Heads In Beds Show - When To Hit The PANIC Button When Looking At Your Google Analytics Data

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

In this episode Conrad and Paul break down when to panic when looking at your Google Analytics data.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteBook A Call With Us🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads of Med Show presented by Build Up Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacational properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing, and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host, Paul. The red light is blinking. We're on. What's happening?

What's going on? We didn't talk weather before this, but it's hot up here. We're 90 degrees. And 90 degrees in May for Paul is a... We may have jumped the shark a little bit. We were talking about sharks before, but in this case, we may have jumped the shark with 50 up to 90 and 80, and I got soccer this weekend.

I remember playing in that. I'm not ready to parent in that and just sit in it. So I don't know how you do it, but I'm going to maybe need some pointers on this after the recording here. I've ever seen these frog tog type of things. They're like a foamy type of towel, basically. You put them in a cooler. And then you basically wrap them around your neck.

So when we first moved here, that's what my dad and I got those at PGA Superstore, actually. And we put them in the cooler and then you pull them out about whole six or seven, somewhere in that range, six, seven, eight, some of that son. And you wrap it on your neck and then you squeeze the towel. And it lets like ice cold water just run down you for a second, which for a moment feels a little bit cold, but it just lowers the feeling of your temperature. Like your temperature is not any lower, but the feel, how you feel is vastly different. Or you can dip your hat in there really quickly and then put the hat on.

Other fun way to go about it. So yeah, there were probably similar names to other types of products that do a similar thing, but the frog talk. No ad reads on this podcast, by the way. So that's a freebie. That's a freebie for the froggy-toggy corporate organization. And for two easy payments of 9-9-9-9-9-9-nit-net. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, that's, yeah, so yeah, that's my advice for whether too hot.

But here's my ask of you when you deal with 90-degree weather. Would you trade that? Would you trade a 90-degree day for like a 20-degree day when you have those earlier in the winter, like a 10-degree day? What's to read on that? Like where are you more in the middle on it? It's, I mean, that's the thing. Like, I can, when it's 10 or 20, that's usually a comparison to like minus 10 or minus 20. So that's always, I don't know.

I, if there's, if it's snowing, I'll take cold weather. Because it's just, more visually than anything else. We don't like really do a lot of skiing, snowboarding, anything like that. But I just like the way it looks. So I would take that probably over an unsustainable heat wave. Unsustainable heat wave, exactly. We're supposed to be 80s for the next couple weeks here. So we'll see.

It should be a big fun kickoff this summer. Yeah, yeah. Both our kids, by the time you're listening to this dear listener, both I think our kids, Paul and I will be out of school, and I'll be sending them off to the pool every day with my mother-laws house, which I was saying before we hit record as well, like, these kids don't know how good they have it, man. Like, they're just in such a great time in life and they just don't feel that way.

They got no bills. They got no responsibility. They just get fed, you know, like nothing, you know, don't do any work. So, yeah, you know what I bet your sons never have logged into before is Google Analytics. I know my sons haven't. So that is the topic of today's episode, which is essentially when it hit the panic button. This was Paul's idea. Really good headline when looking at your analytics.

Dig that headline. I think it's a really good one to play with here. So I have a few panic buttons been hit in your roster. What's going on? What made you think of this one or did it just strike you? More than anything else. I'm an over-panicer. I've always been an over-panicer when it comes to Google Analytics. If I see those sharp spikes, I dive in right away and we figure it out.

But I'm in there every day or every other day or whatever it is. So I know that when people are seeing some things or seeing some friends, it's usually after a longer period of time or something like that. But yeah, I am the classic overreactor and I want to see and I want to understand. And it's why I've always been a big fan of clarity because I can. I can go back through and start to really piece the story together. And that's something that's always been just important to understanding that homeowner and the guest journey for me. So it is. I don't want people to have to experience this and experience the heart palpitations that I do when I look at at Google Analytics accounts.

