Heads In Beds Show - Designing for Conversion: Best Practices For Vacation Rental Websites

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

In this episode of The Heads In Beds Show, Paul and Conrad talk all things conversions: getting more bookings, driving more leads and reviewing your website to find the friction points that stop direct bookings from growing. ⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagram🚀 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 Head to Med show presented by Buildup Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacation properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All righthost Paul. All right, Paul. Good morning. How's it going? What's going on?

I'm hoping to stay in this relative air. It's the weather is not going to be good in Minnesota. This is people are listening to the future. So tell them if something happened to you what happened. That's right. I'm hoping what happened is we have so this was a big blow over and then all the weather gurus and the weather terrorism was overblown. But we are. And Minnesota is supposed to get some pretty crazy spring shower weather, tornado. I don't know how it's going to end up. Hopefully we've avoided, you know, I got a knock on some wood, like snow blizzards, anything like that. It's warm enough. We should be able to avoid that. But yeah, it's looking a little dicey. So we're gonna batten down the hatches a little bit this afternoon and hope that everything stays in

one place. I can tell you all my sports balls that were flying around that could be projectiles, they're all in the garage now. So that's good. How are you doing, sir? Hopefully a little better than that. Yeah, weather's fine. I was going to ask you any final words. In the off chance, the unlikely chance this is the last recording, I just didn't know if you had anything particularly notable that you wanted to say. Go Wolves.

So go Wolves. That's a well-ended. Oh, man. All good. No, no. Things are all good on my side of things here. Nothing to complain about. No extreme weather that I'm aware of, at least.

Hopefully nothing comes up and pops me in the side of the head, as it were. Honestly, just playing a lot of AI tools lately, and that's kind of been the theme for a little while now, but really getting into certain things. What I'm trying to figure out is how can I build like every step of the journey could be accompanied with a prompt. So kind of working that idea. I don't know if I've fully dialed in there yet, but we're actually not really doing an AI episode today.

It's just like leaks into every conversation. You know, it's like that awkward cousin you have at a family dinner, like Thanksgiving dinner, who just like, you're having a conversation with this person, then they just kind of come in and start talking. That's what AI feels like. It's just like omnipresent and always there, even if you kind of don't want it there. So that's the nature of how things go nowadays. But yeah, today, you know, speaking of things that are fun and engaging, getting more conversions is fun and engaging. So we kind of wanted to revisit this topic. We've done similar things in the past.

I don't know if you exactly had this precise title, but it's probably worth a refresher, even if we did something somewhat similar in the past, because I've got a lot more data recently. I'm sure you've gotten a lot more data recently or been exposed to more sites, and you kind of come up with new ideas or new concepts around really why conversions are probably

one of the most important reasons for your long-term sustained success when it comes to your own business. You can have a website built out that gets traffic. You and I are very skilled at driving traffic. We can do SEO. We can send emails out to a list. We can run paid advertising and get visibility to the site. But what matters, not for 30 days or 60 days or 90 days, what matters for the lifetime of that, your success getting more direct bookings, is actually get people to convert. So that's kind of where I want to start today, is all about conversion. What's kind of your recent read on this? Have you changed your opinion on some of these topics recently as it comes to conversion and design, or where do you

stand at the moment on that? I wouldn't say I've changed my thought process or anything like that. Once again, it's easy to focus on the traffic because that's it should be a leading indicator of success of the website If and the caveat being if the website is well designed or has the right is optimized for conversions I've probably more recently been Exposed to some of these high traffic websites that when I look at them I can pretty I can I look at them, I can pretty, I can start to understand,

oh, I think this is probably a lower converting site than would be standard in the industry here. And sure enough, when you dig into the analytics, that's what you see. I think that traffic is important. I mean, you can't get the conversions without the traffic. You can't score the goal without shooting the shot. But at the same time There's something to be said, you know on the owner side

