Heads In Beds Show - The Basics You Need To Get Bookings On Your Vacation Rental Website (Design & UX) Part I

Episode Date: January 10, 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. 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? It's a fantastic Monday.

We're starting the year off right. We're starting the year off right. Hey there, Paul. How's it going today? It's a fantastic Monday. We're starting the year off right. We're starting the year off right. I was going to jump into just the mediocrity of football teams and just how... Can we play some funeral? Savannah, can we play some funeral music really quick while we... Yeah. ...adjust the 2023 Packers and the... Or sorry, the Vikings and the Patriots really quickly. Might as well have that.

No, it's... It's over. Yeah, no,'s it's over it's over fortunately we don't need to we don't worry to worry about yeah no this is the january doom and gloom that was going to be experienced one way or another see we just we get it earlier in the month i would much rather get into february hopes get. It's that false sense of, I don't know, security or whatever, but no, it's, it is. I think we're starting to hit the winter fun time and we're going to have our first below zero temperatures in Minnesota. So it is winter now. It has officially arrived, but how are you doing, sir?

Well, it was Nor'easter watching that Jets-Pats game. And yes, I did watch it. Only the hardcores are watching the Jets-Pats game in the weekend of the 2023 season, where the final score was for a while going to be 6-3, and then they scored a little bit at the end to kind of mess that up a little bit. But I will say this.

When Tom Brady left in 2019, he throws, of course, the pick six to local Ryan on the Titans, and he returns it for the touchdown. And there was lots of speculation. Will Tom Brady actually leave in 2019? Will he stick around? And I looked at my dad and I said, Dad, there's no way Tom Brady is going to leave the Patriots on that horrible of a note. And then I turned to my dad yesterday after the game ended because he was over here for watching the game together. And I said, Dad, there's no way Bill Belichick is going to be part of the Patriots coach leaving

on that note, losing to Jeff. There's no way. That's impossible. It's impossible for him to leave on that way. So probably he's gone at this point now that I've spoken that proclamation out there. Enjoy Los Angeles, Bill. You're going to love it. The weather's fantastic. My dad said, what is a 70, whatever, 73, 74, what does a 73 or 74 year old man do that has a boat or that likes boating and likes good weather? And I'm like, he's going to go coach the Chargers where he can go on his boat in nice weather and not have to worry about New England anymore. Yeah, we'll see. Time will tell on that one.

For the record, I don't want that to happen. I always like to go on this recorded for the record. I don't want Belichick to go, but I just think it's plausible. It's plausible at this point. And you can't anyone says they know I think is wrong. Just like people who said they knew about Brady. I think you're wrong. There you go.

But it's all good. You're right. The calendar is flipped. We're getting into all this fun and exciting stuff. I don't think the listener tuned in to hear about our funerals for our football teams. I think what they tuned in to hear about is us talking a little bit about basic direct booking website best practices. Now, I will say the listener who maybe has a lot more properties may start to go, oh, it's basics. I can skip this. I'm already getting a good chunk of direct bookings.

I'm already getting a lot of things done. And I would challenge that listener who's already made it this far to say, maybe just give it a listen because you might actually learn something potentially, something small that you're doing wrong or that maybe you didn't put into your website that might potentially help you get better results in 2021 and beyond. So it's frequent, right? Like we often miss the basics on website design

or we often miss the basics on things and adding a certain link, check out little things along the process. We're gonna talk today about like general website tips. We're gonna talk about homepage. We're going to talk about search results or kind of property category pages, like how do we collect properties? How do we put them on the website? We're going to talk about PDPs, property detail pages, and then the checkout page. There's only these five or six page types that really any basic vacation rental direct booking website needs.

And yet one or two little missteps on these pages can cost you money. Even if you have one property or 10 or a hundred or a thousand. Let's dive in maybe Paul, let's dive into general. What are some general best practices maybe that you have from a website conversion standpoint? What's what's the inner outline, we put table stakes, what's the table stakes, you put your brand out there and see if you can start to get your initial 10 direct bookings, let's say online. I think it is, I think it really starts with the call to action. I think that's so basic and straightforward. And again, and I would agree, if you have the larger property managers who maybe have worked with one of the larger agencies in the space, worked with yourself, worked with even a smaller agency, done something independent there. I think that just more often than not is one of those things that

people overlook or they don't put enough attention and detail into. And it is, it could be as simple as the book now or book your next day, book something or the call to action of actually encouraging people to book with you or on the owner side to list their home with you. Again, even if you work with this big entity that makes you a big, beautiful site, if there's not a button or a call to action to get people to the actions you actually want them to take, what are they going to do? How are they going to get to where it gets to? So I think whether it's calls to action or whether it's the basic navigation of your site, it should be a clear path to get people from the point where they start to wherever you want them to get to that desired outcome,

which is hopefully that direct booking on your website. So I do. I think there's that very fundamental piece of, do you have your buttons in the right area? Do you have hyperlink text? Do you have the menu navigation taking people to where you want them to, to the specificity? And it is in your vacation rental section. Do you have everything laid out or do you have, take them to all rentals and go from there? I guess, where do you typically see the biggest areas or surrounding call to action or navigation when you look at the basic website there?

