Heads In Beds Show - Mobile vs Desktop Traffic Trends For 2026: Here's What To Work On

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

In this episode Conrad and Paul go back to an "old" topic that we often ignore: mobile vs desktop traffic, how the site works on mobile, data on Google Analytics conversions and more...Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp 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 of Med Show presented by Build Up Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacational 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 right, Paul, we're live. What's happening?

Well, we just got to enjoy, you know, a little brief adventure together. It was, yeah, that's my fault. It could have been longer, could have gotten golf in. We could have done a whole lot of other stuff. But we did. We got to spend a little time down in Miramar Beach, Sandestan area at Darm. So that was a lot of fun. I thought our session went pretty well.

It was definitely one of those that I think we're getting better at it. That's, that's, that's, that's what we got to do. We, we learn a little bit each time we do it. So, uh, it was a lot of fun to, uh, get up in front of people and see some, some, some, some other faces too. But how are you doing, sir? I think it's mostly friendly faces. Maybe a few not friendly faces there. But, um, you know, hey, you're never going to get a hundred percent of people to agree on anything. So it's, it's, it's one of those things. Yeah, doing pretty good. Tired. Um, yeah, just the event itself is always a bit of, you know, any sort of event is a bit of a grind when it's like eight to eight type thing. And, and it's like, you know if you've got dinners and things like that with clients and then yeah just arriving very late like we talked about this before I'm not a big fan of the 2 a.m. arrival time you know in terms of like an evening flight I'm more of a morning flight person I've just realized that I like getting to a destination and just being there and or when I'm getting back home you know that sort of thing I just prefer to get it away done in the morning and then have the rest of my day to go and not wait around all day and then wait for a flight at the end of the day so random travel preferences

brought to you here you know I mean it's I will say I had more unique instances you heard about one of them we actually had another one afterwards i had someone who was severely inebriated at my gate so she she took a tumble on her face and then didn't want any medical attention didn't get any medical attention just didn't get on flight so i don't know where she ended up probably somewhere in atlanta but holy cow i got gotta tell you between uh someone thinking that someone not having a prescription for oxygen and someone, you know, taking a little header in the gate, it's, uh, I'm ready to be. Do people at Minnesota drink a lot? Is that the case? I mean, here's the thing. You,

I told you what the temperature is. It's, uh, I arrived to, we're up to eight degrees. It's real feels like minus 11. Um, my guy, by the way, for the, for the listeners, that's Fahrenheit, not Celsius. No, that's no, right, right. We're not, we're not doing the international system or anything like that. This is, yeah, last night I arrived and it was minus eight degrees. degrees minus 22 real deals. So, yeah, I think it does push some people to drink. I don't think, like, we're not Wisconsin. We like to make that joke a lot.

But, no, I don't know. This woman is just, she was a little older. She, I mean, smaller, so maybe it was just too much. But it was a unique 10 minutes or so, just kind of waiting for the last people to get on. And she, yeah, she had an adventure within the gate herself. So two things, then I'll actually put us in the apartment. Number one, I don't drink. But if I do drink, I would not drink before getting on a plane.

At least certainly enough success. If I'm going to do that, I do it at home, right? Like, you know, I can kind of like be in the comforts of my own home doing that. That makes no sense to me. And what happened to her phone? So, like, did her phone fall when she? So her phone fell. Her phone fell.

She fell on her face. Everybody rushed to, you know, get her back up. And then she, you know, everybody's asking, you know, where's your boarding pass? Where's this? where's that? And then she was just sounding off on a lot of things. So it was a bit of an experience. She, you know, she was, yeah, she, I don't know if Minnesota was her final destination.

It is what it is if it was, but she didn't make it there last night. I can, I can assure you, or early morning like I did, she didn't make it. So hopefully she's back now, I guess. I don't know. Speaking of phones, you know, that's a great segue into our episode today. We're talking all about revisiting mobile versus desktop best practices because, oh, goodness, we're trying to keep it serious, folks. We have not done this one in a little while.

We haven't, I don't know if we've actually done like a dedicated episode on this. Certainly it interweaves and episodes we've done before on things like websites and we've done it before on things like, you know, understanding conversion rate by different sources. So we certainly talked about it before. I don't think we've done this exact one before. But it's kind of timely because I think that in the background, we all know what the data is. I guess I'm thinking back to my time many, many moons ago when I was at the previous agency. And we were doing this, like, there was this movement.

