Heads In Beds Show - The Advanced Elements You Need To Get More Bookings On Your Vacation Rental Website (Website & Conversions) Part II

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul dive into how to build an annual marketing plan including a scorecard, budgets by month, media breakdown and setup a plan to make sure guest and homeowner marketing stays on track. Part II of II! Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing🔗 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. All right. Hey there, Paul. How's it going today? Is it a wild Monday for you?

Wild card Monday? It is a wild Monday. We actually dealt with hand, foot, and mouth this weekend. So it was hand, foot, and mouth and football. There you go. So that's three out of four family members. I'm quarantining, we'll say, in the basement. But yeah, I had plenty of time. I think it's harder to catch as an adult. I think it's a very child-born disease. Oh my goodness. Yeah. So that was a little... We had our bouts of that. We're lucky. This is our first one. so that's that was a little bit better about that yeah it's we're lucky this is our first one so that's the first one but i hate to say there's four more to come in the coming two years that's just that's unfortunate yeah no you gave me plenty

of time to watch some football clearly i didn't pay up for peacock because i just i there's a time and place where you just say nope i'll watch the replay on NFL Network tomorrow which I did yesterday during what should have been our the whatever the Buffalo Pittsburgh game Buffalo Pittsburgh game yeah yeah overall though they were game right that was my takeaway outside of the last one was okay yeah yeah Stafford Goff Lions Rams that was fun but outside of that gotta tell you as a Vikings fan that Cow Cowboys-Packers game, it was a lose for me. And it was the ultimate loss, I would say. Right.

God, do what it did. Seeing him absolutely dealing. Seeing the love out there just slinging it. Although I have to say, I feel like Jerry Jones, he slipped a few hundreds into the cameraman's or the producer's wallet because they stopped showing him. They were showing him for a minute. And then at some point, they stopped showing him. Or he just went to the back and was like no i don't want to be on camera anymore because they kept cutting to the booth early on when it was like a little bit of a game and then as soon as it got to be a blowout they

just cut away from him but i will say this about jerry jones people like to rag on jerry jones he's not afraid of accountability he's not afraid of the media there's a lot of people in sports and in life in a business who the moment the something bad happens they hide in a shell behind say that about about Jerry. He's an older man, right? Like he's in his 80s at this point, I think. And when he needs to, he gets up there, faces the music and he gets in front of 25 cameras and 55 reporters and say what he thinks. And I don't know, I'm not a Cowboys fan, but I kind of respect that about him. But I think there's something respectable about facing what is clearly going to be like a hostile, angry local media or just media in general, when it would be easy for you just to give a little statement and walk out the front door which is what a lot

of owners don't even talk to the media i'm gonna give jerry a little credit for sure it's it is guys in his 80s it's yeah there's i'm sure that's a lot of stress on the body to to have to go through all that i wouldn't want him to be checking his heart or his pulse or his heart rate or his blood pressure at any point during that game man it's it is there's something to be said for being willing to and i think we understand i think everybody understands dallas is a different right and i would argue new england is probably a different market new york is a different market but dallas and football that's one one of a kind there and jerry has helped build that it's but very much a what have you done for me lately type scenario unfortunately and they're not actually in dallas right where they're not in frisco where

they are is that right frisco frisco yeah i think it is in frisco okay there's some cowboys fan right now it's screaming into us you're right sorry irving texas maybe it's irving i don't even know i don't even know but yeah it's it's unfortunate that we each watch the games and obviously we were joking before we recorded we're neutral fans so we're just written for a good game you may not like this i think i'm a lions i think i'm on the lions bandwagon at this point there's something about that locker room speech that you just gotta like the togetherness of that team yeah i feel like they could lay an egg easily next week but i just i like some of their sensibilities about them i think they have such a lovely one-two combo where golf is like the nice guy that you want

i don't know like you want him to like date your sister he seems like and then dan campbell's let's rip their kneecaps off i just i like that kind of dynamic like i feel like that resonates with me a little bit so it's very entertaining for sure it is i can appreciate it as packers i can't appreciate that winning that just that doesn't work for me but the lions that's been i've gotten to laugh a little at their expense over the last three decades or so i I am more than happy to see them. That's a good story. It's the story that I want to see. I don't know.

It's not. And those fans deserve it, man. They've always been so easy for them to turn and be like really bitter. And they've always been a little bitter, but they never, like the Bills fans, they've never completely turned on their team. I think that's what I respect about the Bills fans is that they got just sunned for 20 years by the Patriots and they never, ever completely turned on the team the team of course they were angry at various moments over that time frame but it was never just oh forget these guys i'm never gonna go to the game again and that does

happen quite a bit around our wonderful country in the nfl so you got to give the bills fans credit when they're bad and the lions fans have suffered a lot and they deserve i think some victory and they deserve some wins at this point so i don't think they can win it but i'll be rooting for them maybe they can pull it off for sure that's right that's right yeah you know what else we can pull off which is hopefully transitioning nfo football five minutes on that by the way i don't think the listener ever wants five minutes on it it's the playoffs guys we like watching it sorry uh but otherwise maybe we can put i'll put a little thing in the show now skip to 501 if you want to look at the actual part two all right so part one last week we did um a lot on basic and i

