Heads In Beds Show - Is Your Vacation Rental Website A DUD Or A STUD? Here's What To Consider!

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

In this episode, Paul and Conrad debut "Dud Or Stud" and dive into vacation rental websites. What features or tools make them STUDS (so they can convert) or DUDS (ones that fail to get enough bookings). Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellGoogle Travel Is Not Named Among Alphabet’s Key Priorities🔗 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 and Beds 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. Hey there Paul, how's it going? Oh, it is another fantastic Monday. We're just rushing through summer here, and I don't know when. We're almost into August here with our recording time.

So once you're hearing this, it will be August. So happy end of summer, everybody. I'm sorry we didn't give you more warning. How are you doing today, Conrad? Yeah, I'm okay. Just off a trip for personal reasons to see family. A few people sent me an email and stuff I wanted to see see everything is okay. Unexpected trips are never always the fun thing to do. We stay in a vacation rental. We might save that for a future episode, which is

like always interesting to be on the other side of it and actually staying in a property for a week. A lot of family members who don't know anything about the industry and getting their perspective on, Oh, what do you think the host in here or here, but all good back now, home recording and ready to chat about things. And you're definitely right. That summer is over or feels over because my son got his teacher assignment while we were away. So yeah, the school had called and said, here's the teacher this year. And I said, oh yeah, that's starting in just a few weeks.

So I know everybody starts a little bit differently, but if they're giving out assignments, that must mean that that's right around the corner from a school perspective. You're getting close there. I would say, yeah, now it's just about there. Yep. It's time. It's time to get back into it, get back into the school side of things. And we're going to do

some education today. I think maybe we'll see. I guess we've got a little bit of, I've got a little bit of a marketing minute today. So, so the one thing that I think is Google continues to innovate on the AI side of things. The one area I've had questions about is really the travel side. What are they doing? It doesn't seem like they're really changing the Google travel, the Google hotel, the Google vacation rental side of things. And that kind of continued, I would say it's prominence in how Google is being talked about, how Alphabet is talking about Google and the travel side of things. But the parent company and Philip Schindler, if you've listened to any of the Google Marketing Live events, he's usually the guy talking most prominently about the Google ad side of things,

the Google marketing side of things. But when he was talking to analysts on Tuesday about Google's three key priority areas, those were artificial intelligence, retail, and YouTube. Now for the last, definitely the last two quarters and really going back, I would say even pre-COVID, travel has been a part of that. So the fact that we are, I mean, they're specifically have gone from citing retail and travel to now really just being advertising, search, and other being the segment that they're looking at for revenue growth. Travel's kind of falling by

the wayside. And again, I'm not surprised by that based on what we're seeing on the generative search experience side of things. It seems like they're not working on that as frequently. We also know that back in January, when a lot of those layoffs happened at Google and Alphabet, travel took a hit. I think the hotel side of things and the flight side of things were pretty heavily impacted by those layoffs. So I think we've hit a point, we've reached a time here where Google may be evaluating, is it better to be the online travel agency? Do they want to be the person of record? Do they want to continue to establish and refine and enhance that technology? Certainly we see it in our space all the time that people do have to

decide whether they want to build it or whether they want to buy it. And Google may be at a point now where they're not as willing to continue to invest in that infrastructure and that technology. And they may be looking to either take on more of that ad revenue or figure out ways that they can do it in a little more cost-effective way. The last thing I'd want to do is see the Google Graveyard include some type of Google travel hotel or vacation rentals. But I think this is a small, quieter first step towards that just because it is. It sounds skiffed. That's where the headline is. We'll certainly put that in the show notes. But what are your thoughts on Google and what they've done in the travel space, what they've done in the show notes. But what are your thoughts on Google and what they've done in the travel space, what they've done in the vacation rental space, and whether this is going to be

impactful for the average property manager or not? I wonder if Google sometimes forget that they just have the best business of all time. Maybe they shouldn't mess with it that much. The best business of all time is selling clicks, which have essentially no marginal cost to deliver that product. The actual search engine results page to the end user costs them basically nothing. They can deliver the click and then charge the advertiser a dollar, $2, $3, $4, $5, depends on the market and the owner side, 10 bucks a click. Right. And it's essentially right profit. That's why, that's why Google has so much of what they have is because they have the best business model of all time. And I wonder if their foray into travel yielded more revenue, but at what cost and what complexity of not only the search results themselves, but also the people on the back end to run these things.