We focused a lot on getting the right traffic to these pages and I think there's there's something to that But the volume game is still a good game to play on the traveler side as long as you've got a site that converts So I think that it's, whether it's maybe the path being too long, maybe too many clicks going from spot to spot. We're gonna talk about a lot of the hitting points of where people can miss on the conversion side of things. But I think the other side of it is that it's kind of difficult for us to control that as well

because of the webs, you know, you do control some websites where you're doing the work on the back end there, but in a lot of cases we're working with an ICND or a track or you know any of these other providers who are, they're gonna have some limitations, they're gonna be able to do some things that you really want to do. So being able to kind of take what they can do and take what we know does help in conversions. Hopefully is going to help people put together some better performing landing pages, property

description, property pages, websites, all these things. So I'm excited to have the conversation. I think this is really important because, right, you hit the nail on the head. What we do is get people to the website. But if the website isn't converting, how can we recommend informed decisions that are really gonna help the website perform better? Yeah, I think ultimately it's kind of like, we do a lot of analogies and I do a lot of analogies and sales and things like that. And the analogy that makes the most sense here,

and I generally don't like this one, but I think it's a fair way to think about it, is this idea of it's a leaky bucket or a leaky funnel, if you will. Or it could be a leaky bucket too. But the reason I like the funnel analogy is that a funnel, what it implies is that whatever you pour in the top of funnel makes the way to the bottom. And that's not really how a vacation rental website works at all. It's a funnel with a bunch of holes in it. So like as you're pouring things in, like people are leaving and not coming back. So anything you can do to kind

of plug those holes, I think is always a valuable tie in or valuable piece of the puzzle. And something's very obvious. Like one of the things we look at right away, for example, when we do our audits, is not even necessarily the design elements, how it looks, but how does it actually feel to operate from a speed perspective? Which there was a brief period there where people, I think, got very speed obsessed because it was something

that Google talked about at length. Went the website too fast, went the web too fast. And that was something that they would say pretty much ad nauseum. And then I think we all reached a point where it's like, I think you can get to good enough on speed. But I'll tell you what, if you're on the wrong side of that coin, if you're not good enough on speed, it's very noticeable, and it really harms your conversion rates. You know, people are having a hard time going from page to page if the load to get properties back once they put in date searches

is more than a few seconds, like people don't really have a ton of patience there. Like they'll give you some level of leeway. But if you don't have it tied in there, you know a big thing for me. So some of these things we notice, not even as a matter of like, it's black or white, it has to be this speed or this other speed. That's what a PageSpeed Insight type tool will tell you. You put it in there and they'll tell you, oh, you're over under this kind of somewhat arbitrary mark. But if you put it in there and your site's loading in 14 seconds, you're absolutely losing people because of that, that's for sure. Now, should you do everything possible and do everything in your power to get down three seconds?

I don't think so necessarily that you need to obsess about it to get to that lower level. But I do think you have to get it to where it feels snappy, it's fast enough, it's good enough to be a high-performing website from a speed standpoint because you absolutely will have issues from there. What's your tie-in today on speed or how do you think about speed as it relates to conversion at the moment? I think the focus on speed came from Google putting it as a factor in the SEO side of things. But that's not the

important part. I think it is we get sucked into it on the sucked into the conversation on the SEO side. Well, fast page speed that will help your SEO. And that's kind of how a lot of those initial conversations came down. But it's a much bigger lever to pull on the actual conversion side because yes, we've all been on those websites that sit and load and load and load. And that might not even be on the property landing pages or anything like that. You may be talking about on the homepage or it's one of your main navigation pages. So that homepage has to be as speedy as possible. And I think it is, it's one of those things that everybody likes the video,

everybody likes the big images and everything like that. Those are great. But if they're slowing the overall speed of the site down, probably not worth the visual because it is, if someone can't see it, they're gonna bounce before they even get there anyway. So on the speed side of things, you can definitely be too slow. Speed is, I think there is some relative nature to that,