I think, so being as someone that's been on that seat for fairly frequently, been on the agency side of the seat, I think what's really can be troubling at times is when the client is very adamant that they want things to look a certain way, even when it comes to the expensive conversions. But sitting in our seat, sometimes we want to make our clients happy. So we may protest with some level of aggressiveness, or we may protest a little bit and say, this is a comment when I hear frequently, just to give a very practical example. People use the word minimalistic or clean or that type of that type. Whenever I hear someone saying that kind of thing, I always like start to get a little worried because I wonder if they're going to start taking things out at the expense of results at the

expense of being clear on what people need to do. Like I'm not a big fan of ghost buttons. So you see that pretty commonly in these minimalistic clear design websites where a ghost button, by the way, for the listener is where the background of the button maybe is the same color as the background of the website. So it's white button with a white background website. And then the text will be black, the text will be legible, but it's called a ghost button because it almost doesn't, but it's not obvious to me. Like it's not clear, like this is the button I click to actually do the searches. I put in my dates, I do searches and go on and go forth from there. So little things like that, I think often come up, which

is that I would say, be very careful if you're the vacation rental property manager and you're sitting in the seat of telling your agency what you want done. I would be careful about going against their conventions, assuming you've looked at their work and their work seems to be working well and they have happy clients, like their conventions, assuming you've looked at their work and their work seems to be working well and they have happy clients. Their conventions, maybe it makes you look similar in some respect to other vocational management companies out there. That's not always a bad thing when it comes to following conventions of what people expect to see and what the expected widgets or options or, to your point, call to action is actually there on the website. I think some people change things for the sake of changing things, and it could potentially lead to

issues and problems with respect to just the most basic of getting someone to the website and getting them into that search results, which we'll talk about here in a second. So that's one mini rant there. And the story that I'll tell, I've told on the podcast before, but maybe some folks haven't learned it. We talked about the SEO kind of migration lesson that I learned a long time ago. I think that was also partially website conversion conversation as well, is that people, so the

story basically is that I was with a different company in the past and we launched this agents we launched this new website and honestly look good everything worked all the links worked there was no pms problems all on paper all the if it was a car inspection all the things would have been checked off and yet the performance tanked and the client lost over a million two million dollars in bookings in two months of just conversions going through the floor unfortunately from a conversion rate perspective so something that looks nicer is pretty that's's great. Like I'm all for things that look nice and pretty. We want to put our best brand forward and things like that. But sometimes what you think looks nice and pretty actually kills conversions. And we have to be

very cautious and careful of that as we go through the process of building sites. And I think that, I mean, we joke often that you and I can look at a site, an industry site right now, and with very little difficulty, we can figure out who built it. Who did it? Yeah. I know what all the defaults are. Exactly. And that is, there's something to be said for that. But at the same time, and there's a reason why it's all very similar feel template type of stuff like that.

It's because that's what works. So it is, yes. Are we going to take our cracks at it and say, oh, that's obviously a blue tent website. That's obviously an ICND or whatever that is. Yeah, we will do that. But at the same time, we also can understand that there are benefits to why they do that.

And you see it in the results as we work with people on the other side of things. On the actual advertising, oh, yeah, you do have a higher conversion rate because you have this agency website that they put together a good product for you. And they put together a streamlined booking process. And now we're doing well because of it. So I appreciate your help there. So there's something to be said for that too, I think. I'm going to cut it.

I'm sorry for cutting in. But I have to get it out there, which is, it's not super common, but every once in a while, I'll get someone who reaches out to us and they say they don't have a website yet or they have one, but they're like, we haven't put any traffic to this yet. And they go, but I don't want to go do a template site

with my PMS company. And I say, okay, there's a reason. There's certainly drawbacks to the template websites as well. Well, sometimes you can't control them or customize them in the way that makes sense for your business. So I totally understand. But I listen, okay, what are you hoping to achieve? What are you hoping to accomplish? And but i i listen okay what are you hoping to achieve what are you hoping to accomplish and most importantly do you have the budget to back up what you're hoping to accomplish which is a different

discussion for a different day because the template sites we may poke fun at them but they can offer to often deliver them for a few thousand dollars relatively expensively to doing a fully custom website i think some people just don't understand how many hands have to touch that how many chefs have to be in that kitchen for a totally custom website to go live speaking of personal experience on that one as well they go yeah i don't want to do a template kitchen for a totally custom website to go live. Speaking of personal experience on that one as well. They go, yeah, I don't want to do a template website for XYZ reasons. And they're all, well, I don't want to look the same, right? I don't want to want to have this unique look and so on and so forth.

And they think, I don't really think we can grow our business that way. And I'll give examples. I often give one example, one that I can't share publicly, but I'll show the client on the call and be like, this is the client we're working with. They started the template site with 13 properties back in 2018, 2019. They got this thing to $2 million a year in direct bookings on a template website. And now they're on basically a slightly updated version of that template website. And they're doing well over $2 million a year, $3 million probably this year in direct bookings.

I'm like, so this idea that, you know, taking a template website that comes directly from your PMS and you can't get some results from it. No, that's not true at all. There's obviously some good templates out there. Now you are restricted in some respect with regards to design and things like that. But back to the episode topic really here, they do cover a lot of the basics, usually pretty well. There's obviously some good templates out there. Now you are restricted in some respect with regards to design and things like that. But back to the episode topic really here, they do cover a lot of the basics, usually pretty well. There's quick search.

There's eight options there. There's a nice search results page that often has a map on the right side, a property detail or property cards on the left side. It has a property detail page for each and every listing. We can debate the nuances of what that should look like. They have a checkout page and it connects directly to your PMS. So a lot of the basics, this is not a rant against against template size i think that's a valuable service to the industry for sure sorry i derailed you but i had to get that one out there oh that's perfect that's it is

but whether you see it as a positive or a negative there's a reason why most of these pms companies or the agents they have as many partners out there or customers out there as they do is that they ultimately more often not, they put out a better product than competitors and they put out a product that works. So not to poo on those teams out there, they do a good job to take care of property managers. Yeah. And I talked to someone who was a former employee of one of those agencies and I was trying to actually convince him to join my team. And I was like, hey, what have you learned about doing this for so long? And he'd been in this company for a long time. And he basically said, either you have to make the templates somewhat customizable and

offer them to as many people as possible, or you have to go full custom and charge a ton of money for it. There's no in between. You can't tweak the template and customize the template. You've got to go from there. And honestly, that cemented my decision and going more towards the custom high-end stuff and away from just doing template sites, because there's so many different ones out there. I don't know if I can improve on it that much where it'd be that

much better. Our temple will be that much better than anybody else's template. So that's what we're working on now as a sidebar. But some of the things that we've talked about, so we've talked about, okay, clear and obvious call to action. The most obvious example would be come on the homepage. There's right in the middle of the, whether it's an image, whether it's a video, whatever the case may be, there's an option for dates, some type of filtering. It could be amenities. It could be sleeps. It could be something. And then there's a big obvious search now button. So those things seem clear to me. One thing I had on my little list, you have a little checklist that I'll walk through as we talk a little bit today.