I can say this with a lot of confidence now personally, because I've been involved with this hotel beta product almost a year, the performance max beta. We got it with our hotel resort client that we work with. And someone had to help us get on the phone, help us and do a call. Okay, here's how we're going to do it. We're going to opt you in. It's all done at the CID level. And that's how most Google betas works. That's not a revolutionary. I've been in betas since I first started running Google ads. But in my head, I'm thinking these accounts are spending collectively $100,000 a month. And the grand scheme of things that is pennies on the dollar compared to what booking.com and Expedia and these big OTA platforms spend on an hourly basis with Google. And I wonder if they just think in their head, why don't we just sell

clicks and then you click on it and then we charge the advertiser and then they get to the page and then, you know, it's up to you to make sure that's profitable and we'll just get out of the middle. I wonder if that could be something that they go down the path of realizing that travel is a rich experience that people have through Google, but do they need to insert themselves as aggressively into the middle of it as they have? And it's so funny because when people said, or when, excuse me, when Google started beta testing these vacation rental blocks some time ago, I was actually pretty worried. I tend to get worried at first when these things happen. And it seems like the effect has been so minimal because the OTs have stayed away from it. So a lot of the people that are listing inside

of the vacation rental search blocks specifically on Google are putting out either it's like through some kind of like quasi direct connection, like they use one of these partners that ables to kind of list them directly in a weird way but it still lists that actual company name which is strange or they're through like a to say like mid-tier body tier uta type sites which are trying to stop white clicks but it doesn't seem like it's a really good experience for the user it doesn't really seem like it's picking up unbelievable levels of traction or surely more property managers would be talking to me and going oh yeah we get 10 of our bookings through Google. Never hear that. The number is always like 2%, 1%, something like that. So I just wonder if they've tried to

complicate something that doesn't need to be complicated in the first place. Maybe there's some high up executive at Google that's like, why are we doing this? Why are we putting all this right? We can still serve the travel industry perfectly well by just selling them clicks and search, which is probably what they want. I don't know. That's my take on it just as like an observer. We'll see. Time will tell. Like, obviously, if they can figure out ways to extract more value versus their cost, they're going to do that.

They have shareholders and that would be the most logical thing for them to be doing. But it also wouldn't shock me to see them wind back some of these efforts as well because of pending antitrust legislation, too. So I think the more stuff they get out of and say, oh, yeah, we just sell ads on every type of search. We don't really get the middle of it. The better position they may have in the future to be like, oh, no, we're not unfairly competing in this area or that area because we're just selling clicks.

And that's like a pretty, I think, foolproof way to say we don't have a monopoly or any sort of antitrust legislation. So I'm not a lawyer, but that's my take on some of these things that we're seeing potentially in this space. And that is, that's why it just, even when they were first starting to roll out flights, to roll out hotels, it just didn't make a whole lot of sense. There was some type of logical nature there where, yeah, you're doing all the searches and maybe you do want to avoid that middleman. But you were talking about at that time, I think four or five billion in annual ad revenue that you were getting from booking and Expedia and all these things. And you're just going to go directly into

that. I think there was probably a little bit of animosity there from the start. And it's difficult to say that those advertisers probably weren't looking for ways to get back at Google from that time and then optimize whether it was reducing some ad spend or whether it was trying to figure out the best way to do it. Google Flights is an elite product though. That product is crushed because you know what it is? This is my understanding of it is that there's only a few inputs on each given site. Let's say there's 12 airlines

that each have two or three flights per day coming from each. So it's like easier to figure out the puzzle pieces there compared to a single property manager has 500 properties. All 500 properties are unique. And then there's in a given market, there's 25 property managers.