of making sure that it's equal on the desktop and the mobile side. There are some times where we see the desktop side work just fine, but the mobile is much slower, which as we'll talk about a little later, that's definitely not where you wanna have the traffic being slow. But again, just having all eyes on that

and understanding, hey, you may be, again, we've talked about this before too. You may be in an office where the internet is much more high speed. You may be in an office where the highest internet is much more high speed You may be in a different location where it's much lower speed Trying to kind of test in different areas and with with some different internet speeds I think that's important to really get a better feel for How fast your site really is and and the other side kind of taking it into anognito tab too, because there is some caching that happens with these websites as well. So if you've opened it once,

well yeah, it's going to open a little quicker the second time and a little quicker the third time and do things like that. So anything you can do to do those little small speed tests and see what is the actual speed, Google does the page speed insights, you can do that. But I sometimes think that even that the server, you may be going to direct server route, that's gonna be different than the average user. So testing for speed and trying to test different objects for speed, I think it's really important and ensuring that you do, you have a website

that can convert it at that higher level. Yeah. And I don't know if you said mobile there, maybe we can go into mobile, because I think it ties into exactly what you're talking about and I'm guilty of this as much as anybody. So I'm saying this almost to remind myself, which is that I'm sitting here all day on this computer,

on this laptop. I mean, it's hooked up to this whole setup, but you know, it's a laptop. And I tend to look at my own website and our clients' websites a lot of the time through this lens, but this is not how the guest experiences. And in fact, 70% in some cases, 60%, you know, depends on the client, depends on the location, all those kinds of things.

But the majority in almost every client site that we look at is getting the most of their traffic through mobile. So you've got to do everything you described, bang on, absolutely. Then you got to redo it all again on your phone. I go through the homepage, go through the search fields, go through all those things because it's common, you's common that we'll see little things that look fine on a desktop, you get down to a phone, it doesn't work well.

Like just some things that come to mind, like these banner bars, any sort of banner. And I'm a big fan of the banners. I think they can work well. I don't think you want a banner in perpetuity. I think you want a banner that comes up and then maybe leaves for a while, like a visitor, not someone that just lives with you forever.

That's not as appealing. I don't want my banner to be a roommate that I just have to live with. But I do think that the banners can make a lot of sense for promotional ideas. But if you make them so that they're a certain huge size on desktop, then they get collapsed down to mobile and they're taking up a third of the screen.

And even worse, they can't be swiped away or dismissed or anything like that. That's super annoying. And that happens sometimes when you bring it to mobile testing. One thing that happens a lot, I don't know if you experienced this one. This is one I see the most on client sites

or when I look at different PMS platforms, the keyboard is wrong. I'm opening up a date search and I'm getting a keyboard. I don't want that. Or you go to the checkout page. This is one that's on our audit list, for example. And I open up the phone number field, for example. Let's say you need my phone number, logical, or the credit card field.

You should show me a keypad with the numbers that I could punch in for my credit card number. Instead, what I often get is the full letter keyboard where I don't need that to enter in a phone number or a credit card number. So these little things, and someone listening may be like, ah, does it really matter? Someone wants to book, they're gonna book. It does matter because it's kind of like,

I guess I think of it like, imagine driving a car, but there's like these little speed bumps that you know you're hitting along the way. At some point, if you go down that road long enough and you hit like 25 speed bumps, you're basically just gonna say, forget it. I don't wanna ever go on this road anymore again. So it's like, it's sometimes I think with this UI UX stuff, it's like death by

1000 cuts, which is why we'll make improvements to a client site, like we may do an audit and then give them all these ideas we're talking about today. And then like, nothing may change right away. Like in fact, you may have lost some customers that you would have gotten anyways, then the next like 30 days after you really don't see this massive change. But then like with enough volume, with enough traffic over time, whether it's mobile desktop, all these little things that add up, you start to see that conversion rate slide up mobile, desktop, all these little things that add up, you start to see that conversion rate slide up a little bit, at least on key actions that matter.