Some clients are still using these cookie notification bars. I don't know the point of the cookie notification bars at this point. Can we like close the book on cookie notification bars? If you're in the US, I get there for in the EU, there's different laws, right? So let's separate that for the time being. But I have this, our largest client actually still was adamant that they needed to have these cookie banners who does 100% of their bookings from people in the US. I take that back. There's 2% from Canada, but all their bookings come from the US or Canada, and they're worried about complying with GDPR laws. And I always thought this too. I looked up really quickly to see if there was any, I could find any cases of it. For a US based company to get sued in theory from like a GDPR claim from the European Union. Who are they suing?

Like it's a US company. What authority does like the European Union or like the government in the UK have to do with your website that runs a vacational company in Florida? Correct me if I'm wrong on this. If anyone can find an example of a small business in the US facing problems with cookie notifications, I'll eat my hat on that one, but I can't find it. I don't think it exists. Now, Facebook and those types of companies that have offices and stuff like that, no, that's different. I'm not talking about a large company. I'm talking about a small business in America in any industry that's actually asked to do a cookie banner. What am I missing? I don't get it. I think that it is. When working with a larger site, when we're pushing 10 million annual travelers through

on resortsandlodges.com, absolutely. that was a concern at that point because we did we had maybe a million people coming through or two yeah that's legit though that's like you have business interest in that location and but even with us when we were because we were asking a lot of things gdpr was relatively new at that point so we were asking all the right questions and even at our level which wasn't breaking any barriers by any means, they said the likelihood that you're going to have to run into anything like this, very low.

Now in the past four years, I think, and I think the other thing that we have to consider now is that we're moving cookie-less anyway. On the mobile side of things, there's really no need to do a whole lot of that stuff because iOS is asking you,

Apple's asking you to do that early on in the game there. Yeah, yeah. So I do. I think that if it's, and this is another, this is an area where if you have clarity or some type of session recording, to see how many people are having a negative experience because they're having to click out of that or do something like that. because they're having to click out of that or do something like that, I would have some type of session recording software in place of some kind. Just be able to review that. It doesn't have to be anything consistent once every quarter,

once every six months or something like that. Just see specifically for that card and some of these other things that we're talking about, what impact are they making on the actual user experience on that website? Because I would agree, generally speaking, it's not something we have to worry about. Truly, I think even if you were doing two, three million a year in bookings and had 50% of those coming internationally, I don't think it would be incumbent upon some individual, because it's not the guy that some individual going up to a government level and then suing across it's just the likelihood is so low so yeah lawyer we're not lawyers blah blah blah this isn't legal advice by any means please do not charge us that hourly rate but yeah that's yeah we don't need to all

right if you're in the u.s it's the cookie banner we're calling 2024 is the year of death cookie banners at u.s based websites yeah if you're in the uk or eu consult your legal or your what's the term there's a term for a lawyer in the uk it's not the same word we use it's a barrister or something barrister something like that all right consult your legal team we don't know the word some british listener right now that's these americans if mark simpson is listening it is a barrister a solicitor oh yeah a barrister solicitor that's where it is a solicitor there we go there you go we're off to a good start. We're learning new words here. Okay. All right.

So kill the cookie banner. We're tired of it. And the broader thing here, actually we could dovetail this nicely into pop-ups, email pop-ups, because I'm a big advocate of email pop-ups. I'm not a big advocate of email pop-ups that hit you literally right away. There should always be a delay in my mind with the email pop-up offer.

And actually I've tested this by the way, and it works better when you do delay it typically from a conversion rate standpoint. Now I will say this, I hate to say it, it does work better from an overall collection standpoint when you hit it right away. Cause I think there's people that think that in order to access the website, I have to put in my email. So I've done some testing on that and I have a client that does do it right away against my protest. And I can't disagree with that because we've run the numbers and it does indicate that if you put it right away,

it seems to get a little bit more overall opt-ins, but the percentage of opt-ins is lower, if that makes sense. So if you show it to more people more aggressively, you'll get more opt-ins, but I think you'll also potentially upset people. Whereas in the email pop-up thing, if you time it better, like when they're actually in the process or they're going a little bit deeper into the checkout process, or just not right away, like even a 10 second delay is better than nothing, then they've had a chance to look at what's there, consider it and go forth from it. So I don't think it's like necessary on like a basic direct booking website to have an email pop up it's close to necessary for me i could run one without it but i'd really prefer not to personally speaking

it's i think it's one of those and i the nice thing i think almost universally most people use opt-in monster the nice thing about opt-in monster is so many rules you can use so many rules to fire that have you ever tried it based on scroll depth as opposed to the timing of the or the timing of pop up from when a session started? There's three main triggers that I think you can use. One is time, one is scroll depth, and then the other is exit intent. We found the best success with exit intent, actually. So when you go to leave the website, or like you're actually considering closing a tab or you're moving from page to page, that's when we hit them with it. But we'll put a timer in place too.

So it's 10 seconds and they go to exit the website. There's all these and or rules and things like you can fire. So that's typically how we'll do it. It's like they have to have been on the website for at least 10 seconds and then they go to leave. Bam. Now we're trying to get them with pop up and trying to get them to sign up. So that's how we do it.

