenbridge keywords and tell you that. So like you want your Telluride keywords to go to the Telluride page. You want your Breckenridge keywords and postcards, et cetera, to go to the Breckenridge page. One page probably can't do the job in many cases. And I think that that's the key. It is one of those that we just, you just have to make sure you're being very diligent. I think people, even on the owner side, are probably a little more concerned

about the professional messaging because when we see them actually reviewing those pages, they are, they're reading the the USPs that you're putting out there. They're they're going through the content They're probably to a greater degree than I see on some booking record You know booking session recordings where people are kind of looking through the property description But more image based certainly people want to see the value that you're actually delivering on the homeowner side of things So I think that that's something that anything you can do to make it as clear as possible,

you know, take time to do that right and Conrad put it put it perfectly that don't just let anybody write that content. Make sure that whoever is writing that content, maybe someone's gonna help, you know, maybe it's a collaborative team effort or wherever that is, but make sure you understand the value of what you're doing, you know, On the booking side, on the guest side, on the owner side, put the value into the content because that will pay itself off on the quality of the website traffic you're seeing. And I'm both the owner and the guest side. When in doubt, just keep it simple. Do it, do it. Keep it simple, do the kiss system. I think more often we want more complexity because we think it's in because we think the end user wants more complexity

They want to be prettier bigger nicer all these things, you know If your form isn't converting consider removing a field on the form If you have people are getting stuck in specific areas take that part of it out remove the obstacles remove the barriers You know, we we don't need to put in artificial barriers, there's already going to be things that are going to stop a either a homeowner or potential guest from booking with you. Do not manufacture potential roadblocks here. Hopefully everything we're talking about here is things that we can avoid. But when in doubt, yeah, try to keep it simple, because that is going to make the process easier for a homeowner to fill out a form for you for a guest to potentially

book a room with you. So No, that's that's perfect. When you put that in the outline to finish, I thought that was a great finisher. But the example we just came up with on the fly is a perfect, I guess, like my counter to that is yes, I agree. And the logic should be keep it as simple as possible, but some no simpler. And I think the landing page example, we just said a minute ago is a perfect example. It is simpler to use one landing page for all your traffic.

If you were trying to advertise a vacation rentals and tell you ride and Breckenridge that is simpler. However, your conversion rate will be worse by having one page try to do the job of what is actually a job for two pages. So that's a perfect example, because all this stuff is nuance. All this conversion stuff we're talking about does have some nuance to it.

And this is why the marketing professional that you're working with, whether it's an agency, whether it's someone on your team, whether it's you, if you're the owner of the company, I still think that marketing is one of your core responsibilities, that is the way that you drive new business into this world. The properties are great. You can make them, you know, make the owners happy. That's great. But the owners aren't going to stick with you if you're not marketing

and putting heads in beds. And so ultimately I think that idea of like, keeping it simple, removing friction where possible, but there's always a period where you can't make it any simpler. And that's kind of where I think you wanna get to. And then I think you can find a lot of success in that zone. We have clients that are,

I think I have relatively simple businesses that do a really great job at the basic things. And they just take it very seriously and they do a great job at the cleaning, at the marketing, at the housekeeping, turning the the properties over, inspections, you know, maintaining the properties. None of it's easy, but it's all right in front of them and they do a great job at it. And that's the kind of client that we certainly like working with. So also a little bit of a longer run today, but I think a pretty meaty episode, we were kind of able to dive in and

go through the outline, I think pretty effectively. So conversion killers that are hurting your direct book in progress. So do the opposite of all the things we just said not to do, Do the things that you should do and you're going to get a lot more success with your business. One thing that we want success with is more people listening to The Heads and Beds Show. So to do that, we need more reviews. Go to your podcast app of choice. You can go to iTunes, Spotify. That's where we get the most downloads.

Click five stars. Takes you like five seconds. Not even five seconds, honestly. Once you have the app open, you just click it. You can write a review. You don't even have to write a review just by clicking five stars on iTunes or Spotify. It helps more people listen to the show, and then Paul and I can keep bringing you awesome episodes.

So we thank you for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode, and you have a great rest of your day.