And when you should, when you maybe should be a little more concerned about the numbers being off or looking a certain way. I mean, we certainly know there are different factors that play in here. But this is kind of how we do in the summer. We talk about these things. I mean, there are things that are going to help you maybe during busy season, but certainly in the off season as well. I guess what's interesting thinking about the summer season and to what you're talking about there is that we're seeing the shift, right,

occur pretty much everywhere, where there's such an increase in last minute booking trends. I say last minute, but just closer to check in booking trends that I do think now, more than ever, it's imperative to understand like where can I fill in more gaps? people are on your website right now looking at dates that you have on sold that you can consider you know getting more demand in the summer season so I think if you've got that in front of you it is not too late like as much as I used to feel that way like well at some point you can go start after summer and it's like what else are we going to do but you know some of our clients that we're

at a call today with a client and we're rolling out our midweek offer and we kind of made a big deal about it like dedicated ads on it dedicated landing page all this kind of stuff across the few different properties that they're working into and it's been pretty successful so far with some of the properties. Like people are taking us up on this offer, this midweek offer. So I'm like, that's stuff that's influencing their demand over the next three weeks and six weeks. And that stuff we came up with three, four weeks ago with their marketing team. And now we're able to launch ads on it. So yeah, I think it's kind of just, I did this the other day. We're on the AOH show when I was talking about like, if you're in this business, like you just kind of have to enjoy this stuff.

Like you have to be excited by like new marketing ideas. And I would say it's an acquisition business. You're constantly acquiring new properties and acquiring new guests. And those things never end, essentially because you're going to turn a home through no fault your own. And you need a guest every three days, every three days, every property. You need new guests, new guests, new guests, right? For this business to work. So maybe five or seven days if you're lucky, but you know, usually it's closer to three or four days nowadays, right? So yeah, I think that like getting excited by this, knowing your numbers going into analytics and like having a pulse on what's happening right now is so critical. And I'll be honest, there's clients in our roster that don't really have a good

handle in their numbers. We'll kind of log in and like, I'm telling them what's happening, not the other way around. And then our clients that could tell me to the seventh decimal point exactly what percent after, you know, bookings that they're down or up from this year to last year. So, you know, we run the gamut, but I'm sure you're the same way. It is. And I think that that's where, I mean, it has been eye-opening because I've been fortunate to see a lot of different kinds of accounts. I mean, we, I think we went through at Resorts and Lodges, probably seven or eight

analytics accounts, just those high levels. And that's 100 per. and it is. It's interesting, like comparing some of those numbers of dozens of site visitors versus hundreds of site visitors days and thousands of site visitors. And I think that's where it does begin to morph together of everything is on scale. Like it is. When you see a 20% increase in traffic or a 20% drop in traffic on any site, it's going to be noticeable. But I think if you start equating that just to sessions and visitors and things like that, that it is, oh, you had 200 fewer visitors.

200 fewer visitors from a very specific channel, from a very specific whatever it may be. I do. I think that's where we've both had the opportunity to see on very different sizes of scales. But even when I look at a new analytics account for the first time, that's one of the first things I notice is do we have big fluctuations?

Is it because we have smaller numbers of traffic? Or is this because there's no consistent? distance here in the traffic. You know, what does that really look like there? And I do. I think the fact that more people are concerned with the operations and they kind of let the marketing play itself out. If you're not, if you haven't done it before, you've done it in a way that there's, there's been more, I've had to install analytics accounts on more websites than I'd like to admit, and that's something that, I mean, some of these are three, four, five year old websites that haven't had tracking before. And I just wonder how, or they've done it through

a WordPress dashboard or things like that. So it is. This is, these are things that we know people have varying levels of understanding of what the numbers mean in G4. And, and let's, let's call a spade a spade over the, I mean, it was easier to understand universal, the universal analytics airface. It was easier to manipulate. It was easier to find the data points you wanted to find. I still think. Is there more in G4? Sure. But did we

create reports or that don't really solve problem? I don't know. That's a whole matter. That's probably three episodes. Just on the Universal versus G4 two years, three years later. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole. I will say really

quickly for the listener. If you have not yet asked Claude co-work to build a report for you in analytics. That isn't mind-bending experience. And I know how to build reports in analytics. So for me, it wasn't like a gap in skill necessarily. Although everyone's while I get stumped by something when I'm trying to put together a few different, like who knows every single dimension, every single variable, all that kind of stuff. I'm sure some people do, but it's the majority, even if people that are in marketing that do what we do all day long. There's just too many things that they change and modify in there. But if you go to Claude and you say, like, I want a report

that does this. Flip on co-work. Open up the cloud window, give it browser access tab, where it can go mess with your settings and actually build a report for you. It is unbelievable how it's slow, but eventually gets the job done. And I'm just like, wow, I would have taken me so many clicks. And like, it just did all clicks for me. And then you're just like working the background and come back to it. It's incredible. So I would actually highly recommend if you could explain in words what you're looking to do in a report, do that.