And I think it is all about that when you, again, but based on those rules and triggering and stuff like that, it's all about that messaging to match it up. If you're doing any accident intent, it's Hey, did you wait? It's that last opportunity and use that kind of urgency messaging of, Hey, did you miss something? Did we did you did we not have the right dates? Did something like that? That's something I always found was a lot more compelling to Hey, did you did you check out our deals page or even having a navigation elsewhere after they've filled out that information, because it does. It gets them in that right mindset. Again, trying to think of intent as much as possible. They're there to likely,

hopefully, get that booking. How can we entice them with the exit intent or with that added 5%, 10%, 15%, whatever that is, $150, the fixed rate versus the percentage. It is, you can test and toggle all those things. But I think it still is important that if you are going to hit that, put that pop up in place, make the trigger have some type of emphasis or some type of strategy with the what the messaging actually matches up towards yep yep 100 i'll beat this drum until it stops being the case that i see these but we find better results with fixed dollar discounts as opposed to percentage discounts or generic newsletter signups so always a fan of the fixed dollar discount again is it absolutely necessary for a direct booking website no but it's close to it or like is it

necessary to clean your windshield off if it has snow on it before you drive your car? I guess not, but you probably should if you want to be more successful. So there we go. Some other things that I have here as we kind of work through the homepage, or just these are homepage, but also just general website tips, because it might apply. Having a very clear logo on every page that's clickable back to the homepage. This sounds like a simple one, but I see it missed somewhat regularly, where there's a logo and it's in different places, like the property detail page layout has the logo in a different spot. So like the navigation changes a little bit from page to page. Don't like that have issues with that. Also, the logo is not clickable. So if you click the logo,

nothing happens. I think people expect when they click the logo to go back to the homepage. Some people put like a home item in the navigation. I'm not wholly against that. If you have space for it, it may make sense. But I find it makes more sense to do the logo link. So that's actually something in our checklist we look for is to have the logo link actually be up there. We also prefer in the navigation while I'm going through

that upper navigation elements, things that I think make sense, better to be broad and shallow than narrow and deep on the navigation items. What I mean by that is that it's okay to have like multiple long tail search pages

up in the navigation, but it's better to have rentals and then you mouse over it and it's like pet friendly oceanfront rentals. I prefer that versus like search. And then you have to go over to rentals. Then you have to go over to pet friendly oceanfront, like just even on, on desktop, like your mouse isn't going to properly get to those deeper navigation items anyways. It's just going to frustrate people. If you have a lot of different

long tail search pages, like you're a large property manager and you've got 18 or 19 different search pages that you may have, just click on the search page or something and then bring them to a list of those and then have them pick on the page themselves. Or I really like this term collections. I think we talked about this a little bit before. I like calling properties collections. If you have 20 different page types and one is the three bedroom and one is the luxury and one is the pet friendly and one is the ocean front, one is the sound front, whatever. I just like that idea quite a bit. If you are a sound front home collection, that sort of thing. I've been using that copy more and more as we built out new sites a lot of our existing clients don't have that copy but when we're doing new ones i like it

because i think it speaks to what it should be as part of your portfolio this is a collection of your oceanfront properties and it may be only 20 of the 200 that you have or whatever the case may be but i think that type of copy and how you're presenting it on the site does matter and especially if you have a lot of properties how do you disseminate that information to the guest? I think it's important. Potential guest. Yeah, I think it is. How you, whether you're using collections, I think in different, for different property managers, it's by destination, by property type there, by any breakdown that you can have there. And I think that's, again, it's just giving people, I would agree that you want to give people multiple ways to browse and look at your rentals,

but ultimately if you're giving them too many options there, that's analysis paralysis and they might end up abandoning before they get to where they want to anyway. Yeah. I love that idea of taking them to from an all rentals page down to those collection pages, whether that's in the manual navigation or not, making sure that you are doing it. If you're in multiple cities, say the Outer Banks, you're in Kitty Hawk and Hatteras and Kill Level Hills and all those things, break it down there. But don't break it down in your primary net. Make sure that if people want to go down to that level, you're presenting them with a way to get to that level. Yeah. Yeah. No doubt.

Awesome. I know we're not doing great on time, so I'll move on to some other page types so we can sit there and pick things apart. So let me go rapid fire here to round us out here on like homepage or general website. The footer, just I think people sometimes don't think about the footer. People are going to go down there and consider it looks like a legitimate company. I don't dislike even some marketing copy in the footer. You always get the best rate when you book directly on a website. Like just little things like that sometimes can help a little bit.

I have in here, I like this feature. I use it quite a bit. A back to top link on the footer. So when you get to the bottom, there's that little button. Sometimes click it. They go back to top. I like that. If you have a physical address or photo of the office, absolutely.

If you're a real company, show off that you're a real company, right? People want to book with someone that they trust. No one can trust. So if you can explain some of those things or show some of those things in the footer by showing an actual street address or having a little picture of your office or they click on it and goes to an office page that they get, maybe they never visit your office. I get we live in this virtual check-in world. That's great.

But if they know that you're real, it's going to give them more confidence in actually being willing to book. So talk about that. Certainly the social networks in the footer make a lot of sense to me, but also link to your informational content too. Don't just link off to social media. That's great. But I'd rather, honestly, rather than once they're on our website rather

than them clicking off and going to our facebook page that's okay if they want to do that but i'd rather them go to like our things to do page or our blog page that's actually gives me more benefit from kind of a brand awareness perspective and things like that big fan there also around out this one i don't know your philosophy on this one i hate sticky navigation i hate when i'm scrolling down the page if you're going to use a sticky sticky navigation it's gonna collapse and be very small then i'm cool with it but i hate the sticky navigation where you're scrolling and it's taking up like 30 to 40 percent of the viewport with the navigation and it just stays with you the whole time i hate that it drives me crazy so don't do that i don't know your philosophy on that but

i don't like it yeah that's i mean i would say all the things you covered there the footer is one of those things where i think there's more that we can talk about there on the advanced side of things where you can get a little more, give people a little more interactivity. But generally speaking, yeah, yeah. You covered all the main parts there of basic business information. And yes, the sticky, anything that's sticky, make sure people are actually, again, make sure people are actually using it. If it's just following someone down the page, especially in the mobile side of things, that

is going to greatly diminish their user experience because that 30% or even 20% on the mobile screen, that's half your scroll. That's it is. I've seen the scrollability just go down dramatically because you are following it down. And then you're looking at, oh, let's say 50 to 60 pixels of space between that. It's so bad. That's the last. I mean, I get you want people to be able to get back to that spot.