But yeah, Google Flights product is absolutely elite. But I don't know if they make a lot of money off that because a lot of time you click on the button and it just kicks you over to a site and then maybe there's some tracking parameters appended in i don't know but or you can just go directly to american airlines is often who i fly and then i just put in the same information then i get the flight but then i don't have to go search a bunch of websites so if they end up killing google flights i'll be sad about that because that's an amazing product but that that real there's something to be said for that real time. And even as we're looking at doing some fall travel,

to put that notification on and say, okay, any price updates between the given timeframe and being able to update and change your flight potentially to take advantage of 20%, 30% savings, it's huge. It is. That's if we don't lose one product from Google, Google search might be it, but I think flights is probably, it's just a better option for us not to lose. So there we go. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. But also I do believe that has to be an easier product for them to run

because of the, there's limited players as well. There's only most airports that are not, big hubs only have a few, maybe a dozen or something airlines going out of them. So there's the number of inputs coming in is relatively low. And then it's more just about timing and scheduling. And I'm sure that's all done on a feed and that sort of stuff. Yeah, very interesting. And let's keep we'll keep you apprised of things as they come along. And you know, we'll see what the future holds. Let's get into today's episode here. dud or stud. That was a clever chat GPT creation. So we'll give full credit open AI on that one. So the goal here, walk me through what the goal is here, Paul, we kind of came up with this idea. I thought it was pretty solid.

What is dud? And then what are we going to talk about today? And then what is this stud? And then what are we going to talk about today? Yeah, the dud side of things, it's the stuff that doesn't work. It's the examples that we've seen out there that probably everybody has seen out there that we want to call attention to. In this case, we're going to be talking about websites today. We've got some other things that we certainly want to talk about, other channels, other strategies that we want to talk about. But we wanted to start really with the base of your digital presence, that high quality website versus a low quality website.

So those stud websites, what are they offering right now? What is that simple path that they're giving travelers and guests to get more bookings or to gain a better following? And what are those low quality websites right now? What are the biggest opportunities we see out there? And what are some small things or maybe more major things that you can do to turn that dud hopefully into a stud? So I'm going to hand it off over to you. And for the high quality website, when you're trying to, when you're identifying a high quality website, what, when you're trying to, when you're identifying a high quality website, what are some of those things that really stick out to you?

Whether it's the design, whether it's the functionality, what really makes it a top performer for you when you're looking at it? All right. So some stud characteristics of high quality websites. I like this. So the first one, and we've talked about this a little bit before in the show in the term, the context of SEO, but I don't think we've talked about it in terms of conversion is speed.

Now people overstate its value and its importance. They'll say, oh, if I go shave a half second off here and we get some massive SEO boost, I've not found that to be true. I don't find taking a website from slow or slow-ish to fast seems to make much of an SEO difference, ranking difference at all. And when I say that, I mean like positions on the page, how much better are we going to rank in Google? I don't see that personally. But it doesn't mean I don't think it's a good idea. I do think it's a good idea, because I do think it helps tremendously and can help tremendously with someone who's using the

website and really trying to drill in and find the ideal property. So I think going through the effort and the time of speeding up your website can be overstated from SEO perspective, probably understated from like a conversion perspective, and people actually going through and using it. So that is actually the first thing I'll say is does the website, like you said, design certainly plays a role, but honestly, I would rather take a simpler site from a design perspective that loads really quickly, gets me all the properties that I'm looking for and works well than one that has a lot of really fancy transitions and things like that. But it makes it using it a bit choppy and awkward. And there's not that I'm a front end developer, but you almost feel like there's too much JavaScript on the page.

Like you're trying to use it and it's like jumping around and there's issues. And I'm just like, just give me like a simple list with like nice photos. That's going to work a lot better in my experience than something that's like trying to do too much. So that's kind of my initial reaction is how fast does the website load? Like you, the homepage, but also like when I apply a filter, does it, and then if, whether I have to hit apply, whether I just click the button, does the properties come back quickly? And some sites we see that we have to even

advertise and work from, you hit refresh and ask to go back to the database and call. It's just, it's just slow and sluggish. And it feels like you're waiting for the website. It's, and the guest is not going to tolerate that. So stud websites are fast and they're really intuitive and they have that Gmail like experience where when you click a button on Gmail, it instantly opens that pane. I think the interaction target they go for is under 100 milliseconds. When you click a button in Gmail,

it should do something within 100 milliseconds, which is very fast. And stud websites have that characteristics. Dud websites, in my experience, don't have that characteristic. You go and go apply filter, it takes multiple seconds or there's no loading screen at all.