At one point, when I was at the previous agency, we were actually designing mobile sites and then desktop sites. There was actually two different websites. So that was kind of phased out. We went to this responsive format. Responsive was the buzzword at many VRMA events for a few years early on in my career. And it was kind of like, you got to make sure you're ready for mobile. You got to make sure that mobile is there. I think that kind of re-ignited or restarted again, maybe a few years ago when Google said,

we're going to crawl your mobile site by default. So that became a thing where it's like, oh, I better make sure that my mobile site is a really good experience. Again, some of the responsive and, like, testing stuff kind of came back up again. But now it's just like people who just kind of acknowledge and accept that, like, yes, they get a lot of mobile traffic. But we just haven't, yeah, we just haven't kind of revisited this topic in a minute. So what's kind of your current, like, thought process when you're looking at a new client,

you're looking at their mobile vacation rental website versus their desktop, what are your thoughts are. Yeah, I won't lie. You just gave me a little PTSD saying m. That's, uh, oh, those are some interesting times. And I think, I mean, really it was because it was a completely different experience. It wasn't just like a different, I mean, you could have had a different site, man. You could have a different, really a completely different, yeah, user experience is the easiest way to say.

So it is. I think that since that time in mobile first indexing has made a big deal here, responsive, all these things. I do. I think the user experience on most of these sites is better. Like the mobile experience is better. I think at a basic level, at a templated level, yeah, the responsive template is better than an m.template is. Is it still where it should be on the mobile side versus the desktop side?

No, I think we still, and we talk about it quite often, because we're always on our computers, as we're working on things as marketers, that we forget that the end user does tend to skew mobile in some areas, in some verticals, in a lot of different settings. So I do. I think that there's a willingness to look at the data and see it at a high level, how the business is performing, but we don't really break down into mobile versus desktop and really seeing where the engagement or the events, where the purchases come through. I mean, they're talking about some of the other agencies in space. They are. They're very

quick to say, you know, your lookers are going to be on mobile. Your bookers are going to be on desktop. And is that universal? No, I wouldn't say that by any means. But if you're giving people a good experience on the mobile side of things, you're much more likely to get them to book there, or to get them to carry over wherever they are. So I think that it is. I think it's one of those things that's overlooked. We may look at the data, but rarely do we audit it. So I think part of what we're going to talk about here today

is some of those audit pieces that you should be looking at. I mean, really going through your site like you do on the desktop side because I would guess the average property manager probably looks at their desktop site three, four times a week, maybe. You know, just checking in on small stuff. It could be three, four times a day. Yeah, it depends. Again, certainly depending.

But maybe it looks at the mobile side once a week, once every other week, something like that. And it is. I just think that that's a really easy way. Do you have to be looking at it every day? No, absolutely not. But it's a really easy way to catch things earlier on that are stopping people from converting or allowing people to drop off earlier in the sales process or the sales funnel than you want them to so it is i i i i always think that this is something that we're blind to but we can't be

because it's or we shouldn't be we are more blind to than we should be and and this is just you know kind of our our chance to recap at the end of the year and and get people thinking about that as as this is a time of year when you can do some things like that you can start to kind of peel back the onion and and do some deeper audits and try to understand what's what's happening what's working, what's not, and hopefully we'll give you some pointers here. Yeah, I think the sentiment around, you know, we have this sort of desktop anchor, you know, myself being a clear victim of that. We're not looking at the phone.

The marketing materials and we're not looking at the actual website on our phone very often is very valid. It's also interesting to look at some of these browsers, by the way. Like if someone clicks on a link in a Facebook ad, that's almost like its own. You can have your own discussion about that or an Instagram ad because it opens in the Instagram or Facebook browser. It's not even like the Safari on iPhone or the Android. Chrome browser that you might use on those two major platforms. So a lot to think about there because I think, yeah, we tend to say, okay, you know,

this is, it passes the test, but that's really not enough. I pulled some data and I looked at some large companies and smaller companies and my typical response over the past year and change has been kind of like what we mostly see is 60-40-ish. I say is isish on those things because let's say is high as 65, maybe a little bit lower depending on the market, the demand, that sort of thing. But also there's technically a few percentage points left over for like iPads and like other size screen devices like TV shows.

go up in analytics every once in a while, which always tracks me up a little bit. Someone like using a browser on their television smart TV to look at the website. But typically like that that smart TV kind of random design surfaces might be 1% at most. The tablet might be 3 to 4% at most. And then the other 96% is typically split between mobile desktop. Again, of what's left, it's typically around 6040. But I looked at a large client that we have in Smoky Mountains and they're actually doing 74% mobile with about 22% desktop. Because again, a few percentage points is going to iPad and other layout.

So, you know, that's a property manager we work with that gets millions of page you use every single calendar year. And they're getting actually 74% of their traffic on mobile. So you could almost make the argument. And this was the thing for a while that you should actually go response. You should go mobile first. You should think about it first from a mobile perspective. And then back into what the desktop looks like. But I will admit like, again, I'm admitting this too.