That's where it is. And we'll talk about it more, I would say, in the advanced side of things where anchor text and being able to just not have it follow you all the way around. the things were anchor text and being able to just not have it follow you all the way around. I think that's an antiquated user experience to just have people, or maybe better for different types of businesses. For our business, I think it's better to showcase everything else about the business as opposed to having that navigation, getting them back to that direct booking, following them around. Because if you're doing a good enough job of presenting the property information, anything like that, they're going to book.

You don't need them to follow. You don't need to follow them around with some little gimmicky, yeah, header, whatever it is, just the user interface not being the good experience there. Yeah, I know. All right, some other things that I have here on my list as we get going. This applies to any page type, but I think it sometimes can

be egregious on the homepage, which is that when I land there immediately, where am I? It sounds simple, but you'd be shocked how often I go to the homepage of a vacation website and I don't know physically where you are located. Tell me exactly where you are. A lot of people coming in won't have any context when they land on the homepage for the first time. Maybe they're clicking on a link from an ad. Maybe they're clicking on a link from social media. They've never heard of you. They don't know anything about your brand. They don't know anything about your property and so on and so forth. Go down the list. This is brand new to them. And you expose them to something that says something like you're home away from home. Can we stop using your home

away from home as a hero or a thing on there? And that's another thing. But anyways, I need to load it up right away. It's okay to have some kind of more interesting marketing copy. I can roll with that. But the subhead or the logo or something needs to indicate to me within the first view. I don't need to scroll. I don't need to do anything additional. I need to see right away. Also, by the way, that's what you want for Google. You want to Google right away where you are and what you actually have to offer as a sidebar

here. Not that some people would say, oh, I don't want to build my website for Google. You're not building your website for Google by telling people who come to your website what location you're in. So when I come to the homepage, I want to see right away where in the world am I? Literally, like where are you actually located so that it's clear there? This one comes up all the time. I see on the owner side too, Paul.

I see the classic, we will manage your property. And I go, I got a property in Africa. Are you going to manage that one or are you managing the one that's in Orlando? So just clear copy. Clear copy. And that's above the fold section of every, that that's something that take a look at the whole page, but take a look at above the fold.

That is what people, that's what's going to capture people. That's what's going to send people down the path that you want them to. It's going to, what's going to keep people there. And yeah, I can't tell you how many times before we've taken over landing pages, short-term rental management.

That's the H1. Cool. Yeah. Where? What? Again, you're not helping Google, but you're definitely not helping the owner. I'm not worried about Google. I'm worried about someone hitting that page and saying, I've got a home in X.

Well, where do you guys manage? Scroll. Scroll. Nobody's scrolling two, three times. We got metrics on that. Our average scroll depth on the average owner landing page about 46 to 50 i promise you that's not more than two scrolls when you're going on the desktop side of things and mobile it might be even less than that so keeping track of that above the fold section and making sure that you

are you're putting any area or any information that's necessary when people hit that page make sure it's there and location of where you're operating is a number one i'm sorry from an seo perspective and just from a user from a traveler's perspective so so that one's on my list here can't beat that one up anymore they've already done i don't think social proof i think this applies to home page i think it doesn't really apply to search results page i think we could put that one up anymore. They've already done. I don't think social proof. I think this applies to homepage. I think it doesn't really apply to search results page. I think we could put that one to the side. Although willing to be persuaded if I ever see a really clever social proof, like maybe you're five properties in and then you see a little thing that's I love staying with this company name and then you keep scrolling. I don't know. I could see that. I don't hate it.

But it really matters in my mind to on the property detail page. And even the checkout, we have a client where we're testing it on the checkout page so to the right of your property card but below the like confirming the details like the date and stuff like that there's a little rotating thing there that shows reviews from recent guests it's like reviews from recent guests and it's i love my stay with company name so definitely some new surface areas that you can support this with but you've got to put it somewhere and you've got to put it in probably a few more places than you think this idea of past guest reviews photos from past guests i'm associated with these brands right i think this is something you talk about a lot in the property management side but i think it can make sense we are in

airbnb superhost i know you're booking directly i get that side of it but yeah people knowing that you're an airbnb superhost does give people a little more confidence that you say what you're say you're going to do that you deliver a good experience and so on and so forth google reviews obviously can make sense reviews from past guests that leave directly directly on your website. All these can be potential options, trust badges, I think is the terminology that Brooke uses on the inventory side of things that I think you've carried that forward as well. We're a member of the 100 collection, we are a member of VRMA and so on and so forth. I think these can certainly help a little bit, even if the people haven't heard of the organizations like it puts more effort into it than just what a lot of people

do just do nothing. So social proof, I'm big fan of that. I think it applies to homepage. Again, you could open my mind on search results. I probably know though, probably detail and then play with it in the checkout page as well. But I don't know if you have any like more examples. I think it is what was always impressive and continues to be impressive when we did it, when we put any type of screen recording. And anecdotally,

you watch these people who do, who will look at the dates and look at the rates and look at the images, but then they scroll down almost every time to go to those, to go to the reviews. They're always looking for a five-star, one-star, something in the middle, but there's just something to be said for people want to know, especially if it is, if it's a high, if you're a luxury property manager, you've got a lot of really nice places and it's going to cost people thousands of dollars to stay with you. Yeah. They want to make sure they're getting the experience that they're anticipating. They're certainly on the owner's side of things. It's one of those things where you're trusting someone with your asset. We've talked about it in the multimillion dollar asset.