Ask how to do it and co-work, give it browser access. And I pretty much guarantee you it'll build out something really close to what you need. If not, you can like tweak it and customize it and go from there. So just a quick sidebar there. If anyone's done it was super valuable. So I think to come back to the core problems, you've hit on maybe a touch or dance around them so far. But here's kind of the four that I came up with. Then you add a bunch of other notes in here for our outline.

But my mind, no more problem that I think I see is sample size. So you just don't have enough data basically in there to really have a sense of a trend month over month or year over year. So if you're getting 10, 12, 15, 20, 30 direct bookings a month even, like one a day, it's just a small sample size in the grand scheme of things. So you're going to see normal fluctuation due to who knows, right? the weather or geopolitical events or, you know, you have a bad stretch of whatever, you know, you get worse. Like, so that's just tricky. Like if you just don't have a lot of data, do we are really building trends off that?

Seasonal trends, I think matter quite a bit as your marketing shifts and changes as you get bigger. These clients we have that are scaling. I notice like every report I run looks good. You know, it's like, oh, you know, we're getting more traffic in last year. Well, because they have more this. They have, you know, they grow in their business. So it's like it always looks good. But I think that would dove sales is my next one that we can talk about, which is expectations.

So if you expect that you had 30 direct bookings last year, let's say during the month of May, and then this year will you have double the inventory. So you expect to do 60, then your expectation should be made clear, I think, to your vendors, team, you know, members, et cetera, people looking at that data because I may see 50% gain. And I'm happy. You know, I'm like, oh, wow, they only did 30 last year. We launched all these new ads. Now we got 45 or 50.

And my head, I'm thinking, like, this is going to be awesome. And then we go dive in and we're like, oh, no, this is not what they expected. So I think expectations is super valuable, understand. And then I've already alluded to it, but size of inventory. as you go up or down. And frankly, I've had situations in both camps. We have clients that we started working with that lost some inventory. And as a result, their direct bookings are down a little bit. I would argue it's, you know, they're not down nearly as much as they lost inventory. Revenue-wise. So I think we're actually still doing pretty good at converting people.

But at the end of the day, it's like the numbers are red in the dashboard. So that doesn't feel good. And vice versa, we have a client who's added a bunch of inventories. So the direct bookings keep going up every month. But as a percentage of their overall booking percentage, it's not going up that much. So it does make it tricky to be like, okay, well, that's fair as well, you know, because you're measuring both ways. So those are kind of mine. Yeah, we can pick apart any of those or kind of build on each of those as we go along here,

but that's what I think about. I mean, I think it is just going on to that size of inventory. I think that is something that's overlooked a lot of the time in relation to marketing efforts is that there are a lot of, I mean, it is, it's something that I'm reminded that when I see an email from someone over that says, oh yeah, well, we've added these on and now we're trying to just kind of keep up,

so we want to turn off some of the owner. or the homeowner stuff. It's like, cool, fine, wonderful. That's awesome. We can do that. But it is. It's figuring out how that it counts into what our budget looks like over the next six months now that you have onboarded four new properties, five new properties,

10 new properties, 20 new properties. And I do. Because that is so operational, I think that people forget that, okay, now how are we? I mean, and we've talked about it many times. You've added 20 new properties to your portfolio. you know, now what? How are you going to market to those? Because they need to have the,

you have created an expectation with homeowners and probably created an expectation with how you've sold these new homeowners, what results are going to get. Now you have to account for that for what you're doing holistically across the business there. So I do. I just think that that's something that it should be, it should always be an underlying factor in what we're talking about here.