teased a few more advanced booking, direct booking website ideas in there. Part two here, we'll try to transition, do more of these advanced ideas. So I want to preface this a little bit too, by saying on my side, these aren't necessarily ideas that can copy and paste and work in every market. I'll give some examples today actually with a property manager or a sorry, property owner that we work with in the Bahamas who we've had a lot of success with. But what he does honestly is not necessarily replicatable for a lot of property managers because it's very high touch. It's very customized service. A lot of information on his webpages would make sense for

a lot of property managers who are listing 100 properties and vice versa. What 100 property manager unit, I should say 100 unit property manager might do might not at all work for this company in the Bahamas and some of the other projects that we've worked on. So this isn't meant to be like a checklist where you implement everything. It's more just like giving you ideas, what are different ways that we can present information on the website? What are some more advanced things? Although some things I mentioned are pretty widely applicable, like the card to card piece we talked about last week in the checkout and some of those little things. So yeah, maybe we can roll us off here. What are some of the more advanced things that you've seen

in your career? You've had a pretty interesting look into this, right? Because you've spent time on the guest side with your previous career, where you're at today. With Ventura, you've seen some of the more advanced owner tactics. So maybe on the website side, I'd love to hear your perspective on both, maybe some guest things that come to mind. And then I'd love to hear more advanced owner marketing strategies for sure on the website too. I think that's important as well. I think the key is, in most cases, just leveraging the technology that's there. I think more often than not, there is additional technology or there's functionality that if you dig into your website a little bit, you're going to uncover and you're going to realize there's better opportunities out there. Yeah, it is. I think anything you're doing to optimize that booking

process, whether you're sending, trying to customize an approach a little more. I think when I started seeing people specifically put dropdowns to specific units within their booking area, I thought that was something that off the bat, really being able to customize that experience of going down to the unit, going down to the location specific area within the search. I think that really helps refine and get people to the spot that they want to go to. That was something that before it was just arrival, departure, how many guests are you going to have? And I think that's fine.

But I truly think that the more you can build into that search, now you got to be delicate and gentle with that because you don't want to stop someone from actually getting down the funnel. But again, putting in locations, putting in those areas. And I've seen even people use must have some, if it is, if it's a pet friendly amenity, if it's a hot tub, if it's a swimming pool, trying to build that into the search functionality somehow without making it a requirement to actually get those search results out there. I think ways that I've seen a lot of people try to do a lot, that's just one example, but a lot of things with that booking process to really

try to give people a leg up on the search, not trying to just go, okay, dates and rates, and I'm blind to everything else. Popular searches, finding that by the property name, doing stuff like that. I think that's certainly something that is going to give people, doing stuff like that, I think that's certainly something that is going to give people, maybe it might make travelers feel like there's a more customized experience on that side of things. On the homeowner side, it is, there's a lot. It's really, I think, people's willingness to think outside the box and present owners with a lot of information because it's, if it's one thing I've said over and over on, on, on these, on our episodes, it's that that is not a low touch decision. It's not a low effort decision.

You want all the information you need possible, or you did like that's possibly out there to really make a decision on who's going to take the best care of your home. Who's going to earn you the most money. I've heard some people trying to do a training course, give people a little LMS system of this is how I'm going to onboard, not just my owners, not just my homeowners and stuff like that, but actually prior to them signing the deal. These are the steps that we want to make sure that in this case, this is one particular partner who has the number that they want. So now they're just refining. They're trying to make sure, okay, do you fit our brand? As opposed to, we're going to take them all. We're

going to, we're going to make sure that anybody who is, who is two beds, two baths in this area, we're going to take them all. No, they're truly trying to refine. So they're trying to upfront, make sure that someone is qualified, more qualified than really anyone I've seen before there. So maybe you can do guest books I've seen before there. So you can do guest books, you can do guidebooks, you can do whole reference pages. There's a lot that we can do. Yeah, but I think it is. I think the more you can customize the experience, that's really what a lot of these advanced features I think are about. It's making sure people really feel like I'm not just coming to

the website as any other user. I'm coming to the website as Paul Manzi or as Conrad O'Connell. And I'm going to have that experience that leads me to where I want to get to, whether that's the content, whether that's the booking page, whether that's the property management page to list your home. So that's a lot. What do you think? What are some of those things? Pick out what I had, or what have you seen that's been effective, especially on the booking side of things? Yeah, I think maybe the homeowner piece really quickly I'd like to touch on. You said it there, but I think it's worth expanding on is the idea of comprehensive information. I love that word. That's my favorite word to use when it comes

to like, how long should a blog post be? How much information should I put on this page? We should cover it comprehensively. Some things we can say relatively quickly, but there's usually a lot more to things when you dig under the surface. Like I found the people that are good at this might have a background in journalism or reporting when there's like a simple story, but they usually can dig further and find out what the actual truth is. So on the homeowner side, like the idea of managing, I will manage your rates to get the most revenue out of the property. There's a lot of layers to that. Describe to me how you do that. If I was like, if I was coming in the industry brand new, I'm a 21 year old college graduate and you have to hire me for your vacation rental company.

And this is a fictional scenario. What would you explain about the rate setting process? Oh, once you dig in and ask people a few follow up questions, usually you find some pretty insightful information from that. And that could be great fodder for landing page copy or information. Oh, so what we do is three times a week, we log in and we'll look at these five metrics. We look at the average rate. We look at competition.