I think one thing that can happen from time to time too, whether it's mobile traffic, desktop traffic, whatever the case may be, is you get more traffic over time. And sometimes your conversion rate, if you look at it overall, will dip a little bit. You see a little bit less visibility coming in. Now it usually means that you're getting a lot more traffic and your conversion rate isn't dipping that bad.

You're making a lot more, you know, so the overall volume is increasing drastically. But, you know, it's not uncommon for us to see that, especially if a site starts to get a lot more traffic to informational content, blog content, that sort of thing. Their overall site conversion rate will fall, even if the actual flow that we're focused on works well on desktop and mobile.

But what's kind of your experience, I guess, whether it's mobile specific or just kind of some of those broader comments on growth? Yeah, I mean, I think that mobile keyboards thing is so important. I mean, even when you're entering your phone number, when you're obviously doing anything relating to a credit card number, you're putting in 15, 16 numbers.

So doing it on the little QWERTY keyboard up top with, I'm sorry, I got huge fat fingers here. Me too. That's gonna frustrate you. So I think that's a really big one. And those payment integrations, you know, being able to implement or use Google integrate with Apple Pay, with Google Pay, people have gotten become so accustomed to being able to do that, that it is, you know, if they don't have to type in those

16 numbers, boy, that's even a step that makes it even that more efficient to get them to actually check out there. So I think that those are things that I think at Darm, people were starting to talk about when we took our first payment through crypto. That's a whole other conversation. But again, as we're moving into a more modern world with, you know, there's more people taking that as a payment option. I probably wouldn't do Venmo or PayPal right off the bat, but there are some ways that you can integrate some more payment options in there.

Obviously you want everything to be secure. Obviously you want everything to come out at the end, in the wash at the end of the month and everything like that. But if that is, if you think that you have a younger target demographic that is more mobile pay friendly, maybe something to consider if you haven't done it previously. I again, I don't know what the costs are for those integrations behind the scenes and that's

going to make sense for you on the parts and labor side of things. But I really do think that making sure that people can pay through the mode that they want to pay is Really important there and then they can do it quickly again making sure we've got the right keypads and the keyboards and being able to have a Frictionless checkout flow so we can kind of kind of just jump into that here as well I'm kind of looking at that checkout page, you know, where do we want? Well, you know, what do we want to have on there? We want to have trust badges on there. That's something that we talked about the SSL being a scary thing.

If someone doesn't have that, well, having those trust badges of, I'm on verbal, I'm a super host, I'm this, I'm that. In every outline, I kind of ran through Gemini and everything like that. They said, well, put Verma on there, put things like that. I think that's good. I don't think it maybe is as important to the traveler that you're a member of Verma. Maybe on the owner's side of things. We'll talk about that a little bit more. But I do, I think having the super host, having anything on the booking side that people would find valuable, that's the trust and validation there. I think at the same time, the trust of a third party review doesn't have to be in the checkout, nope. But they should have seen it at some point

before they get to that checkout as well there. Sticky summary for the booking details. That's something that people want, if they're making, in most cases, these are not small ticket purchases. So we wanna make sure that we have all the details kinda coming through. As far as a conversion rate auto saving the form, that is something that is probably a little more driven by the PMs I would

say. So that's something you know it is if your PMS is able to do that awesome. If not I don't think it's the reason to change PMS is by any means but definitely something that's gonna help overall help overall in the long term there. And the visual card input cues, I've seen those. They kind of scare me a little bit, I'm not gonna lie. Having my card flash up visually on the screen, I know that's, you know, it makes sure that I'm typing the right numbers and I see everything there, but what do you, I guess, what do you see? Have you seen that be an improvement on the conversion

rate side of things? Have you seen it often? I've seen it a handful of times. But what does that look like for you? And what are some other things on the guest checkout side of things that you think help improve that? I think on the checkout, one thing maybe you didn't say, I haven't seen a massive improvement