You're not even sure if it's working and it's actually frustrating to use. So that's my first one is like usability and speed specifically. I don't know if you agree or if you want to go to the next one. I think that's spot on. I mean, I think that is one of those things. And I, there's a couple of websites right now for partners that we work with on the owner side that I can specifically point out and discussions I had with them when we were talking about just the overall owner strategy, it was, Hey, so it's a side point to this? You have your website, what are you doing to

improve that speed experience? And in their case, they were just trying to load six rentals, I think, on the rental page. And it was really struggling. And especially on that unit specific page where you're trying to pull down all the units you're trying to book. If you're getting past six units, 12 units, 18 units, and I don't know, like that part of the site speed, I think does play in. There's something that's out of cyber control in a lot of those cases, and that's a property management system. If you've got a ton, hundreds of rentals going out there, it's going to take a little extra. There's no doubt about that.

So I think the one thing with page speed is control what you can control. And I think you did it in a, you talked about it in a very appropriate way there, where there's stuff that you think you can control, but you really can't. I think that initial experience, certainly getting that loading as quickly as possible is important. But then when you get to those booking pages or those purchase pages, something where someone's actually going to make that ultimate conversion, you got to make sure those are rocking pretty quick too. Some of your

sub pages, your blog pages, okay, they're nice to have, they're not need to haves. And Google is certainly seeing it all through the lens of the entire site. So they're going to be able to say, all through the lens of the entire site. So they're going to be able to say, it's not just this page, it's the entire domain that is fast or slow. But speed is definitely something that just with that overall experience, if the average,

and I don't know what your average time on site is right now, but if it's only a minute and a half to two minutes, if you're waiting a minute or 30 seconds or 20 seconds for a page to load, are you going to stick around for that full two minutes or that full three minutes? Probably not. So just something to keep in mind there that the average time that people are on the site, is that being extended by the site speed or is it being reduced by the site speed? And I guess how can you streamline that as much as possible there?

But yeah. Couldn't agree more. What you streamline that as much as possible there? But yeah. Couldn't agree more. What you got? What's next? Let's see here. I would say the next one is probably going to be those compelling visuals. I think that's something that it's not just having,

you want to have beautiful imagery and you want to have something that's going to drive people down that conversion funnel. But I think one of the most important things on the compelling visual side of things is making sure that it is. I've been keeping up the speed of the website. The last thing you want to do is drop a huge image or a huge video on the website and then have it slow down or not have people get that full experience. I think the other thing with the visuals is making sure you understand how it's going to render on different devices. So if it's mobile versus a desktop versus a tablet, even, although maybe 10% of your traffic is coming from tablet, probably 50 to 60% is probably of the visuals or any of the display assets that you're using, I think is really important.

I will openly admit this as a huge bias because I'm always on a desktop. That's one of the last things I check is do that right click, inspect element, see it on the mobile side of things. things I check is do that right click, inspect element, see it on the mobile side of things. It's a pretty quick flip to switch or switch the flip in the grand scheme just to see and understand even just pulling it up on your mobile device. But more often than not, I get blind to, oh, it's just desktop and really just thinking about through that perspective. That might not even be where most of your traffic is coming from. So really, anything you're doing with the compelling visuals you're using, make sure you understand how they're showing up on any device there. What are your thoughts on just the images and maybe just the responsiveness there as well? Yeah, I think that I've thought about this a lot recently too,

when we're starting to do some new homepage designs and things like that for clients. And I think that different images serve different purposes, right? I think there's a time and place for images and content on the website that is more sizzle, but a little bit less steak, meaning like the homepage background. We did one of these recently for a client where it shows a bunch of different properties, like all side by side, it shows people enjoying the properties, it shows different things very quickly, like one, two, three second cuts. And that type of thing can work well on a homepage. I think that's really chaotic. And if not annoying on a property detail page to have that. I think on the property detail page, you want to see quickly an exterior of the property usually to

understand where your setting is. And then you want to quickly dive into what's the best features of this property. Maybe that's the initial five set of images is like going through the house and seeing these things that are unique and valuable and that sort of thing. Then you can get into, okay, we do have to show a picture of every bathroom and every bedroom. And that's more the blocking and tackling of the photography. Hard to make a bedroom of a condo seems super exciting and appealing to this point of dud or stud, but you got to do it.