We do use a pricing software, maybe like a price labs type tool to help supplement us, but we don't just blindly follow it. So I'm like, oh, these are all little gold nuggets that you're actually dropping right here that we can pick up. So if it was three times a week, we could say something to the effect of, I can't do the math in my head, 52 times three, 156 times a year, we adjust rates based on the most up-to-date data. That's a pretty compelling bullet point for a landing page, right?

We use pricing software like price labs, but we don't follow it blindly. So we're technology assisted with our pricing recommendations. We don't just follow the systems. We do apply our own logic based on our own internal data or our own internal metrics and reporting on when we should lower or raise rates. Okay, that's interesting. That's already something that I'm probably not going to have access to if I'm just one property host as an example. So that's just one example. You could sit there and pick it apart, but that's a lot more compelling on the landing page and to make the information more comprehensive on the website, on the homeowner side, to say those types of things, as opposed to we're going to manage

your property to get the most rates. That's like a benefit. But I think sometimes we got away from feature conversations because people seem to almost feel like that's reductive or that it's just, I remember having this conversation once with a client where they're like, well, of course we do that. Everybody does that. And I'm like, but they don't necessarily know that. They don't know that you do that. They don't know maybe that you do 156 price adjustments a year. They don't know that you do three deep cleans a year or four deep cleans a year right before

season, middle of season, end of season. And then for the new year or something, maybe they don't know that. And they think they're going to have to go do it themselves or they don't understand the other property managers. And I was like, don't make that assumption either. Maybe the other property manager doesn't do that. And it benefits you to talk about your process that might be more comprehensive or in-depth or whatever the case may be and go through detail on that.

And I think it's a risk to assume that other people do that. Again, giving other examples here, we're a little bit off the core topic here, but just to drive the point home, we had a client come our way recently and they were paying for SEO services from another agency. And I had to ask them, I was like, okay, we were considering going from them to us. I'm like, obviously I want that to happen,

but let's make sure we fully understand what apples to apples is here. Because the subtext here is that we were more expensive. Our monthly pricing was higher. Not significantly, but enough they weren't just going to be like, okay, that's not no big deal.

Let's figure out what the parameters are. And we'll ask them what that includes. Do you have a scope of work? Do you have a proposal? Do you have something that they're actually, a list of what they're are. And we'll ask them what that includes. Do you have a scope of work? Do you have a proposal? Do you have something that they're actually a list of what they're doing? And long story short, what they were doing is not, I'm not saying this in a bad way necessarily, although we were lucky enough to sign the client, but I'm like, this is an apples and oranges.

What they're doing is not nearly as in-depth or as time consuming, frankly, as what we're doing. And here's the results of our approach. Show me the results of their approach. Hasn't been really successful. I think it easily justifies the additional price because what they're doing isn't really working. What we're doing, we've proven over and over again, has a pretty decent chance of success

without tooting our own horn too much. And I think that a lot of people don't necessarily think about that in the homeowner side. Or maybe they don't have a really refined process, right? A lot of clients that we've talked about before, mutual clients are people that aren't getting the results they want from a homeowner because they're in these really competitive markets and things like that is like they don't necessarily have a better mousetrap than their competition. So it's really challenging to go out there and say, yeah, I've got a little bit worse website, I've got a smaller email list, I don't quite manage the rates at the same level of accuracy as you do. Like you start

going to the list if you're being if you inject someone true serum and you start to compare them against the best property manager in the area, they're falling short seven or eight of the 10 or 12 categories that a homeowner might care about. And it's really hard to bridge that gap. So I think some of what we're talking about today to try to bring it back to advanced rep booking sites is like, these are the things that if you are a manager, once you have budget that's coming in that you can deploy, it makes sense to invest in things that are a little bit more custom, a little bit more tailored to the user, whether it's the homeowner side or the guest side, because then you're actually building a little bit of an advantage. And you're not just saying,

yeah, we're just using a template site for our PMS. And that's it. And they're not really thinking of any improvements beyond that all the best companies we've worked with typically have the ability to make advanced websites a lot better than just using these basic default functionality. So that's after I say last week that I have given examples of where we've taken basic, more basic straightforward websites, and they've gotten a lot of revenue. So I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just giving examples of things where you want to separate yourself. You don't want your lead to be one point.

Back to our football conversation earlier. It's much better to be the Chiefs Dolphins and be the Chiefs in that scenario where you've got a 20 point lead or a 30 point lead on your competition, not a one point lead because it just takes one little thing to go your way to not win it. So those are just some overarching thoughts that I had around your homeowner piece around comprehensiveness. And I think that applies as well in the guest side of things, which I can go over here in a second. But yeah, I mean, I think that just to touch on that as well as that one thing that you said there was just because everybody's doing it doesn't mean you shouldn't put it. And I think that's

for owner side or guest side, just because everybody's talking about it, they're talking about it for a reason there. It's just that we go back to the templates for a little bit. Just because people are using the templates work. So there are things about those templates that work. Just because everybody has managed revenue. Okay, explain how you do it. Get into that granularity. You talk about it in a more specific way, but don't not talk about it

just because you think everybody else is talking about it. That's not making you unique in any way there. So yeah, I just, I think that just as that's the reason we've done it before, we're not going to try it again. We don't want to say that, but we also want to make sure that if, talk about it, make sure you're telling people about the experience either on the owner's side or the guest side, that's going to happen and do it in great detail. And even if