You're trusting them with your home. You want that peace of mind that they take care of homes similar to yours and they do a good job of it. So having owner testimonials, I think is always important, but yeah, having that guest be able to back up a great stay and not just talk about the property itself, but to talk about you as a property manager and how you're taking care of them and giving them that amazing experience. I think that certainly builds up the trust that you're not going to just come for this day, but potentially more stays down the road. You tell stuff that I have on my list here, again, just things that I think that make the difference, at least on the basics. Now, if you don't have a lot of properties, then you're probably not that worried about like the sorting

on search results page or property results. Most clients that are at this level, they got four homes, there's not a lot of logic that we can use to sort those four homes differently. But I will say this when I was at Durham, I think Amber had a really fantastic presentation from V trips, talking a little bit about the classic thing that most property managers fall into, which is that I have an unhappy owner because their property is not booking. Let me put them at the top of the search results. And her logic was like, if there's a reason they're not booking, why are you putting your your worst inventory, so to speak, so prominently in your storefront, your digital storefront that is your website. And I can't disagree with her. I think it's the kind of thing that it's a challenging spot to be

in. If you're about to lose a homeowner because you're not getting enough bookings, it feels easy to say, let me just get this a lot more eyeballs. But it might be the case that homeowner is not the right fit for you need to move on. It goes goes against I know, like the philosophy of like sign as many owners as possible, but you've got to sign the right owners. And if you're not delivering for that owner, maybe it is best that they move on. So that's tricky one, right? There's politics in there. It's not just the natural inclination of sure, let's trust the data. Let's use the data when there's a potential $100,000 value contract walking out the door, that can be a little bit more tricky. But certainly as you get bigger, the logic and

sorting those properties needs to be more advanced than availability. It certainly needs to be more advanced than like sleeps high to low or sleeps low to high or price high to low. I think that's probably the wrong logic there. You probably want to be showing people you want, let me not say probably, you want to show the properties that are most likely to get a booking to people when they go and do a date search. So just that idea, I think we need to work on that a little bit more on our side and some of the sites that we've done. But I don't know if a lot of PMS companies are doing that. I think they just have a few sort options, high, low occupancy pricing, those types of things. And they just put it through that way. But I think it could be a little bit better or more accurate if you put some more thought into it there.

So I don't know your philosophy on search results sorting. I think that is an area where I think we'll see AI become a larger driver of a better experience. And I feel like Amber at one point when she's still, I'm not sure exactly where she was at that point, but she was really working hard, I think, as part of one of her master's classes or something like that on like a software that was looking at that type of thing. And I think there's another, there's a couple other solutions out there that people are trying to enable AI to kind of do a better experience with that booking side of things. I do. I think that's where AI can play a vital role in a lot of areas moving forward for support and guest experience and stuff like that. I think within just the booking area and the booking of specific units,

I think that's something where, whether it's evaluation or finding ways to affect the sort and do stuff like that. I think that's the untapped market area, I would say, for AI and what it can do specifically. I think PMs are going to try to build that into all of their systems wherever they can. But I think that's an area that's untapped or maybe we haven't put enough focus on because everybody's got revenue management software or platform or something like that or a specific revenue manager that's helping them out. But at this low level for a zero to five or zero to 10 units, something like that, this would be perfect to be able to push more based on. And maybe you can factor in whatever into the algorithm or whatever, train the AI to do what you want, and then let the system take a look at what you've got on the site. And I'm sure there'd have

to be a plugin and there'd have to be something else. But I think that's an area where it can be leveraged in a much better level to give owners a better experience, property managers a better experience, guests a better experience. Hopefully someone listens to this, takes this, and runs with it. And we have something good to talk about later in the year. Yeah, I'm wondering if maybe there's even, because the AI conversation is always tough, right? Because the, and there's some AI companies out there that I think some of our clients are testing right now that claim that they help do better recommendations and stuff like

that. But then when you press them on it, it's always a little bit unclear to me. I'm still not sure of like how they come to those conclusions that those properties are in fact better for that person. Like there's some machine learning element to it. Great. Maybe it's all true. I don't know.

But I wonder if maybe the optimal outcome is that there's some admin dashboard that you log into and play with that you have weights and you can play with the weight. To be fair, that is something you can do in OpenAI. So you may say, hey, for right now, focus on these set of properties. Show all my pet friendlies that are lagging right now or show my three bedrooms or so show my sound friends but you can't like knock it all the way up or all the way down it's you can make it like 30 of the weight or 70 of the weight and you just play with those different things or whatever so that's just a different idea that i've had before is this idea that the way you sort it should be somewhat controllable by you but probably not

completely controlled by you because then you're just going to do the classic show all my bad properties first and ignore everything else. Yeah, the way you think about it, I think makes a lot of sense. Some other things I have here that I think can make a little bit of sense for sure. Additional property details are shown. So it's pretty common, I think that we do a search on some websites, you just see nothing, you see the name of the property, which sometimes it's a nonsensical name, it doesn't mean anything to you. Like it's called I have one client where we had to go rename all the properties because they were coming in the search results page and it was like lockout L4702. And I'm like, that is just terrible. Like we got to at least give it some kind of fun name, even if it's like

the blah, blah, blah building. And then it's unit 107. Like I can live with that, but I can't live with like your internal naming code structure showing up on the front of the website. We could stand for that. So we rewrote that. Would have been much easier with AI. I'll tell you that we just sit there, write it by hand and put it into the PMF. That was a painful, regretful time in my career, but it helped the client get a lot more booking, so I don't regret it. Scarcity, we talked about this a little bit before we hit record, this idea of someone doing a search and then showing, hey, there's limited availability. Maybe we'll talk about that more in the advanced thing. Any sort of badges or property image

thumbnails, do some testing around that. You probably, just like Airbnb tests your thumbnail, you probably want to consider swapping out other thumbnails as well in your thing and your website as well so those are things to play with and then filters like making filters easy to understand so many sites are so confusing with the filters and how they're applied or like when i click it does that apply the filter because that seems common or do i have to click it and then go to the bottom and then click apply filter and then it applies the filter so what i find this happens somewhat regularly on some sites where i apply the filters then i click click the little X button, but I can't do that. What I need to do is scroll down the bottom of that little pane or whatever and click

apply filter. So one site that we worked on, we, when you apply the filter, a little JavaScript alert type thing pops in the top, it says filter applied. And there's like a little check marks and it stays up there for about a second. And then if you tap again, it actually shows you another one. And then that goes away after a second. So we ripped that off, I think from from I forget what project management tool does that. I think it's Basecamp does that when you're adding tasks or whatever.