And I think there's a way of ordering things to structure it where it's more appealing or less appealing. So that's kind of my take on it is that know what the context is, the person looking, do they need specifics? And that's where you really want to be detailed with your captions on the photos as well we we went through a client recently where we went and added captions to the photos because it wasn't just that he didn't have captions he had captions but it was like dsc 0173 because it was like okay it just looks sloppy no caption i could maybe live with my caption that looks like

that is terrible so definitely a dud that we tried to turn into a stud on that one by writing like 100 photo captions for them but anyways yeah that's kind of my takeaways like knowing the context of the person on the other side and then putting the right visual in front of them that's going to get them excited so on the search results page like that's where you want one photo that really represents the property and ideally is unique and shows that listing and not a bunch of other ones that's another thing we've had recently with clients especially on the condo side is they show a photo of the condo building I'm like, I don't really know if that's actually the right one, because they see the whole building, but they're only in one small unit in that building. Probably better to show the view maybe from the kitchen, like pointing out to the back of the property

where they can see the ocean or some other problem or something like that. Yeah, there's a way to do it. And I think it's just understanding the flavor that people are looking for and then giving that to them in that way. So just Dutter Stud, there's the quick dud or stud videos on the homepage, dud or stud. I think it's dud if it's done well, and I think it's easy to do it poorly. And it's, you should always have fallbacks. Even if you have a video, it's mostly going to be consumed on desktop, which as you said earlier, might be only 35% of your homepage. I think the video itself can be interesting and engaging. I can show the area in a different way. There's that classic,

like a picture is worth a thousand worlds words where a video is often showing a lot more than a static picture could do. That's kind of my takeaway, but don't expect people to sit through a two minute video. It's got to be short. It's got to be punchy. It has to load quickly. You can't give that up to our last point.

And I think if done well, it can be an engaging piece, but very few people can do it. Well, that's also my experience. Fair. I think that's good. That's also my experience. Fair. I think that's good.

That's spot on there. Cool. Let's see here. You want to take on content for the website there and dud and stud there? Yeah. So in my opinion, dud content is stuff that's made specifically for search engines is the kind of the most common mistake that I see. Or I see this one quite a bit too. Non-specific content. This really bothers me. We've talked about this before you and I

not recording, but like you get to a homepage and you have no idea what the property is or the location or anything like that. It's like, it'll say like the homepage header will say something like professional service, awesome guest care. And you're just like, okay, like maybe I'm not completely opposed to those topics or those ideas, but like, where are we? What are you doing? What's your unique value proposition that you have, whether on the owner side or the guest side, and they just don't get there. So I would say non-specific content or content made specifically for search engines can be really duddy and just not stuff that really isn't appealing at all. Where the flip side of that, in my opinion, and what we try to go towards is like orient people

very quickly. And honestly, you're actually are oriented Google very quickly by having your own page header be explore the best Myrtle Beach vacation rentals with company name or something like that. But get people to understand where they are very quickly. And the content and copy should read well. Even if you do have to put certain keywords in there, there's a way to write it in a way where it's still appealing to the user, not just repeating a bunch of phrases and plastering it on the homepage or something like that. I mean, it's obviously done for SEO purposes, not really done for a reader to actually enjoy and get value out of it. So it's, I think it's true that not a lot of people are going to sit there and read every word on the homepage, but when you see bad copy, and when you see bad content on a homepage or a search results page or a property detail page,

I think it can sway people the other way often where they go from trusting the company or trusting the brand to not trusting them. And then they get in a bad spot in a bad way about it. So that's a few of my pet peeves. There's more, but those are two that we can start with, at least in the context of website and like homepage and those types of things. So yeah, your point of view on content and maybe you could touch on owner as well. Yeah. I think that the, we run into the same thing talking about high level concepts and principles and strategies and not talking about, Hey, I'm in the Smokies or Hey, I'm in the Panhandle or hey, I'm in this destination here. Yeah, one of my biggest pet peeves actually on the booking side of things is getting to that booking page and not having any content, just going straight,