it seems over, you know, it seems like you're overdoing it on overkill. I don't think I've ever heard, I've ever seen a review on a website or anything like that said, Oh, I got too much information about this rental or this property management company that I was working with. That's not that I don't think people will choose not to read it. They're not going to say, oh, they're not going to complain that you gave them too much information there. Yeah. And I think part of that to go through that a little bit further, maybe I'll bring up my property detail page checklist because I think that's a good example, is that it also depends on how you display that information and present that information. So I do think people might say that if the information was presented very poorly, if it was like one long page, or you just have to

scroll down. But if you're sectioning things out, or like one of our main things that we're doing now on some of the sites that we're putting together is having that tabbed interface on desktop. And then a mobile it might just be in separate sections for kind of SEO purposes a little bit there too. But if I can click on what I'm interested in that I'm going to direct my attention towards what's the most relevant. And we talked last week about how when you have 50 photos, some guests will actually sit there and click through 50. If you have 60 or 75 or a hundred, there's guests that will click through all 75 or a hundred photos, which is always interesting to me, but having all those different elements on the page. So here's the pieces that I had on the basic version,

a property name. I think that we can't overstate what that might look like too, as well. We talked last week, I think it gave a story or an example about someone that had a unit and it was like 601l lockout was on the website and i'm like nope we're gonna give it some names but you can have fun with names we have clients who have done like a theme we're working with a new client today who has like wine themes for his property so one's like the chardonnay property one's the cabernet property and stuff like that so there's this and then of course the chardonnay one is like this red the other one's a different color red and there's a like kind of a yellowish one in there that's like a white white wine. I don't know. I'm not a wine drinker, but it's like he has some fun with it. It's not just coming up with some name and also making that name unique

as something that can make a difference too. That way people, if they find your property on Airbnb, they can find it more easily on your direct booking website when they go off platform. So little things, even starting with the very first piece of text on the page, after the navigation, things like that, the property name, there's a lot of thought that can go into that. Photo, property page sections, daily rate, call to action, book now button. So these are all things where showing like the average daily rate is somewhat useful sometimes, but it sometimes makes a little bit more sense to focus on what's the overall like average price or something like that. So people can orient themselves a little bit to, is this property right for me based on what I'm looking for? I think it's always challenging to

make someone put in dates and then only give them a sense of the price after that. I think it's better to hopefully give them a little bit more context beforehand. Now I know some type of websites don't allow that or you have to change that number manually. And I know that number is rife with problems because you might have a rate that's 200 bucks a night and you might have a rate that's 1000 bucks a night for the same property. But those things that we've tested, it seems to help people get a little bit closer where they want to go. One other thing, this was actually done by the previous agency that I worked at. And I haven't really seen a lot of people copy this. I don't know why. But they have a section on their property detail pages where a guest can ask a question, hey, does this property have XYZ?

And then when they answer that question, they don't just leave it in an email inbox somewhere. They post it on the website. So if you go down underneath the property description towards the bottom of the site, you'll see some occasional websites out there have this little Q&A section where people have asked five or six questions a few times and it gets put there. Not only is that a little bit of content, which might help a little bit of SEO, maybe not a ton. There's something there that gives people the sense of what people are asking questions about and then they can respond to it.

How far is this property from the beach and things like that? There's a property manager at Outer Banks. I think it's Outer Banks Blue that does a good job with that. On every single property detail page, they actually tell you exactly how far it is to the beach. Because it's like beachfront or not beachfront is somewhat, there's some looseness on some of those ideas, like what you may consider beachfront, I may not. But yeah, I think if you go on there, yeah, there's a feet to the beach section on the Outer Banks Blue property detail page. Not a client, by the way, just someone that I've been observing from afar.

And I thought that's really clever. Like I'm on one right now that says it's 817 feet to the beach. That's about as precise as you get right there. You got to respect that level of specificity, right? There's no gray area. How far is it from the beach? I'll tell you to the foot how far it is from the beach. I'm picturing them Paul would like a range finder like me, right? Yards be the nine iron. But anyways, I think that's clever. And there's a lot that you could do. So if you keep getting questions over and over again, on your property pages about the same information, time after time, maybe having a separate section on there or talking about what's there. It makes a lot of sense. Another property manager that we work with actually has a list of standard amenities. So

I'll get the exact list so I don't get it wrong. But there's a list of things that every property has no matter what. In other words, it's not a property on my program unless it has these things. But we don't, we say that, but then actually in the search results, we mentioned, hey, this includes the standard list of amenities. Every single property has Wi-Fi. Every single property has a washer and dryer, which in this market actually is not common. Every single property has a private balcony. They won't take a property that doesn't have a condo building that doesn't have its own private balcony.