Like we've done that same thing in the past where we give clients a desktop mockup. And then we just kind of think of it like Lego pieces that we're folding down into a smaller layout and trying to get that to work there. So that's definitely part of the mix as well. I mean, in looking at those numbers, because, yeah, there's some other numbers that are similar to those really low 1%, 2%. So all these people asking to optimize for chat GPT, it's like someone asking to optimize for smart TV, right? It's the same.

No, okay. That might be taking a few extra liberties there. But no, I mean, I think that's the thing. I have people who skew closer to that 7525 mobile desktop, and I have people. up and I have people who skew, I have one that skews just a little under 50%. They have on the mobile side of things. They have just a little, I think it's 51, 40, 48 or whatever it is. But that's not the rule, but I do.

I think that that's something that at a base, base level, before you do any of this other stuff, that's what you should know. I mean, you should definitely know how much your traffic is coming from mobile versus how much is coming from desktop. That's the table stakes. If you don't know that, well, we can't run out of some other things

we can talk to you about as well there. But, I mean, it's just that is, and again, we've talked about it in the roles people play as well. You know, maybe the marketing manager knows that now. Maybe the CEO doesn't know that and stuff like that. I even think the CEO should know that. Like that's a high enough level KPI on the performance of your website,

website overall, you should know and be able to make that, have that conversation that, okay, this is the experience people are appreciating more. What you do with that information is up to you. But I do. I think that that's something that when we do talk about the, you know, optimizing for this and that, optimizing for 74% of your traffic or optimizing for somewhere between 60% and 70%. Yeah, that's probably where you should be optimizing as opposed to focusing on that 20, 25, 30% there, again, played the 80-20 rule like we've talked about many times before.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that as you just begin to go through this process, I would say, just understand that that's the primary interaction mechanism and that you should be probably spending double the amount of time when you're reviewing these sorts of things, looking at the, I'm not saying, like, stop what you're doing and work on your site on your phone. If you need to work on your side on your computer, do that. But, you know, everything that you're doing, you need to think about the context of how it's going to look, operate, et cetera, on mobile.

So, you know, I got some things here. I got some ideas, you know, kind of like how someone might go about this. So first of all, you can check that data, by the way, in Google Analytics. I don't think we said that earlier. So going to analytics, there's a device report there. You can see the breakdown of essentially what amounts to mostly desktop mobile and then the tiny fractions for other ones. So again, are you closer to the 50% number?

Paul's got a client in that range. Are you closer to 75% of I have a client in that range, kind of both ends of the spectrum? But needless to say, it's going to be a lot of your traffic, even if it's not necessarily, technically the majority is going to be very, very close to that in most situations. So I would say the first thing, once you kind of have some sense of that is one more thing I might add in there. Know what devices people are using. You know, it's even funny, even on this podcast recording me, you've got more of an Android guy over on the Pulse side and an iPhone guy, I'm over on my side. But if you go look at the data, iPhone is the most popular in most sites that I looked at.

But you can certainly see different trends depending on the site, the platform, all those sorts of things. So you definitely, if you have the means and ability to do so, I want to test everything on an iPhone, in a perfect world, even multiple iPhones, different sizes. And the same thing on the Android side of things, different devices, the same thing on the Android side of things, different devices. The Samsung appears to be the most popular, but of course, Google has their own product, Google Pixel, et cetera, et cetera. I just don't know the Android world as well as you. So maybe you have more knowledge there. But long story short, you had a test on both not just mobile,

but different mobile sizes and different mobile operating systems as one. Most definitely. Now, here's the thing. Have you, we, for a while, we were testing, doing, there was a kind of an emulator, a mobile device emulator, and it did 1,200 different devices, and you could run something through and see, different customizations and stuff like that. That's probably a little too extensive. However,

have you used like the inspect tools and drop down to different device varieties to kind of see and kind of test how that works when you're kind of testing sites on the back end? Is that something that you do and you utilize? That's probably more of a 300 level class type of thing, but is that something that you found effective and is it something you do? Yeah, I think what I typically find the most effective is when possible using it. So, like, I would rather say that got an emulator double check what I'm seeing to some degree. Yeah, but I like, I like to use it on my phone because it's like, I figured that's what

a guest is going to do. That's what a user is going to do. And yes, you can emulate something on your desktop, but you're using like essentially your mouse to pretend to be a thumb, you know, but that's not really how I use it. So I, I much prefer to actually test it on my phone. And again, cross-check my assumptions in those other emulators, you know, in a perfect world, we'd have like four or five phones sitting in front of me and I could do all sorts of testing on device, you know, across a bunch of different popular platforms. But that's not