with any sort of visual card type of aesthetic. One thing that matters quite a bit, though, that I don't think you got to that matters in our testing is that when you do have a form error, that stuff is not reset. So one of the highest or the most frustrating, I would say, check out bounces that you're ever going to get is when someone fills out the form, but they make a little mistake. Oh, they put in their credit card number one number off. They put a four when they meant to put a three. And then they click book, book now. They click it and you number one number off. They put a four when they meant to put a three and then they click book, book now they click it and you see this in like clarity recordings.

I can't see the numbers, but I just see like what the, and then they get an error and the whole thing resets. That's the, that kills conversions for sure. Like having to reenter the data and they actually start to not trust you. Even if it was their mistake. I've noticed that with some of our testing is they, even when they get a call, they're just like, I think there's probably the website, you know, and it's just like, no, like you put it in your card number wrong.

That was the actual problem. But, um, you know, that can that any moment of doubt when someone has a credit card in their hand is the worst thing we want them to like, be, you know, dialed in. And I could do one minute on trust badges, because there's a lot of people in our space that say that. And I think it makes sense. The problem with trust badges in general is that trust makes sense if I if the guest understands what the trust is, like, there's a large like trust based organization, you know, that I see marketing all the time on LinkedIn and they say, hey, we verify listings and stuff like that. And that's like a good idea, don't get me wrong,

but the guest doesn't know that brand. So if the guest doesn't know that brand, they see that, hey, I've been verified, I've been certified by company ABC or company XYZ, whatever the case might be in that scenario. It doesn't resonate with them because they don't actually know who that is. Now, if it's like, I'll give you an example,

like a Michelin star has entered the parlance of our culture to where if I said, this is a restaurant with a Michelin star or multiple Michelin stars, you would assume the food's really good. You would assume it's a really high-end premium dining experience. That's something where it's like a trust badge from like, I've been awarded Michelin star is inherently a positive thing. No such thing exactly I think precisely exists for vacation rentals. In the guest mind. I know there's a lot of people in our space on the homeowner property management layer who have built products or built services

that are tied around this concept. But again, I don't think that the guest knows those things very well. Just your average everyday person that's booking a vacation rental. IPRA comes to mind, the 100 collection comes to mind, a bunch of things come to mind. But again, those are not things that people know. If anything, I would make the case that Airbnb has done this on their own website recently with, I was talking about this, about this with the client just the other day. Guest favorite is like kind of like your bronze medal, or maybe it's like even one click below the bronze medal. Then you have super host, which is if anything, more of like a host level thing. But again, it shows up on your listing, people would see that. So those are kind of like confidence maybe

that the guest would have that like you're good at what you do. If you have a guest favorite badge and you have a super host badge, they're like feeling a little bit more positive. But then these new tags that they have, there's three actually additional things that come to mind on Airbnb specifically. There's a top 10% home category,

a top 1% home category. And then there's, it's like often booked or almost always booked tag that you'll see on Airbnb. And I was showing a client of mine, we went into his destination, we put up a no date search in his market, started clicking and I was like, look, almost everyone on the first page has guest favor. About three or four listings on the first page have a little trophy icon. One of them had the top 1% and then two or three others have that top 10% badge. All the ones with trophies, little

badges there had a rarely available tag when you put in dates, travel dates on there. So I'm like, that's what you're looking for, right? Is like this kind of stacking of proof of like, this is one of the top 1% homes, like that is really great copy from Airbnb, give credit where credit's due. Because when you see that on a page, like you feel really confident in that scenario, like, oh, there's thousands of listings on Airbnb. Well, there's millions if you count for everything. But in this market, this is one on top 1%. That makes you feel like you're about to get something really awesome. I don't know if most property managers are willing to do something like that, where they're actually willing to admit that they

have winners and they have dogs. It seems to be sort of this unspoken thing that most of our clients kind of deal with, which is this idea that no, like we'll never really frame a property in a negative light. Whereas the OTA platform can be a little bit more detached from that outcome and say, like, if you put a bad listing on our site, we have no problem removing it. We have no problem taking it off our site because they see the platform as the thing to protect. You see, if you put a bad listing on our site, we have no problem removing it, we have no problem taking it off our site, because they see the platform as the thing to protect, you see if you're a property manager, the revenue as the thing to protect the money that coming in from that property. So kind of a kind of battle there on that side.