Every single property includes linens. In most markets, people are like, of course, it includes linens, but that's not always the case in every market, especially on the East Coast. There's somewhat regular in some markets that you might find that's not the case. Every property now has HD TVs, not only in in the main living area but every bedroom now has an hd flat screen tv again there was moments in the past where that wasn't the case so these are amenities are all checkboxed on every single property detail page so people know they're included and they've also got to the stage where every property i think now has both a regular

coffee maker and like the keurig keurig smart coffee maker stuff so those are two private checked amenities not every property has a hot tub for example so that's not checked on every coffee maker and like the Keurig smart coffee maker stuff. So those are two private check amenities. Not every property has a hot tub, for example. So that's not checked on every one, but you can start to look back and see. And I think they're working through the next one on their list. I'm looking at their website right now. They have a workstation one that's not checked on everyone. So I know they're working towards that where they're going to have a dedicated desk setup. I know it's something that can make a little bit of a difference on Airbnb as well as my understanding is if you can check that you have a workstation, you show up in more

searches. So they don't have that fully there yet, but they've got most of the way there yet. So these are the little things, right? And I know some property manager might listen and go, it's in my photos. Yeah, but they're not processing everything inside the photos necessarily, right? Like they want to look through and see and they want to see and read and be confirmed like what they saw is actually going to be the case in reality. So those are a few little things that I picked out. I don't know if anything there stood out to you as a expansion idea for you it's funny i was i'm looking at a different outer banks partner actually and it's and it there is theirs is save included value hassle-free freebies almost the same thing free bread linens free bath towels for keyless entry

free wireless internet interest for you way away plan club discounts for outer banks fun free beach gear included i'm sure there's something there, but there's a question there, which they do. They have a little light box, hover over, giving people that FAQ and giving that information. And then a free welcome bag with starter supplies. I think it is anytime you can, like it is that perceived value saving and freebies, whatever, however you're saying it, everything is included. I think that's incredibly important because it is. It's making people feel like there's more value to it. It's not that they're just getting everything that they want in the actual accommodation, but hey, I'm not having to pay for any of these other

stuff that I saw fees for with this other person that I looked at there. So in this case, this section, you can trust this partner is right below their photo gallery and right above their kind of amenities tabs and everything like that. So I think it's a good spot to lay everything out as this is what everybody gets and then bring it into what you individually get at this property specifically. I love that idea. As far as property detail pages, what are your thoughts on floor plans and video walkthroughs? I know that there's a lot of data out there

that some of the floor plan creators will say that indicates that people who use these floor plans seem to convert at a lot higher rate. I don't know if I can necessarily back those up with the effectiveness that they seem to claim. So it seems like it helps. Like when I go look at clarity recordings, for example, and you have a floor plan or virtual walkthrough,

some percentage of people use that for a plan or virtual walkthrough. And of the percentage of people who use it, they seem to be ones that seem to book at a high rate. So definitely not against it. To be clear, I just wonder how much time and effort is being spent on that versus the reward and upside of it. So I think it's a question of like bandwidth. Is that if that's going to take away from your budget in other areas?

Hey, I did the walkthrough, but now I can't do Google ads. For example, I had a really hard time supporting that idea where it's like blowing your budget on things that maybe five or 10% of people on a page might engage with. But I do think it like when I see the Matterport style walkthroughs, I'm like, these are awesome. Like the level of detail you get on that. It's actually better than photos. If you're willing to take the time to go through a Matterport walkthrough, in my opinion, we didn't have one on the property that we stayed at a few months back when I was visiting

my grandfather when he was sick in the hospital. And I was like, man, this would actually be a really good Matterport tour because it would explain it was a three level house and it was narrow and small. And this would have actually helped us understand better where we're going to put all these kids when we got there. And I feel like that's property that would benefit from it. A condo doing a Matterport, I torn on that one. What are we really going to get out of the one or two bedroom condo getting a Matterport tour of it? If anything, I might want to do a Matterport tour like the amenities. What does the pool look like? And what are the other things I have access to? But I think the bigger, the more complex the house, honestly, the bigger, more

complex your property detail page might need to be to explain everything that's included or not included. So back to this example, I'm talking about looking at the seven, eight bedroom house, like that one is probably going to benefit more from a Matterport tour than a studio or one bedroom condo. So I think know your inventory, know what makes the most sense, do some testing on these things. But if you can figure out ways to make them a little more economic, I think that's the key. I know there's some providers in our space who charge like a monthly fee for every single property adds up as you get bigger, you might be paying one of these companies 500 1000 $2,000 a month for what is essentially pictures or like little pictures of

the way that floors are laid out. So again, not boohooing the idea, but just I think that it's something where if you can figure out a way to include it in your gallery or that also will distribute to Airbnb, for example, so that might actually help you get more bookings there. I think that may be the better play versus marrying yourself to one of these vendors that seem to charge a lot and don't necessarily have some secret sauce,

magic stuff behind the curtain that really makes it worth it, in my opinion. So that's just my view of it. I mean, maybe there's someone out there who can show me some different data but some of the data i've seen before has been extremely misleading with the way that it's structured in the way that they talk about people who visit these pages and then come back are already pretty engaged so that's my feel about card abandonment emails you didn't ask me about that but card abandonment emails some percentage of people who abandon the cart are just shopping

right they're just going through the process of looking at properties. And some percentage of those people are going to come back and book. I'm all for cart abandoned emails, to be clear. Very pro cart abandoned emails as a way to get people who abandoned the checkout to come back and make a booking. But it's not all incremental. It is completely dishonest to say that it's all incremental, that none of these bookings would have occurred, and that our email saved $100,000 a month of revenue. There's reports I've seen like that. And that's just, that's very intellectually dishonest, in my opinion. Maybe a chunk of those would have turned on. And I know this is true, because I have a client whose their connection broke accidentally for a few weeks,

and we barely noticed a huge blip in bookings and back on and things seem to go a little bit better. So it has value. But I just, I just like some people in our space that overstate the value of certain things by taking the that on the doorstep type conversion that's about to occur, and then attribute every attribute one little thing to that one thing. Like that's just not how our industry works. And that's not how booking works. There's thousand factors that go into it, including most importantly, perhaps the property itself.