not having any content there, just going straight into the listings. I don't know what it is. I feel like there needs to be some type of premise there of sending someone into an experience of starting to plan their trip, whether that is just like, hey, whether you're looking for the shores of Gulf of Mexico or the inland trail on the Hill Country, Texas, looking at something like that, just being able to look through and create that experience before you start, or I guess not look through, but read through that experience and kind of, again, setting you off on the right course to do travel planning, because it's not just, you're telling yourself a story. We've talked about that as you're doing those and using those images, creating that experience that someone's going to have in that

rental. It's the same thing. I think just looking at the images of the initial properties, cool, that's fine. But tell me what I'm going to be able to do. I don't need the whole blog post of top 10 things to do in X area, but I do need that experience started, I think, as a traveler to just go in and have that content written. But fluff content is just the worst to have to read. And I think if you're in a specific market, it's maybe easier to write that content. If you are more of a national brand or you're looking to go into multi-markets and stuff like that, it can be difficult to have that specific content set up for specific pages or having content talking about a lot of different locations that doesn't feel like, again, you're pulling in a lot of different directions there. So I'm talking about Maine and then I'm talking

about New Hampshire and then Vermont and then just jumping around there. So I think much any of the writing of content that we're doing, you're not just writing it for the crawlers or for the search engines or anything like that. You do have to write it for the travelers, but make sure that it's providing some type of value. Don't just write the fluff and then just do it because over time, the search engines understand. They know what's valuable, what's not, what's engaged, what's not, what's engaged with, what's not.

And the less engaging content you have, certainly the lesser experience that someone's going to have on your website. On the owner side, yeah. You want to make sure you're talking about your risk reversals, your unique selling positions, because everybody says they're going to make more. So there's got to be more content than just you're going to make X amount more than your competitor. Well, all your competitors are saying the same thing. So how much are you going to make these people? At a certain point, there's going to be a law of diminishing returns in these people's minds of, well, this person is going to make 10x more,

10% more, or 15% more, or 20% more. You all make $150,000, $200,000 in gross booking revenue. Congratulations. You're the top manager on the block here. But yeah, I think that we've all gone to a website and seen the same content written over and over again when we look at different property managers. So that's the last thing you want to do is write exactly what your competitor has. They may be showing up. That may be the SEO research that some people are incorporating is just, oh, they're showing up. What content are they putting out there? You definitely have to differentiate yourself with the content as well there. I think a good rule of thumb is don't cheap out or don't put out low quality stuff on items of your marketing that are

highly leveraged, right? And the homepage copy is highly leveraged because you're writing at one time and it might live on your homepage for a year or two years or three years and who knows how long it's going to live there. But potentially hundreds of not hopefully thousands, tens of thousands of people might see that copy. So you should be like extremely thoughtful. If someone's going to walk into your store and you had a retail store, would you be like, would you just talk to them in a very awkward way? Or would you like really have a very well thought out script and approach to the way that you trained a salesperson to talk to that person? Look at a car dealership, right? They have like very heavily scripted interactions with you when you walk onto a car

lot and a good car salesperson knows exactly how to talk to you to get the right step and get you to step in that car and buy it. Same thing here. We're trying to convince someone to make a pretty big purchase. We have to write in a way and communicate to them in a way and have that brand put out there in a way that they feel happy and excited and also that they trust it. And they go, oh, yeah, this makes sense. Let me click here. Oh, yeah, this makes sense.

Let me click here. We've got to walk them down that step to actually get to get them to convert. And it's hard. Let's be honest. It's hard to get them to convert. So cheaping out on the photography, cheaping out of the on the photography cheaping out of the videography cheaping out on the content cheaping out on the website our theme today but putting out a dud website okay you can do it but your competition's not going to and they're the ones that are going to rise to the

top and then you're going to end up regretting it down the road yeah i'm with you on that one for sure maybe we could go to the payment checkout one yes because i think that one's valuable and this is where the rubber meets the red for sure go through this one yeah i think the for a while you could get away with an unsecure site like for a while http was not it was not uncommon that that is a absolute non-negotiable now now it's an seo hindrance or red flag or whatever that is. But the last thing you want to do is send people to a payment portal where they see the unlocked icon in their browser, whether that's on the mobile side of things or the desktop. And I think for the most part, even if you actually try to book something through an unsecured site, Google's going to put up flags or some of the browsers