But I think you asked about credit card fields, and I went very off topic there. But I don't know if you have any reactions on that before we go to the next bit. I mean, as a consumer, those are the things you know, those are the call outs that called me to if I'm on as a consumer, those are the things, those are the call-outs that called me to. If I'm on just a shopping site or something like that, like if I'm on eBay looking for deals, if I see something that's a hot auction

or I see something like this, I'm gonna look a little closer at it. There's those visual cues. I mean, I think that's where the design side of things of this is really important. It really does get into how can you catch someone's eyes? How can you interrupt the flow and pattern? It's not social media marketing, but it's kind of taking some of those best practices and saying, whoa, what is it that's going

to legitimize or what is it that's going to call attention or what is it? Is it the CTAs? Is it the urgency and scarcity of the button bar? I mean, is it the content you're using to write? I think there are so many things that kind of play into the whole conversion rate that that's why we do, we can look at it from a lot of different areas and say, okay, so from the homepage specifically, we have these three areas that you need to have in order to inspire confidence, create clarity,

and to direct you to a faster search, or hopefully getting them down the funnel a little faster there. So each individual business, and that's why it is, I mean, we work with a lot of these individual businesses. If we tried to roll this out universally across all the websites, it wouldn't work, because everybody's targeting different types of travelers,

different types of homeowners, everybody is in different types of travelers, different types of homeowners. Everybody is in different markets where there's different value propositions. You've got different people who are traveling for different ways. And I think that it does, it makes it, I saw an article on, I don't even remember where now, but we've come to a point where micro-targeting, we may be kind of going too far into that and over personalizing some of this marketing for some people. So we do, we want to make sure that we're giving people that the streamline process,

the easiest possible way to get from point A to point B and ultimately get down that booking funnel and find the property that they're looking for. We talk about that a lot as well as that, you know, we can we can make this process as seamless as we think is possible. But ultimately, if the property isn't doesn't have the images doesn't have the amenities doesn't have the categories that a traveler wants, we are going to see lower conversion rates there. So that's I mean, that's the part that we can't control, obviously. But William, what are your thoughts there? Well, I think you bring up a good point at the end there,

right? What can you control? Well, can't can't we control? And there's certain things that I think, again, this is an uncomfortable truth, but one that I've encountered a lot over the last, you know, maybe a year or so, and then more so recently, which is the idea of like, you chose what homes came into your program, right? Like, you didn't have to take that home. So in the moment, you took that home, and you moment that you took on that responsibility of marketing that property, we

now have to deal with it from like a promotional standpoint. And if you know it's a dog, and we all know it's a dog, and it's not going to perform well, then it's like, yeah, like, why are we trying to prop up a loser? You know, why are we spending effort, energy, money, time, etc. to try to get a home bookings that really doesn't isn't going to book for very much when it does book, right? That's the battle. And I think it's kind of this like misalignment that occurs, right? And that's where conversions I think you'll like, let's be honest, right? Paul, you and I can fix every conversion issue there is in the guest marketing side of things, list every property for a dollar per night, we'll sell out a hundred percent occupancy, we'll convert like mad, we'll have people lined

up around the block to come book with us, you know, book a thousand dollar a night place for a buck a buck per night, and we'll do very well for ourselves. So obviously that the battle is always. And this is where the data comes into play to your point. We had to find the balance point between where the data kind of says what we should be doing, the pricing experts, which I am not, I'd meant a pricing expert, although it's something that I'm trying to learn more about

and compare that with the traffic we have coming in and how people are reacting to it. That's the unique thing about pricing in our space, which is that people react to your pricing. But our pricing all the time, the people are seeing it and they're kind of reacting to it. Positively, negatively, we're getting bookings, we're not getting bookings.