quite possible for me at the moment. So I think the best way is to use it on your device and then also, you know, sanity check yourself in the other ones. Because let's say, for example, one of the things that I see a lot and it's early part of our outline here is a date picker. The way date picker works where if you tap on a date picker and it opens a keyboard, that's one that's, it sounds like a pretty simple thing. Oh, it's not the end of the world. Like people can just click done or they can close the keyboard. But it's friction. You know, and we don't want to add any friction in the process, especially when it's think of like a paid click coming from Facebook, a paid click coming from Instagram, coming from Google, you're paying a few bucks to get that

person the websites that are just like toss away some portion of them because they click the date picker, whether it be on an Android phone or iPhone. And it opens up a keyboard instead of just opening up the calendar widget there so they can easily tap and pick their date experiences. Sounds like a simple thing. But believe me, I've seen in, you know, I'm sure you have as well looking at clarity type sessions. You see people drop out just off one little negative small interaction like that. I think that's where that's where I love and probably hate clarity. little bit too is that you do get kind of sucked into those individual interactions and that's where if it's a one z two z type of thing okay it's good to see good to note hopefully that's not

happening more frequently but but it is i i think that's where i mean and i've talked about it often i've caught a lot of things i've caught a lot of areas where elements aren't clickable or the one of my favorite dashboard items for clarity is rage clicks. Like seeing how many people have rage clicks when they're trying to hit the same button or trying to click an element that's not clickable or vice versa or whatever it is. So I do. I think that that's not only just the elements and the engagement, but just seeing how that's another way to see now it's after the fact.

But that's a way to see how things are rendering on different devices as well. because if I see something where all of a sudden a footer bar is taking up half the screen and your header bar is taking, you've got like 50 pixels that people are seeing actual text from your site on on the mobile side of things, whoa, we got an issue here. So I do. I think that that's another great way to just identify how things are rendering, whether they're rendering the way you want them to or not. And again, note it or take action, fix it and make it a better experience ultimately for those people. But that's, that's, that's, that's where clarity is a great tool.

I just don't know how many people leverage it to that extent to be able to say, I'm seeing this, I'm understanding it, and these are the action items I'm taking. I think a lot of people have it as reporting and it's great reporting. It's good to understand those things, but they're not actioning anything off of that. So that's, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's, I'm not going to lie. Like, it's very tedious time consuming. And, you know, one would argue even frustrating to do these kind of tests where you're going

through and looking at many property pages, but I do believe that it's like it's three different booking flows and then you have a good sense of how well it's working. Like you don't need to spend 100 hours on this necessarily, but you just have to go through every step in the process and you can't just double check that, oh, things are okay. I looked at one this morning and the, I didn't have the calendar issue. It was responsive, but what was weird about it, I was scrolling on the property search results page and it was like I could scroll left to right on my phone and it was like the viewport was like awkwardly going over to the right and that like it looks like one of the

images was like too big so it was like flowing over to the right side and I was like again it wasn't like horribly broken it wasn't like a disaster but it just made it tough like I was trying to scroll down the page and instead I was scrolling to the right on the page the user can't see anything but I'm miming right now or the listener can't see anything that I'm miming right now but it was just like really frustrating to go through that and I was like this is a client by the way that said some transact or some you know harm to their conversion rate lately and they're trying to figure it out and I'm like well imagine I'm scrolling down the page and it's go from left right then what I did I opened the filter and I was going to add in a filter like pet-friendly or oceanfront or

whatever the case may be. When I opened the filter mechanism, it covered the ability for me to update the filter. So I could open it and then I could apply the filter, but I couldn't actually close the filter like panel that popped up on the screen. So again, these are very one-off examples. The point is not to, you know, say, okay, check that exact thing. I think it's just like, go, go do it. Like, go give yourself three challenges. I'm going to try to find a one-bedroom condo that sleeps for people. And I want to spend less than $2,000, whatever. make sense for your market and then go through and try to use all the filters walk through process is a clear how do I understand it you know et cetera et cetera and then on flip side you know

okay I'm going to go book a luxury stay for with five people seven people and we want the biggest baddest place some budgets no concern we'll book whatever again go through that process see how it works and I think you'll find a lot of you know your sort of desktop blindness exposing yourself where you find these little things so yeah search and filter I would say speed makes a big difference and and when I say speed yes there are tools you can use like Google page speed insights and that's okay that gives you some level of data but But again, just use it like a user. Google pagebee doesn't really test something like that.

It doesn't test the interaction of going to a search results page, putting in dates, adding a filter and clicking update. That's not what it's testing. And then when you do that, you're like, man, this is really slow. It takes 18 seconds for my website API to go grab all the relevant information from, you know, my PMS of choice, whatever that happens to be, return the results and get it back on the page. And then you're like, I don't think a guess is going to wait that long. I don't think they want to wait 15 seconds.