are actually going to put up those flags and say, are you sure you want to complete this booking or complete this transaction? Certainly the security of your payment page, if you're going from some property management systems, you go from your base domain to a different base domain, doing anything like that, just make sure that process, the payment area seems as secure as possible. It doesn't seem like you're moving, jumping around too much. Anecdotally, I know that there are a few partners who once they switched from those moving from domain to other domain, they saw big conversion rates because or conversion rate increases because the story they're telling is

people aren't going to another website. Now they're booking directly on my website and they feel honky dory and all warm and fuzzy that they're not getting anything stolen from them. If you're using one of those booking engines, one of those PMS systems that does take that, just try to try. If you can put some of that messaging in to tell them you're going to navigate away from a two different page, just make sure this is secure, this is fine. Educating those guests on how that payment is going to take place might be a helpful little, whether it's content, whether it's a quick video, something like that. But I think that's the security in that payment area just gives a lot of people peace of mind. But there's also just the ability to get that done as streamlined and efficiently as possible.

So maybe that's something that you want to talk about there, just with that good streamlined booking experience, as opposed to the tedious, time-consuming, and easily abandonable. Abandonable? We'll go with that for right now, booking experience there. We've made up words before. I don't think we can stop it. And the data actually indicates to me that a really good checkout might convert at 10 or 15 percent that's our average so that means that even a really good checkout 90 percent of people 85 percent of people are coming to the checkout and leaving so if your numbers aren't at least in the

hopefully like the double digits low double digits that's like an acceptable level if you're converting three four or five percent of people who come to your checkout, it's just super hard to actually get enough traffic in there to really make the math work on any sort of paid application or lots of other ways. Yeah. Checkouts in my opinion, I think going to another domain can certainly produce subpar outcomes in some cases, like you said, especially if it's not disclosed or people are confused, like they get, like if they get to the page and it looks identical, I don't think many people would notice. We have a client who uses a template site from one of the most popular PMSs, but it's on a subdomain and the design of the main site is pretty similar to the checkout page

on this template site. So I think we're okay. Like we seem to get pretty good results, even though we're going to a template site because it's like book.vacationwellcompany.com and there's a little bit better optionality there. But I've seen some, this isn't quite as popular now, but some of the older PMS platforms I used to use when I first started in the industry would kick you off to a completely unrelated domain. And like the logo wasn't even the same, like everything just looked completely different. And I always thought that was a jarring experience. So that can cause issues. But in terms of like

onsite checkout, which a lot of our clients have luckily built in with their website provider and with their PMS, remove distractions from that process too. So a dud checkout page is very cluttered, has unnecessary fields on it. And it is often linking to things in the top navigation that don't need to be linked to. Once they're in their checkout page, guess what? I don't care about the blog at that point. I don't care about other things. The only thing they should have is a phone number or a form to contact if there's some kind of problem or issue or question at that point. And then a logo or maybe a way to get back to the property page they were looking at. That's it. You don't want a lot of other distraction up there during that key page.

So a stud website is very minimal. It's very clean. It's very fast. Like we said at that checkout page, they trust them. There's icons. The fees are laid out very clearly. If there's a payment schedule, it's easier for them to understand. Payment one is due on this day. Payment two is due on this day. And ultimately it's very easy for them to enter in their information. One thing I saw interestingly going to checkout recently on a website, this wasn't in the vacation rental industry, was that when you tapped on the credit card field, they made sure to bring up like a number picker on the phone as opposed to bringing up just a regular keyboard where I would have to go to the top and then type in the numbers. It was small, but like little things like that can just nudge people over the edge to

that next step, which is really what we're trying to do in the checkout. I think getting the checkout right is honestly tedious and hard. I'm not going to lie, but it can make the difference between a 4% conversion rate and an 8% conversion rate that could add tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to the bottom line of any vacational website out there. So it's worth it. And it's worth the effort of going through that. If you want to go from dud results to stud results for sure. Agreed. Yeah. Awesome. Where do we want to go next? Do we want to go responsive? Is that a decent place to go into? I think it is. Yeah, it is. We touched on it a little bit

knowing that we don't have many MDOTs, just like we don't have many HTTP websites like we used to. But those MDOT versions, the mobile version only version of your website, boy, that was just a great thing to create for people. I just loved creating this mobile experience and then this desktop experience.