So we stole that. It wasn't really exactly our idea. But it's so much clearer because when you're actually applying the filters, it's like telling you like filter applied. And then you click X while your filters are applied as opposed to that logic there. So again, some of the more advanced stuff, maybe that I'm cheating. I had a little bit here. But yeah, a lot of that stuff, I think people just take for granted the fact that they're

on the search results page. They're seeing stuff that's technically available, but they're not seeing what they want to see. And that could potentially cause a lot of issues and problems. So think about that carefully. Moving through just some different items here in the property detail pages trying to be aware of time here as well. We the property detail page layout, I think we talked about this previously. If not, maybe we can do like a dedicated episode on just property detail pages. But this is the obvious thing that maybe some folks need to hear, which is that people care about the photos more than anything they'll spend. If you put 50 photo galleries into a photo gallery, a dedicated person that actually is willing to book that property will sit there and look through 50

photos. If you put 60 photos, they'll look through 60. Some people, it's pretty hard to overdo the photos, especially if they're good photos. Now don't stuff it with crappy photos, right? But that's, that's the number one thing that you want people to actually engage with and care about. So put that first. I think the classic property description information on the left side, quick search rate information on the right side seems to be pretty tried and true.

I've not really tested a different layout that's been like, oh yeah, this is more clear. This is more obvious. This is one where I think it's probably perfectly fine and perfectly healthy to copy Vrbo and Airbnb who despite their design differences have come to the same conclusion on property detail pages,

which is like photo gallery information on the left hand side, quick date information, or sorry, date and booking information on the right hand side, and a two thirds, one third column, or like a three quarters, one quarter column set. Don't really see a way around that unless someone has some different layout that's worked a lot better. Just making it clear again, once you get to the property description, having that text be very legible. I've seen this somewhat regularly where the text is very thin and it's hard to read and it's problematic to actually go through the property description and things like that. So those are different things you want to play with. And your point to bring it back all the way to where you started a clear call to action. So that book now button should be big, large, obvious. It should be very clear of what we

actually need to be clicking on and working on. And yeah, Paul reminded me that we did do a crafting the perfect property description episode that we'll go back and pop that one in the show notes if you wanted to go and dig into that one. Maybe we could do one on the property detail page because these things are very correlated with each other. But yeah, I stole a lot of the thunder there. But any thoughts on property detail pages and the Lego components that make sense for those page types?

No, I think that is it's it's knowing what is important and just making sure it's there. It's knowing what is important and just making sure it's there. I think that if there are parts of that property description page that aren't available via your PMS, I don't think that's the reason to change. But bring that up. The presentation of your property is going to be one of the most important things on your whole website. So if that is, if you're missing areas that we're talking about here, especially on the basics, advanced side, sure, that we may be talking about some stuff that not everybody that maybe we're thinking revolutionary as opposed to just table stakes and making sure your business is going to run. But, but yeah, I think that the you've laid out everything and you covered all the important things. And if people are

checking those items off their detail pages, they're going to be in pretty good shape. Yeah, I think the goal of this episode is you got to get at least your direct booking website to a B plus range. If you're in that space, you're sure there's a lot more optimization that can be had from a B plus website to an A plus website, right? That can potentially provide you a lot more conversions. But if your website is so tricky, so hard to use, they don't trust it, etc, so on and so forth, they're just gonna say, forget it, I'll just go back to a listing site like Airbnb and Vrbo. And at least I know what I'm getting there. That's what you want to avoid is it would be such a shame for our direct booking movement or industry or whatever you want to call it to flame out because people just didn't put enough effort into actually making their website experience good enough, great enough to deserve a direct booking to actually earn that direct booking.

And if that's the case, then like you're in a lot better shape, right? Like you're in much better shape by just having having a 1% half a 1% conversion rate is something that I'm talking about, we have a client we're struggling with right now, like, we're sending all the right traffic to the website, and the website just not converting. And I'm just like, we're banging our head against the wall here. It's just if it's not gonna work, it's not gonna work. And we might need to come back and listen to this process and go through this process first, getting 1000 people to your website and getting no bookings from it whatsoever. And these are all people searching for very specific things on Google, or they're clicking through an

ad on Facebook, and you get 1000 people and not a single one books, it's the website, it's probably not the marketing at that point, right? Like it's the website and the problems there. And a lot of these template websites, what's disappointing to me about the template websites isn't when I see a bad one, it's when I see a bad one, and it's been bad forever, that just really bothers me that there's these companies out there, PMS companies out there, some of which have taken a lot of funding by the way you can figure out maybe which one i'm referencing by that and the temple website has not changed in five years i'm like we have 100 million dollars in funding folks what are we doing with that we have 100 engineers on a team somewhere and i get there building an integration with some 10th tier booking platform

i'm like can we have them go back and focus on the direct booking website make that really great because that's what an opportunity for a competitive advantage if you're a PMS platform. So on the off chance of PMS platform made it this deep, the direct booking website is not a afterthought or a, oh, 10th on the priority list stuff. Like I get it. You don't want to bust your integration with Airbnb and lose all your customers. I get that. But it's really challenging to when you have a PMS that has a bad template website.

To be fair, it also is what gives all of these agencies in our space, myself included, business, where we can take this API and build it out better. But still, I don't think that's healthy. Like it would be better if these big PMS companies had really, at least again, B plus offers for template websites that you could start up and build and work off of.