So I think that's a good example of just like using search filter and then doing a bunch of like challenges, if you will and kind of figure out how it's going to work well. Well, I think doing those challenges for yourself and honestly doing them for some of your local competitors, going to their site and seeing, you know, how their process is, if it's similar, I mean, they might have the same web company, very similar web company that is certainly the case in some markets in our space here. But I would. I would go through, do the exact same thing with, if you have a local competitor that you think

is doing better than you, take a look at their experience. See if there are some experience things that you can improve from your experience and send them back to the web services team there. I think that that's completely valid. And if you think that experience is better, try to emulate it. Try to make sure that it is happening, that you are able to give your users that same experience. But I do on the speed side of things, I think the one thing that the industry is really good at, the web services company, in the industry are really good at is taking a speed test on the home page. Great.

Awesome. And probably good, probably solid. Everything's probably lazy loading, rendering the way we wanted to, maybe a couple seconds. I'm sure most people are passing their core web vitals there. But if you go to your booking page, and again, this is where the rubber hits the road, this is where the money is actually made. That is typically where I see when I do these tests, the slowdown really happens.

And it is. It's that 10 second. It's that 15 second. I've seen 20 seconds. And that's not that's not necessarily. I mean, that is on my phone. But that's on core web vitals too. And that's on that is on the page speed insights. And that is where I do. I get concerned because in most cases, I'm visiting these sites a second or third time. So there is some type of cashed version of that booking, of that booking engine page that's coming up. And I'm still getting it five, 10, 15 seconds later there. So I do. I think that that's something, I don't know how we solve that together as an industry because truly everybody's booking engines, the API is there. I don't know if we need to build them more streamlined. Maybe AI will help with that a little bit. But that is something

we could all do better. We could all make that booking engine page process, whatever that is, whatever we're pulling through the APIs there. We need to improve that for the overall shopping experience for those users, I think, because it is. That's the last thing you want to do is come to a page that just loads and loads and loads because we know. I mean, you maybe have three, four, five seconds is a long time when you're looking at the spinning circle. You probably don't have six or seven seconds, I would imagine, right?

People aren't going to wait around that one. No, but on a serious note, yeah, I think you're exactly correct. I think that it's, you know, and I've had somewhat debates of people in the past. I think I've even debated on this podcast before about the incremental gains you get from going from like three and a half to two and a half. I don't know if I see a lot of value there. There's all this data from Amazon, but I mean, Amazon is such a bigger sample size than you. You know, there's so many things that they are doing that you're not doing. You know, presumably there's lots of alternatives.

Like I think a guess can be somewhat patient, but to your point, like, they're not going to be infinitely patient. So if you can figure out ways to make it faster and more efficient, you definitely want to lean into that. And if your side is quite slow and it is on a serious note, it is loading. 10 seconds or something like that, you are going to have some challenges, I think, on conversion. People generally speaking are that patient. I was going to say, here's another note on that is that you want good SEO, right? I mean, this is something that I SEO is going to be a key for us. Not everybody's going to land on the homepage.

You have, I mean, you should have some content where people are landing on maybe your rentals page. Maybe, you know, your destination-specific rentals page, your properties page. That first interaction cannot be slow because you, that is something where, that is something where if we go in, that is a clarity test that I have done multiple times where if the slow, the load time is X amount, three, four, five seconds, we don't get those users back. Like they bounce and they don't come back. And that's where I love clarity being able to tie that user ID in and say, oh, let's take a look at the last 30 days or 32 weeks after that to see if they came back.

Nobody comes back. So I do think that's something that if they're landing on a secondary page or, you know, a page way we want them to get to, we can't miss that opportunity there. So just another thing there. Yeah. And I mean, all this stuff is, you know, there's no doubt about it, right?

Like you're talking earlier about how complex it is. And it can feel when overwhelming, almost when I go through sites for the first time. Sometimes I feel that way what I'm doing it in audit. And I see a site that wasn't put together that well. And I'm like, fix, fix, fix. You know, I feel like the teacher who's like right in the red line through the paper and finding all these problems.

But at the same token, it's like all these things do make a difference. Like to kind of turn the page you go to the next one. You know, the photos matter quite a bit on the property page, you know, so we've talked about this one before and some of this is kind of best practice. So I assume your web dev, you know, should be able to be able to be a reasonable size. I think you should almost always get an image. You should be able to get under 200 kilobytes without crushing the photo quality. I think it's pretty feasible and possible to get images under 100 kilobytes. And again, keeping the quality decent. Now, you know, some photographers and some, you know, eagle-eyed people may not agree with that. They'll say, hey, you start to see some blocking and some pixelation if you make the image is super small. But I'll tell you what, there's no. way they need to be five megabytes, that's for sure, right? Because if you've got 60 photos loading in five megs a pop, you know, you're asking someone to download like a short video, a worth of content in order to look at the page. So I think that's one that matters quite a bit. I think they expect that instant swipable experience. They might get that on Instagram or they certainly get that on Airbnb. You know, if you want to see it really well done mobile site or mobile