And why did we stop that? Because I think it was probably more of the technology side of things where people were getting too frustrated by having to completely rewrite two different things of codes. Responsive design, it is. You want to make sure you want to understand how your website is rendering for all devices. And there are some devices that some website builders that just don't perform that well on mobile devices or on tablets, whether that's the text starts to get all funky and just how the alignment is, whether that's custom CSS in a template or a variety of different things could be affecting that. But the last thing you want to do is have people come from a mobile experience or come from a desktop experience and switch back and forth over to both, whether maybe you are, I think we

understand that trip planning experience is still not in most cases, one click, select your dates, and then book. It is, you're going to be looking for different dates. You're going to be looking for different activities. You're probably going to be making comparisons between some local if there's a universal ID that you can use to be able to facilitate that, I don't think we're maybe quite to that space in the vacation rental space right now. But at some point I do, I think that those not cookies, but your unique universal ID is going to be what kind of ties you in from the mobile experience to the desktop experience. So doing that quick inspect your element and making sure that you do have a good experience

on the mobile side and the desktop side and the tablets that I think is going to be very important. I think that's what the studs do is they know what it looks like across all of the devices and they have the design elements and they have the, I would say, the strategic navigation in place to make sure that there is no drop in experience from one device to another. But what would you say

on that side of things, just with responsiveness there? I think that's where we're at, which is that the experience has to be made for mobile. So it's not just, I mean, at this point, it's obvious the website better not load this size when it needs to be this size, meaning a thousand pixels wide versus 380 or 600 or whatever, if it's double the pixel count. So I think people have got that down. That's the basics. But I think there's a big difference between, let me take all the elements on this page and just basically shrink them or reorganize them so that they're small. That seems to be like the simple version of doing that. And let me think about on mobile, how should my thumb interact with this,

which is different than how I might interact with a mouse. Like it's, it really can be fundamentally different. Let's say in a photo gallery where when you tap on it, if it's a swipe on your thumb for each additional photo, like it's okay, that's fine. But what we're used to doing on our phone is we're used to scrolling. So I think a dud version is like, it works, but it's not really optimal. A stud version of it is I tap on it. It again, loads instantly. And then it loads a gallery that I can scroll and I can view very quickly and start to see the individual photos. I can zoom in, I can pitch to zoom. I can see the each bedroom, I can see the layout of it and stuff like that. That in my mind is a better way to think about it, which is that not just as a work, like it's

not a checkbox, like yes, it works or no, it doesn't work. There's more nuance to it where it's like, how do I actually set it up for people to be excited about using it? And they think, oh yeah, like this is what I'm looking for. This has all their information for me. And that's ultimately what I think you want to get to so that's my takeaway is that setting it up for to pass a check mark is one thing you really want to be setting up in a way where you're actually building really unique value for the person on the other side who feels like they can get the information they need and is using it in a way where it actually feels fun and engaging and they're going to keep using the site in that scenario

yeah you don't want to i'd say you don't want to, I'd say, you don't want to design. There is a design specifically or a strategy specifically for how people use a mobile phone versus how people use the desktop. And I think those who have designed for mobile specifically, they now know if on average, how many people are left-handed versus right-handed and how are people swiping in on this device versus a different device? Did all the images and media and videos, do they have to be the same on both? No, just create that experience.

That's a good user experience overall across all devices there. So I know we're out of time here. Is there anything else we want to say or should we finish episode one here of stud or dot? I think we wrap this one up and get ready for the next side this was we did a mini series earlier this year right when we did the ga4 kind of swap and we

did multiple ones on that so we might do a little mini series idea here if the response is positive or if we get an email that says you hate this then we'll stop doing it but that's right yeah we would much rather get an email that said you liked it we also appreciate we really what would be stud of you to do today is leave us a review. So you go to your podcast app of choice, you click five stars, you write us a short review, and then you are officially a heads and beds show stud not a dud, which is all the people that listen. And there's a lot of you and don't ever leave us a review. No, but we appreciate it. This was a fun little one for us to put together. And I think hopefully it gets to the core of what we're talking about here, which is how do you make your marketing a lot better, and ultimately get you

better results with your vacational business. So we thank you for your time and attention and listening this far and we will catch you on the next episode there mr or mrs stud we appreciate you thank you