And in theory, the value they see is the summation of everything that they experience about the property, the photos they see, the reviews they see, the trust they have in booking direct with you, certainly, like we talked about a few minutes ago, the way the website looks, works and feels, the design of it, the photography, the description, the reviews, all these things kind of sum up to this final tie in of like, I feel comfortable moving ahead at this price, or I don't, because if someone's going to travel to your destination, it really at some point, it doesn't really just become about price. If it's just about price, then sure,

go book for as cheap as possible and that's fine. Like you'll get bookings that way, don't get me wrong. And there's people that use that strategy and I think they could have some level of success with it. But if you're trying to play like one layer above that, I think you have to always be looking at these things and saying, yeah, what are the little, you know, those little like, you know, it's like a rough piece

on a piece of wood. Like what are the little sandpaper I can take to my business constantly into this listing, into my website, that I can like rough over that little spot right there, and then I can get people to that next stage a little bit smoother, and then they're gonna convert at a higher rate.

And I think it stacks up over time. And if you start with a crappy piece of wood, the sandpaper is never gonna fix it, right? It's never gonna make it a good option. You start with a dog property, like the marketing and all the commercialization optimization stuff is not really gonna matter much at all. But if you have the right property,

you have the right inventory, and you're presenting it well and people are converting, then I think that's where an audit really can uncover a few things of weird problems, edge cases, oh, this browser, all that kind of stuff can tie in, and I think make a difference between okay and really good results in my experience. Well, I mean, I think the last part of that is,

after you've gotten to that point, then how do we, how would you go back through and do A-B testing and do those, the kind of the data layer and understanding what's happening. And I think that that's where we have to balance that the feel. How does it feel? You know, as I'm using this, how do I feel? It's the UI versus that UX there. But what is the data telling us? Do you have all the GA4 events that you want to for

all of the tracking that you need? I think that that's some one area where you don't want to over inundate with Google events, but generally we tend to as an industry skew a little less, a little under what we could do. We were not looking for the ultimate granularity there and I think there's a point to be made. There's a case to be made for not going too granular. And if you're not using that data, then yeah, maybe you don't want to go that granular.

But there are, there are things you can do to make sure you understand what the key, what key events are happening on the website. And you can track those right in Google Analytics. You all know that I love Microsoft Clarity. That's another great testing tool to be able to say, okay, if you're gonna make some changes to your property description pages

or to a certain landing page or to your homepage, let's actually understand and observe what's happening with those changes and are they actually making a meaningful difference. If you don't have some of those session replay tools on there, Hotjar is another good example. I mean, I like the free version of Clarity, but Hotjar gives you additional insights if you're willing to pay that premium. But if you're gonna make those changes, I think it's a missed opportunity not to invest in some of those solutions to see if those

changes are making a difference. Because if you're just making the changes and you're not actually measuring whether or not those changes made any improvement, then what are we doing? I guess it is. What are we doing there? And are we really iterating or are we just changing and hoping for the best? And I do. I think that it's too easy with the tools we have available to make sure that you can track, that you can monitor, that you can have the reporting in place. I mean, we're not talking about the qualitative, we're talking about quantitative.