platform, go and look at Airbnb, why not? You're going to get some information from that. And think about smooth it is if you go on the Airbnb app to quickly sign through a bunch of photos. So I think that's something that would be another one that I'd lean into on the property page level is photography, making them load quickly and then making the UI interaction of that gallery matter quite a bit. It's often said that people don't read. I don't know if that's always the case. I would say

just everybody doesn't read. People don't read enough. Maybe it would be a fair assessment of the property page. But I'd tell you what, if you pop clarity on there, like Paul mentioned a few minutes ago, and you go watch a bunch of property page recording sessions. You know, what they do look at every single photo, or at least a lot of them. So that's a huge piece of puzzle. It's crazy. It's crazy.

because when you do see like a 50-click or a 60-click session that takes four or five minutes, you know exactly where they're going. And it's just clockwork every time it happens. I mean, I think, and going back to the images, just the pixelation, okay, again, is it possible that it's going to be pixelated on mobile device? I highly, highly doubt it again. So that's something that, yes, I know that there are a lot of people who do. they find a pretty picture they uploaded it they don't think about they don't think twice about what the size of that image is that is something that if you are you know property manage on site

marketing manager whatever that is make sure you're even talking to the web services team about that like how like what tools do they use maybe they have something that they can help compress the image for you and then you can do it if you want to or you can send it over i don't know that could be a whole different thing there but i i i do think that that's that's something i can remember many any time going on some of these sites and just looking at image after image and you'd have a 70 picture gallery and all of them are a gig to two gigs big well of course the site is slowing down that is way too large i mean there's just no way the server can keep up with that so i i don't know i think that that's something that i think part of that responsibility is it's it's it's two way

street. I think, you know, again, if you're, if you are sending the web services team, some of these things, that should be their first thing is they're compressing the image. They're not just like doing the exact same thing you would do in uploading and saying, oh, this is good. That's, we all have to be better about that. So. Yep, yeah, 100%. So turning, again, turning the page here a little bit, thinking about these different processes, you know, the different pages in the process, literally. All right, you put in dates, you look the property page, you're ready to go. The checkout, the checkout, right? Like, I would almost say, like, if you don't do anything else try to work on the checkout process because that's one where that's

where the rubber meets the road. That's where you're going to get that person to kind of proceed or not proceed. I mean, they're the obvious things, right? Like only have the fields you need, try to collect as little information as possible. You know, if you need a field to validate a credit card or something like that, that's fine. But if you have a field to explain why you need it, you know, so even like a phone number field, you probably need that and say, hey, we're going to text you the security code or the door code once your booking is confirmed. Oh, well, that's why I my phone number. Any field you have, if you can explain it. I mean, name, you don't need to explain name, but like any field you have, if you can explain it, if you might think

there's a little bit of hesitation can make a big difference on conversion. And I think it's like every single property manager we work with has like terms of conditions, here's a cancellation policy, all the stuff they're including there. I think you have to figure out how to package that in an efficient way. I think some of the checkouts I've seen lately from some of the big website devs in our space have gotten really much better at that, much stronger at that. It used to be you were scrolling through like this, you know, 10,000 word document that no one's reading anyways. I think there's actually some of the case law about that now. It's like basically all these long terms and conditions, people are like, they don't read them so

we're not going to force them, which is kind of crazy. But that's maybe a different discussion with the lawyer. But yeah, I think you want to have as little fields as possible. You want to have as little friction as possible, basically. And again, very workable on mobile. The classic example I always do. This is my first test. When I go to the checkout page on a right new website, one I've never seen before. I go to the checkout. I put in the credit card field. Obviously, a credit card is only numbers. So when the keyword pops up, we talked about keyword popping up the wrong way earlier on mobile you want the keyboard to pop up with the number keypad like the old nine key number keypad when it's the credit card field and then when I get to the next

field of well expiration date and CBC would be the same but when I get the next field of name obviously I want that to be a letter keyboard so I want to type in my name which is letters not numbers so that's a good example of just like all the small little things that again a mobile friendly test on Google to go back to that for a second is never ever going to catch the fact that when you tap on a credit card field it's mobile versus desktop but you as a user going through the process will find that and if you can make that process just a little bit smoother, you're going to improve things quite a bit. So, yeah, what's kind of your read on that checkout page? Because, again, that's kind of like the money.

That's where the rubber meets the red. I mean, I love the, I love your, just the idea of the how to of testing it, going through once a month with a team member and going through and going, you know, booking the stay on your website with a real credit card with, you know, using all of these things, like truly going down and the Starbucks line test saying, could I have completed the entire search? booking while waiting for a latte, I think that's a really, really easy way for people to think about it because that's that's kind of the, again, we struggle to read a lot. We struggle to do everything needs to be quicker now.