We talked about this before, right? It's so hard to take a mediocre property and get any sort of good numbers out of it from a marketing standpoint because it just doesn't attract the right type of person who's ready to book. We have a client that has these beautiful architectural digest featured stunning homes and everything's just easier from a marketing standpoint. These properties are amazing.

You know what I mean? So everything we do on the marketing side just works better. So think about that when you're coming to laying out property detail pages or building some advanced booking website. Don't build some advanced booking website for a 10 unit, one bedroom condo type company. It probably doesn't make any sense. You need to focus on a different game. The more unique and big and large and complex your properties are, the more some of these things can help you really customize and stand out from the crowd. And I think those are the things worth leaning into for sure, in my opinion, at least. Agreed. Agreed. Cool. I got some other ideas here. So let's go through checkout. We have a few other things that we can go through here. I noticed that this is this was seem to be a trend that I haven't seen as much again.

And then it feels like it might be coming back, which is this idea of make an account to book out, to book with us or creating an account. There's all these new tools nowadays for like social sign and then things like that. And to be clear, I don't have a ton of data on this. I have a handful of clients that have done this. It seems like the data seems pretty positive overall.

So they send 50% of people to a checkout that asked them to register, send 50% of people that check out, that can just check out, put in a form, fill in a form with your name in it. And the people that actually are asked to register seem to come back at a little bit higher rate. They seem to be a little bit quicker to book once they save their information. And the conversion rate seems to be a little bit higher overall if we look over a long period of time. Now, it does hurt conversions in that moment, right? When they click checkout as a rating book now, when they're asked them to make an account,

that can create like a 10 or 20% drop off of people going to the next stage of the checkout process. But more people make it through once they've signed up, if that makes sense. So that's the battle, I think, with that idea. Maybe that's why a lot of vacational managers haven't adopted it. I know there's a lot of people in our space

who talk about loyalty. How do we get the guests to be more loyal? How do we make sure if they come back again, they book with us? And I think making an account is a pretty solid step in that regard. Look at all the big hotel programs, the Marriott's of the world, all these companies, what do they want you to do right away? What's your rewards number? What's your number? And they're trying to reward you based on that.

And obviously that's been super successful for some of the largest hotel brands in the world. So it makes sense to want to duplicate that in our world and vacation rentals. But I don't know if I've seen enough data right now to really have me leaning into it, but I think it's something you should maybe consider and think about testing. How can I get someone's a little bit more information before they book and then see if I can then remarket to that person if they don't convert going back to my abandoned cart rant from a minute ago and see if we can get more reservations in there. So I don't know your experience or perspective on that, excuse me, making an account. But I think it's gone away. I feel like it's coming back. And I think there's some juice in that, for sure. That was something working on because

previously worked with not just vacation rental companies, but definitely some hotels and some chains in there too. And that was always, we always had to dance around any changes we wanted to make to something that was more of the corporate side. And in most cases it was, they had something that was custom to them for their own property but the booking went back to corporate one of the one of the big booking engines there so there wasn't a whole lot we could do but that was always a very interesting question to ask of can we move the sign up somewhere else and no that's more important to the corporate side of things than it is to to us we don't care we want the bookings but i can understand being being under those

flag hotels and doing stuff like that and wanting to get a membership and but i think you do you if if you're going to do something like that you really have to be able to offer something like if you're signing up make sure they're signing up for something that they're going to find value in whether it's the newsletter whether it's maybe's maybe you've got a loyalty rewards group and it might not have to be money off anything, but somehow they're enrolled into getting additional perks during the stay or different amenities or being able to buy into something else. I think that's, yeah, my first thought always goes to conversion rate goes down because

immediately that's what, and I don't, I always want to remove any barriers and obstacles to getting that ultimate booking there. I think I'd feel much more comfortable with it signing up on the guest side versus trying to do something like that on the owner side, because it's already a small window that you're going after, a small audience that you're going after and trying to elongate that process anymore just isn't going to be to your benefit. The lower cost per acquisition, yeah, if you lose 5%, 10%, 10%, 15%, you can make that back up. You can pay that money back to pay for what you've lost there. And it's going to look at like a pretty good return on your investment.

It's not going to hurt your ROI that much. It is. I haven't seen it in a while. It's not to say that people aren't going to try to do it more, but I think the key is if you're going to do something like that, what is the actual value that you're going to deliver to them? Because if they're signing up tangibly, they got to feel like they're going to get something in return. They've put some skin in the game outside of the credit card or the booking that they're going to take from you as well. What are you actually providing them? So making sure that you're giving something when they're giving you something, I think that's pretty key there. But ideally, I don't want to clog the booking funnel. I don't want to add another step. So that's always going to be my hesitation. But if you've got a deliverable on the back end of it, go for it. I think that's going to be the key there. If people see that value of giving you their information, then you can give them value in return. And again, if that's a

quarterly email or a quarterly discount opportunity, they're not going to stay all four quarters with you, but just making them feel like they're getting some value there on the backend. Yeah, I think that's ultimately what it comes down to, right? A lot of people want to make the direct booking conversation all about reduced rates. Hey, you paid less on our website than you pay on OTAs. And I think that's such a small part of it. I do think you should offer a better rate, like it should be lower. But I don't think it actually needs to be lower by the amount that they get because the guest is willing to pay. If the guest is willing to pay, why does Airbnb, what's Airbnb is doing at this point from a revenue perspective, right? Like,