We had this many events over this period. Over the last period when we were in the old version, we had 30% fewer events. That's pretty easy to look and see, okay, now we're starting to understand the motion. Again, get the session replays in there. Tell the qualitative story as well with that. But I think that's the one thing is we can identify all these things. And we talked about it last week in the audit. If we're not doing anything with them, if we're not actually using the data

and the information, then it's a missed opportunity. And I think it's sunk cost. I mean, it's one of those things where you're going to gonna web companies are going to charge you to make some of these updates and things like that. But again, if we're not testing, entering, trying seeing what's happening, are we getting anything out of it? Or are we just adding more to the front end without understanding what it's doing to the back end? Yeah, I think ultimately to kind of bring it to a close here, right? It's kind of this idea of like front to back, everything has to make sense. Or, you know, we beat this one up a little bit on the show today, right? Which is this idea of a chain link, you know, and if there's one weak link in there, you start pulling on it,

you start growing, you start trying to get the success you want, there's a weak link in there, it'll reveal itself very quickly, it'll fall apart, and you'll have issues from it. So I think that this is a key part of the process. I will say sometimes people tend to focus on this too early. They tend to think, oh, I have a convalescent problem when they really have a traffic problem. So I think understand what kind of problem you have, understand what your constraint is. I've been thinking about that a lot more lately. What is the constraint here? And I think it's so easy and so fun to polish the things that we're good at or polish things that we know really aren't the problem, but it feels like progress. Like I'm guilty of this as well. So I'm admitting,

you know, here for all of our listeners, you know, doing a free therapy session with me here. It's like I tend to the same thing at times. So it's like, if you know, this is a problem, this is the thing you have to address. It may be costly, maybe uncomfortable to go back and change a lot of these things. Or you may actually, I've had this happen in, you know, with testing that we've done for clients, you may go backwards temporarily, you may make a change to a website, make a change to a form, and you make it worse for a few months until you get back and get it back in the right spot. And that's not the best feeling. But ultimately you do end up finding the conversion path

that makes the most sense for you. So that's kind of the, at least been my experience on it as well. One thing to kind of say at the end here, I mentioned running an audit or going through doing an audit on your website. I'd be happy to give anyone a template for the audit that we run.

So I'll put a link in the chat or maybe just email me. That'd be the best way. Email me, conrad at buildupbookings.com. Put it in the chat like heads and bed show, audit templates. So I know which thing you're referring to. And I'd be happy to send you the template that we run for our clients. My belief is that the template does provide some value

where the checklist provides some value that I give you. The real value in our services is like me actually running it for you, which is my pitch for, yeah, go to buildupbookings.com, click getting started, fill out a form, and we'd love to chat with you. But even if you don't wanna do that or that's not the thing you wanna do right now to really understand, I, go to buildupbookings.com, click and start to fill out a form and we'd love to chat with you. But even if you don't want to do that, or that's not the thing you want to do right now,

I totally understand. I'm happy to give the checklist if anyone's listening and they made it all the way to the end, because I think that checklist will give you like very specific things that I found to, you know, work the best on the conversion side of things. So that's kind of my offer as we come to a close here, but anything else Paul on your side

before we put a bow on this one? I think we tied this one up pretty good. I think it's, you know, it's not the fun part, but well, it's not the fun part for some people. I love digging into this stuff. So this is the, I truly think that since, since I figured out what Microsoft Clarity was and could understand what was happening behind the scenes,

this whole part of it, I'm not a design person. I won't, I don't pretend to be one, but it makes me feel like I can at least contribute to the design of the final product there. And that feels good. You know, as a marketer, I don't need to be the pretty Photoshop person, but I can at least help and contribute and make sure that those people who do know how to do that really well have the right information to make things as effective as possible, in addition to being pretty. Yeah. You know, what's really fun though, Paul, leaving us podcast reviews. So you made all the way to the end. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. We're out of time for today. But go ahead and leave us a review. Go to your podcast volume of downloads. Volume is kind of how we're judging this and evaluating this. So click five stars, leave five stars, review there. Shouldn't take you very long, should convert very easily.

And it puts a smile on my face, puts a smile on Paul's face, and then we can keep doing awesome episodes. So thanks so much, we appreciate it. And we'll catch you on the next episode of the Heads and Beds show. Have an awesome day.