I mean, we're running at a lightning pace. If we can digest, you know, that three-minute article now in 15-second video, that booking process needs to follow along with everything else. So I love that as a test as something. I mean, whether you're doing it monthly, whether you're doing it, I think that's a good cadence. I don't think it should be any more frequent than that. But I don't think you should let it go any longer than that either. Because again, it depends on if you're making website changes to, I'd argue. So the client that I was referencing a minute ago, they had to make some website changes. And so I don't know. Again, it's not a client yet, I should say. So prospective client, but, you know, were these

issues recent, the horizontal scroll issue I mentioned earlier, or had that been there for some time, because their site was actually converting well earlier this year, and then started to get worse after some changes were made. So, you know, another one, I think that checkout matters quite a bit. Payment, we didn't exactly touch on payment. I kind of touched on credit card, but I will say, you know, we don't, we don't how many clients that are doing this. We have some clients that are using PayPal. I think Streamline seems to integrate natively with PayPal. So, like, it seems to be some of our clients that are on Streamline that are using, like, the Streamline WordPress template website by BizCore automatically at PayPal included or something like that. But

I don't see very many clients that I've worked with, maybe one or two that have Apple Pay or like Google Pay. I'm really bullish on that. Like you mentioned earlier, why would I ever shop on mobile and then book on desktop? Like that's a common thing that people say. I will say if a website except Apple Pay or a platform except Apple Pay, I'm actually more likely to use my phone because Apple Pay is so easy.

Like you just tap the sidebar twice. It face ID's you. You tap your payment method, click pay. Like it's super smooth. And I don't know exactly what it looks like on Android. Obviously Apple I paid. I would imagine not on Android, but a good example of like having your credit card information.

saved and all that kind of stuff in mobile can actually be a better than desktop experience one would one might argue i mean even you that i can remember at darn last year we were talking to a guy who he was excited that his company had just taken their first what was a bitcoin or ethereum booking um remember that oh i i think there was some discussion about that and making and thinking about well are we going to integrate that as a payment method now i think some people maybe change change their thoughts on that a little bit in the short term as AI is maybe taken over a little bit but I do remember that being kind of a theme last year for some people of how can we make the buying process easier and I think as we were having the discussion with

this guy who they were excited about taking that booking there was as a matter of well when are we gonna you know when do you take that money in when do you accept that money when when is it actually when do you want it to come to fruition of a booking that's going to come through is do we want it to be this amount money? I mean, it is. When you're actually going, when you have to watch the market in order to decide when you're going to take the money, take the book, that might be maybe not the best way to do it. But there, I think having a willingness and the ability to want to take those other payment

processing, and I don't know what the concerns are behind the scenes that you have to deal with as well, because obviously you got to keep yourself safe there and make sure that that money is ultimately coming in, but I, the one piece of advice that I heard from a property manager, one of the first ones, as I was getting into the space was, why would I make it more difficult for people to pay? So, like, allowing. That's my philosophy on amount of payments, you know, like different, accepting every credit card, like, that sort of thing, which I think most people are in good shape now.

There certainly was a time period there where they're like, oh, we don't take American Express. So it's like, then that's how, that's how I charge, you know, $35,000 a month of credit card, you know, charges both of my business and my personal life. And, like, I guess you can not take American Express. And yes, I do the backup card, but that's not what I want to do. So, like, we're kind of starting off the wrong foot here to shave a have a point or whatever percentage off credit card fees. Like, believe me, I don't like credit card fees either, but I know that I want to get paid.

So, you know, it's one of those things where you have to decide, like, cost to make business, how do you handle it and go from there? I think that mindset has gone away from the most part. But there was absolutely a period where people were, you know, being very stingy when it came to which cards types they would accept. And then we had clients who would, I think it was like what they were doing is offering people at discount if they paid through like a bank wire or a bank transfer as opposed to a credit card. So that does make sense to me, which is like if I see a price and then you're offering me

a cheaper option if I pay through another method, that I'm open to. That kind of gets me thinking of like, which do I prefer? What is not good is I saw a price then you're adding two or three percent to it for a credit card processing fee. I'm not very bullish on that. I don't think that's the way to go in terms of like keeping your sanity and keeping your customer happy. I'd rather delight them with a potential discount, then, you know, sort of anger them with an unexpected surcharge or an unexpected fee or something like that. So that's kind of be, that's kind of how I would, let's see that and look there. I agree. That's, that's, that's something that it's, I think it's, that's, that's a much better position to be in is, is to come back and say, okay, we're going to,