people obviously aren't that perturbed by the fact that they're paying Airbnb services, or they would stop booking an Airbnb. So it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to come to the conclusion that guests aren't nearly as turned off by these fees as we think they are, or maybe as we assume they are on our side of things. And I saw someone post a screenshot the other day of a booking on Airbnb, which where it's uncapped, by the way, and this was like a large luxury house, where I think it was like $3,200 was paid between the 3% processing fee on the PM side, host side, and the 12% or whatever it is, 13% on the guest side. They paid that service fee directly. So I'm like, a lot of value is exchanged here that went straight to Airbnb. And of course,

the bulk of it goes obviously to the property manager in this case, or the host, whatever it happens to be. But I haven't looked at a lot of bookings like that where I go and do the math on it. So I'm like, that's your marketing budget. That's your budget where you have to sit there and figure out, okay, how am I going to fund my Google ads? Someone commented on one of my LinkedIn posts last week and they were like, who pays for it? We're talking about Google ads and I'm like, the property manager pays for it. And they have to bake into their fee structure, how they're actually going to do brand marketing,

advertising, and how they're building their brand. That's the value of what the property manager is doing. If they're not doing that, then they're really just a order taker in some respect, right? They're ordering, they're taking in orders and distributing to Airbnb. They're taking in orders and cleaning the property. And I don't know, there's probably properties where that is a service that people are going to provide. But I feel like the best property managers are leaning into the fact that they can do

their own marketing advertising. And they need to sell that perhaps more aggressively to the homeowners of here's what the fees are going to break down and why. Here's why we break down the fees in this way. So when you see an admin fee, or reservation or booking fee on our website, and you think, oh, you're just trying to edge fees on your side and on your side, it actually gives your business and your property a lot more stability by being able to take in direct booking and make a lot more from that you should make a lot more from that, that a booking an Airbnb and that should be completely by design. The guest on the other

side is probably willing to pay that fee like they're not that perturbed by that fee because otherwise Airbnb would have no bookings, right? They charge some of the highest fees in the industry. On the guest side, where they actually see a line item on there that says Airbnb service fee and people pay it. So I think we've gotten too far away from it where 100% of the book direct messaging is about rate and fee. I think it needs to be a part of it for sure, but in my mind, it shouldn't be the most important thing, nor should the property manager be trying to make their rates and fees significantly lower. They shouldn't be eating that whole 12% and just saying, okay, on our website, it's $100 a night. And then on Airbnb, it nets out to $1.15 a night or whatever because of fees. In my mind, it's like

it should be $1.08 on your website and $1.15 on Airbnb's website, right? There should be some difference. It should be somewhat noticeable. It shouldn't be $1 or less or something like that. But that 8% that you can then take in on your side as a fee and collect that. And that's your marketing budget where you can actually go build an awesome website where you can actually pay for Google ads, where you can pay for whether it's on your own team or if you hire an agency, it doesn't even matter. But that all requires money, right? You need money to fund those operations and to fund those systems.

And without the fees breaking out in your favor a little bit, how are you ever going to get there? And this is somewhat common that we'll talk to people who are like, all these ideas you talked about in the show sound great. And I don't know how I'm going to do any of them because they just don't have enough margin built into their business. And it's sad, it upsets me a little bit that they've built in some cases, like a relatively large business from a revenue standpoint, but they just, they're not taking enough in to really justify these other adjustments and changes. And I think that's, that's a shame. Like the best companies are going to be the ones that

build their own brand and moat. And then over time you actually find out it's more efficient because you start to get direct bookings without having to do lots of marketing and advertising, right? The direct bookings just come in because people know you, like you trust you, you've done a good job with awareness. And then people just come back to you organically without you having to spend any money on ads or no incremental costs occur. So then as you grow, your actual cost per booking actually goes down significantly. That's what some people don't realize when they're in that earlier. What's it called in your side of things that you guys talk about like this disappointment that occurs? Traffic disappointment? Traffic disappointment?

Yeah, it's like, I think I need to work on that a little bit more on my side, the messaging around that. So yeah, again, I've done a relatively poor job keeping on topic today. So I apologize to the listener. But these ideas, I think are ones where they all impact the website. Like one thing that I will say on the website side of things is how you present that fee is critical. When you present it, do you present it on the property detail page or in the checkout? What do you call that fee and how you explain the benefits of that fee if you do have like little tool tip on it or those types of things I think are important.

Because if you just have if you just stuff admin fee in there into a lot of money, then people are not going to like that. If you explain what it provides, this provides our local support team. It's so funny because Airbnb's little fee tool tip, I think says something to the effect of, this is how we provide support to you. I had a property manager that I work with and they said, this is how we provide local. And then they like bolded and underlined local support to you, including property care maintenance in our team that's local in market name. So they were taking the bit of the joke of the Airbnb fee and saying,

Airbnb is providing you a call center in the Philippines. We're providing you John, who's going to get in his truck and roll up to your house. The vacation rental, if something goes wrong and fix whatever problem is there. Those are obviously two different worlds that some people just can't, don't understand in their head until they've gone through the process a few times like we have. So yeah, how you talk about the fee and how you structure that fee on the website, I think is important. Some people decide on the checkout page to collapse everything.