And if they have to make it a profit center and charge 50 bucks a month for it, then they have to charge 50 bucks a month for it. That's fine. If the product's actually good, I think they deserve that fee. So that's my like ending rant here around everything. Checkout. Let's see. I'll bring us home on checkout. We're checking out here of the podcast episode in a few minutes. And I'll

check out here on the checkout page. Usually, again, the problems that I see here, this is pretty common. You get kicked to a third party platform and it's, that's understandable to some degree, but make the third party platform look like the website I was just on. I think we're garring that I click a button and I go over to some other third-party website that I'm already a little worried about, maybe if I'm paying attention. Like, why did I get kicked to checkout.somepmscompany.com, right? That can already be like a red flag for someone like myself who might be like, is this company trustworthy? Is this checkout process trustworthy? I'm about to whip out my credit card and put it in there. Is this actually something that I should be doing? So at the very least, make sure it looks as

similar as possible to your website and then put a lot of information there that makes people feel safe and comfortable. We're verified. Here's our past reviews, so on and so forth. So that's important in my mind.

There's also just the idea of no navigation. We talked about this a little bit at Darm. So when you get to the checkout page, I only want the back page to go to the back, the property detail page. I don't want the back page or I don't want all the navigation

up there at the top. By that, at that moment, I don't want them searching other inventory. They've got the checkout page. I don't want the back page or I don't want all the navigation up there at the top. By that, at that moment, I don't want them searching other inventory. They've got the checkout page. I want them to actually take it all the way home and actually go through the next process there.

And this is an obvious one, but just make the fields as minimal as possible. If you need their name, their phone number, their email address, their state dates, obviously, you need their credit card info.

That's don't go asking for fax. Don't go asking for, oh, what time are you going to arrive? Stuff like that. I don't like that. If you need to gather that later on, reach out to for, oh, what time are you going to arrive? Stuff like that. I don't like that. If you need to gather that later on, reach out to them later on, right? Unless you're processing

some insane volume of reservations and you can't handle it. I think you're so much better off just being very minimal with the information that you ask. And then once they submit the checkout and we've got their money, then we can ask more information, right?

We've got them at that point, right? Then we can pester them. And we want to know this. We want to know that. So on and so forth. I have some more stuff I'm going to say for the advanced episode around like the little interactions of the checkout page because i think they matter i'll give you one as a spoiler alert which is when

you can actually set a setting in ios so that the keyboard that comes up when they type in their email shows the little at symbol and just makes it a little bit easier to type in numbers like when you go to the credit card field don't have the keyboard show the numbers on the top and little tiny numbers and then the letters at the bottom show them the little keypad like a phone call yeah so the yeah they can type it in that way so little things like that we'll talk about when we get to the advanced episode but check out don't blow it there it's really frustrating to and boy nothing gets me more frustrated than seeing a client who's struggling maybe and we're not getting the results we want i go watch their clarities on the checkouts and i see guest after guest going to the checkout page and then not booking i'm like that's all of

our opportunities right there. And it's so frustrating to lose it, to fumble the ball at the goal line, so to speak, to round out our football conversation here. That can be very frustrating. Don't Malcolm Butler that thing. That's all I got. Checkouts and don't blow it there. It's really frustrating to blow it there when you did all the hard work to get someone to

that page. Any other thoughts? I would say my only note on that is your first note. It's make sure it's brand. Make sure people know that you're selling the same. You don't have to be, I know there are some property management systems that use their own domains and stuff like that. That's part of the game.

But make sure that they don't feel like they're going to a completely different business. Use the same logo. Use the same color as much as you can. Again, these are things that are super, yes are super important just because you have to unify that experience. If people feel like it's a disparate experience, they don't know where they're booking. They don't know who they're booking with. It goes back to that clean, streamlined

Airbnb experience and Vrbo experience. They know what is expected. They put in this information. They're going to get booking on the other end of it. I replicate that. Airbnb checkout's got name, field. Actually, they encourage you to create an account. So they actually pre-fill a lot of information. We can talk about that in a second with regards to pre-filling

info. There's a travel insurance type thing, I think, upsell type piece in there now that wasn't there before. Haven't booked with them in a while, but we booked with them for November for a trip there. So I got to see it, go through the checkout process at Airbnb recently. And that's it. Click book now, very obvious. Again, no navigation, big wide button for my booking. Sign my booking now. I forget exactly what the copy is, but I promise you it's very good. And just the simple things. Well, nothing about that Airbnb checkout page is hard for you to replicate.

It's actually simple to replicate that piece of it. There's a lot of other pieces that are hard to replicate. Totally understand that, but that's not one of them. We've run over our time a little bit here, Paul. It's hard to get through everything when it comes to the website piece. So we've decided to split this into two parts. You may have heard Paul alluding to it earlier. We're going to do the same topic kind of next episode, but like more advanced. So we're going to dig into the really, you know, nitty gritty specifics. I gave away kind of some of

the little things that have gone along here just because I can't help myself, but we should be in good shape to actually go and do the advanced episode next week on building not just a good direct booking website, but what is an A plus? What is a six star? What is a seven star direct booking website looks like? So there you you go hopefully we've delivered a great experience to you and we've done more than just the basics you made it this far you listen you like the show here's what we need from you our new year's resolution what is our new year's resolution paul do you have any like weight things or anything you're working on there or is it just to get more podcast reviews i think that's what you said it's just to get more podcast reviews i

want to sleep a little bit more in 2024 but really really, I'll sleep better if we get more reviews. That's a good point. Paul will get better sleep if he gets more reviews because his head will hit the pillow at night and he'll go, oh my gosh, we got more podcast reviews. It's fantastic. His wife will be like, why are you muttering that to yourself? It'll be very complicated, but it will make him really happy.

There we go. If you could do one new thing for us in the new year, you don't need to send us anything. We don't need any gifts. We made this show Christmas. We just need more podcast reviews and then more people can listen to the show. And 2024 can be our biggest year ever for the podcast, which I think it will be. So thank you, Paul, for recording with me as always.

We're going to dive into the advanced stuff next week. And we thank the listener for your time and attention. Have a great day.