we're going to actually make it less for it. Like, it's that X, the exceeding expectations. It's, it's, it's one of those things where, I mean, we do it everywhere else. Same thing with, with pricing. you wouldn't want I mean the hidden fees is what has long been an issue of struggle in the space so having that change to the positive not the positive to the hot to more money to the more expensive that's certainly not going to be something that anybody's going to be I mean that's that's that's the gotcha that we've been caught and I air quote that caught heavily on um over the last few years so now you know now we we've poohed the cleaning fees all these other fees that we put in there so now we have you know, if you're going to do it, I do it the right way there. Do make sure you're giving

people that discount. And that's incentivizing them to do it the next time as well. So yeah, exactly, exactly. All right. So a few more kind of odds and ends to clean up here at the end. So kind of what we talked about, right? Like you're not mobile friendly. That's not the way you're thinking about it. You need to be like mobile first or just like obsessed with your mobile experience. So you're going through the process. You know, Paul kind of alluded to this idea of like book your own site, like go through, try to book three different stays, three different vacation rentals get all the way through the checkout process. I suppose you can get to the place where, like, you click the payment button and fall short

if you want to. But yeah, I mean, it's not even a bad idea to like look at what you see after you book and then you can just refund yourself or, you know, cancel the transaction or whatever the case may be. So I think that's a great idea. I think to Paul's point, you're doing that quarterly, you're doing that monthly ideally or when you're making website changes. Right.

Oh, we went and made a bunch of changes. Let's go look at everything again because sometimes unintended consequences can occur. You were changing the gallery on the property detail page, but it messed up something over year the way that photos pull in on search results or whatever the case may be. So different devices, I think actually using the device if you can, not just going through and saying, you know, an emulator. I think that's like the next best thing. That's okay. But if you can't actually use the device, that would be better. You know, do incognito. Don't have stuff auto save. Like use, you know, use the real credit card, that sort of thing. You know, the idea of the

Starbucks line test can do it three minutes, can do it in four minutes, that sort of thing. You know, a lot of people, again, some people do look on mobile and book on desktop, but like, don't assume that. Like, that's not exactly the data bears out to us that like, again, as much as perhaps 75% of your traffic is mobile, not desktop. So it would be foolish to say, oh, yeah, they'll figure it out over there. And then they'll go on desktop and make the booking. It's like, don't assume that. I think they might discover and scroll and look around on mobile, but they, you know,

will often book on mobile too. Like don't assume they're going to book on desktop. The data would be clear that many people are booking on desktop if you got everything, you know, kind of dialed in. So, yeah, you're not your guest. You have all the contacts. You know everything. So I think you want to also go back and say, like, give it to a friend or family member.

Ask them what they think of the site mobile. They may be like, oh, I had trouble here. this didn't work well. That could be good feedback. And honestly, when I think when it comes down to it, it's, this is really important for you to be successful and direct. And I think it's one of those little like hidden underserved. You know, again, we're 150 plus episodes in and we didn't really do a dedicated one on this. So it proves that even we were not paying as close attention to it. So this will be a bit of a priority for me for 26 to kind of just go through that process. We'll have our clients, mobile sites, mobile experiences. Make sure it's dialed in before we get,

you know, all of our 2026 marketing up and rolling. I agree. I mean, I think it's, it is. I mean, keeping in mind who those users could be. And also to keep in mind that, again, your 20-year-old mobile user is going to be different than your 60-70-year-old mobile user. And I think that's true. It's not, it is the, you want to do the mobile versus desktop test, but get some different age groups in there, get some different target audiences in there as well. I love that idea of spreading it around a family and saying, hey, grandma, can you go through

and try to book this? I mean, I think that's legit. I think that that's something that you might understand. I mean, in a lot of these larger multifamily type locations, those are some of the people that are making that booking decision and they are going through that process. And if they aren't able to do it, they might find someone else who might find a different spot even.

So, like, I do. I just don't miss out. I think if nothing else, my final words, just don't miss out on the opportunities. I think that this is the mobile versus desktop conversation is really about those missed opportunities that could be happening that you may not even know that are happening on the mobile side because we have, we're blind to it. So don't miss out on the opportunities.

Make sure you're doing your own best QA and have someone else help. That's what a lot of people in the space are good for. And otherwise, you know, it is. You've got family, you've got friends. It's the time of year to do a little homework. you know it's interesting paul the listeners are a friend and they have a way that they can help us right now by leaving us a review so go to your podcast have a choice click five stars because of course we're going to leave you a five star review if we ever stay with you leave a good

comment email us conrad at buildup bookings dot com Paul at mansey digital.com two different email asks any questions feedback comments concerns um hate mail I don't want it but if you were to send it that's where you'd send it to where we can actually see it so that would be the email addresses to use for that particular thing thank you we appreciate it have an awesome day i'm sure you're listening on your phone so have an awesome day hang out with your phone for the rest of the day and we'll catch you on the next episode appreciate it bye