So it's just, there's a rent fee and then there's a taxes and fees line item and everything just gets collapsed together. And then you click it to expand. And that's where you see like credit card processing fee or the hot tub fee or the this and that. I think I'm okay with that. I think showing like the idea of showing one fee, one fee line for $400 versus showing four fee lines for $100 each. I think the psychology works a little bit more in your favor to show one line, but let them expand and dig in if they want to. But naturally, you got to be ready for the questions, right? Why am I paying all these fees? That's what the guest is going to ask when they're going through that process. And you got to be aware of that. So everything here is a little bit of a

trade off. And at this stage, maybe as a way to ground us out here, anything you decide to test on the marketing side of things on your website to make it more advanced or to go against the norm or try these different layouts we've talked about on checkout pages, on property detail pages, on homeowner pages, they're all great, but you got to hopefully have enough data coming in to justify whether these are correct or not correct. So maybe Paul, you can round us out on A-B testing. I know you're somewhat knowledgeable about that and how you actually do A-B testing properly and get enough of a sample size to really make solid conclusions. I think it is. That's really the key is you have to, and you have to give it the time. You can't just do it for two weeks or

do it for a month and say, ah, didn't work. I think whether you're setting up a two completely separate tests or two completely separate landing pages, two completely separate web pages, whatever it is, property description pages, everything you're trying there. With A-B testing, I like testing small things. You don't want to test eight different things and it's not A-B testing at that point. You want to test one parameter, one variable, whether it's a headline, whether it's a description, whether it's strike through pricing, whether it's this fee as opposed to this fee, naming it this, naming it that. And again, using Microsoft Clarity, using some type of session recording, being able to see how people are actually using, seeing whether what it is, you're going to be able to tell right away if you're presenting something as a one fee as opposed to another fee and

people are consistently hovering over, dropping that down, trying to figure out what that line by line of the fees are. Okay. That's, that's obviously something that's taken interest there, taken notice by the guest. But I think with any A-B testing that you're doing, you want to make sure you have enough value. So however you can do it, if you have to game the system a little bit, you maybe you put a little extra money in your Google ads budget or your Facebook ads budget or whatever that

is. But you want to make sure people have that unified experience the same way. They're not coming in to a different area and then somehow they can't find their way out or they're in some type of a mousetrap within the website. It is try to test one thing at a time. Do it for enough time so that you can get enough traffic there so you can actually have statistically significant results to make sure that what you're saying, what you're confirming, your assumption, or that you're actually testing the variables and seeing this performed better than this.

Let's make this change. Because the last thing you want to do is rush to make that judgment, rush to make those changes, and then rush to update the changes, then rush to this and rush to that. to update the changes, then rush to this and rush to that. And you're never going to have, you're constantly in A-B testing mode and you don't have a true brand at that point if you're constantly testing and trying and doing all these different things. Iterating is fine. Doing A-B testing is fine. But make sure you're still sticking to your bread and butter, your brand awareness, your everything like that. I think so often we just,

we don't give it enough time. So give it enough time and test one thing at a time. A lot of the A-B testing tools actually want you to see a thousand conversions. That's not a thousand visits. If you were actually looking for amazon.com or Nike or something like that, they would want a thousand purchases to come through. So in our world, they would want to see a thousand bookings come through to really know the difference between option A and option B. For some clients that might be like, we haven't driven a thousand bookings since we've been working with them and it's been years. So that can be obviously an extreme bar, but having some kind of bar and it's not four bookings is not enough. That's just random. In fact, some of the

tools actually allow you to run AA tests, which is you run the same variant against each other. And if you were to run an AA test, even on a big website, and I've done this before, you actually see some variation over the first two weeks, because for whatever reason, just a few more people happen to go to this segment versus this segment. And you're like, A is performing 50% better B, how's that possible when they're the exact same. And the truth is that you just need enough time to normalize things out and level things out. I'd say letting maybe 10 bookings per treatment or 20 bookings per treatment is maybe valid. It's like four, it's really not even good enough to be honest with you. And ideally, 2000 3000 visitors might

start to give you an indication of what's working better versus what's not working well. And that can take a lot of time to your point. So I agree with you. I think when people bring up a B testing nowadays, I tend to just turn it off, turn that idea off, because I'm like, we need more traffic for this to really work. And for it to really be successful. And that's my takeaway on that. And everything we're talking about here is like trying to get you more successful on the advanced website side of things. We didn't even talk about the Patriots, by the way, who need to be more successful with a new coach. So RIP Belichick, we'll have to put that in the next episode during our football conversation. So yeah, who's winning who is successful, the listener who's made it this far into this episode,

and they want to really do a good job with their website, they obviously want to grow their vacational business. So we thank you if you listen this far, we appreciate your time. We appreciate you listening to us. Hopefully there's some more wins for you in the horizon and we'll really help. What we give us a little win. You're winning a lot. We want you to, we want to win a little bit as you go to your podcast app of choice. You click five stars, you leave this a five star review.

And then Paul and I sit there and celebrate. And we say that we've won. Even though our teams have lost poorly, we can win. And that's ultimately what we care about. So I joke at the end, but obviously we appreciate you too to if you made it this far, really do appreciate listening. Thanks so much for your time and attention. And we will catch you on the next episode of the heads and bed show.