But especially when we do, I mean, that should be in your mind when you're looking at year-over-year trends in your Google analytics. I mean, understanding the full seasonality, I mean, kind of just hopping right in here of, you know, some areas where we probably don't need to panic, there's seasonality in our business. That's just the reality of what we do. You know that you were going to have high season for bookings, high season for travel. Those probably aren't going to match exactly. You're going to have, you know, a booking window and we're going to see some. something like that going on there. Same thing.

You'll have your shoulder seasons and you'll have your off season. This is kind of the way the hospitality works, unless you're in San Diego where every day is sunny and you figure out from there. But still, I mean,

there's still seasonal fluctuations. Even in Burntle Beach, beautiful area, lots of golf courses we talked about. I mean, there are some businesses that are not busy all the time. Some that are.

But that's, again, another discussion. So I do. I think that that's something that understanding, understanding booking window is a better understanding of, it gives you a better understanding of where your shoulder season is or where your travel shoulder season is

because people are going to book at a different timing now this year than they have in previous years. I mean, again, we can go back to the last six years. You can't really draw a line from 2000 to 2020 to 2020 with any, true predictability of what that booking window is going to look like there. So understanding that, yeah, your traffic may have come earlier this year and you're to your website and you may have bookings that are earlier in the season. So where does that account for the rest of the year?

I mean, that's something that you can't just look at those numbers and say, oh, well, we're down. Down in comparison to what time frame? What window are we looking at? Are we looking at two weeks? So we're looking at a month, three months, a quarter. What does that look like there? So I think that shoulder season is a tough conversation,

or that seasonality can be a tough conversation to have because we have seen so much fluctuation in our seasons over the last six years. Yeah. Well, so again, you have to combine those two things that you said and then what I said to really get the full picture, right? Don't you get people booking last minute and the seasons of things shifting during COVID. So and then you get to that, yeah, this idea of like even comparing to last year isn't as insightful as you may look it out to be, right?

Because things shift around so much. So you could agree more. I don't think you've said this yet, but this delay in reporting data is one that just is a nice, pretty much a weekly source of migraines for me. So love this, right? So client logs into the analytics dashboard and they say, hey, what's all this unassigned traffic? That's when I get a lot.

Or, hey, our RoAS is really bad the last seven days on Google ads. And then I'm like, well, really, you can't look at the last seven days. You've got to back out a few days because there's these like two to four day delays. And again, it's just an interesting thing that's happening because we were talking about earlier about like universal analytics and they had a less of a data delay in that. So how does analytic, how do we go further in technology in many ways? Like we have AI, we got a talking robots. We, you know, we're putting men back on the moon, all this kind of stuff. And we made our reporting delays worse with GA4 than it was in universal analytics.

Isn't this supposed to be a better system? I don't know. I digress. Again, we don't want to ramp on GA4 because that could be an hour or two or sevens. So we don't want to do that. But yeah, basically long story short, GA data processing, it can take two, three days sometimes. to fully kind of bake in there and get you the final data. So just be aware of that.

When you're looking at, if you're trying to look at like yesterday's traffic, you're just probably wasting your time. So I really wouldn't bother to do that. In theory, real time may give you a little bit of insight, but I rarely look at that. The truth is you just got to wait a few days in my experience. And that's where they trick you because Google does give you that real-time, you know, map interactive database or, you know, interface that says,

ooh, this is what's happening on your website. But it is. It's still kind of accurate, as accurate as accurate as, Google can make it at that time, but truly it is a matter of, are they catching capturing every session? Nope. Neither is clarity. Neither is Adobe analytic. Nobody's doing it in real time because you can't process that all in real time. So it is. Yeah, I think that's completely spot on here. And then the one that we've been talking about feels like for the last six months, maybe nine months, direct traffic spikes. And I mean, that goes back to Verma. There was one we're starting to

see a lot of them coming over from China and China China. But again, a lot of these areas where we don't know, obviously, this wasn't traffic we had before. And when you take a look at your reporting now and you see these huge spikes of hundreds or thousands of direct traffic, direct sessions, sometimes direct users as well, usually fewer users. But again, it's something we have to take into consideration now. We do have to probably filter out more of our direct traffic to a certain extent, or at least acknowledge that you're going to have those spikes, maybe filter out by country, filter out by some of these other areas.

But that is. That's part of it. I mean, direct is also the area where Google puts everything. We know that. It's something where it's always been kind of that catch-haul for, audience segment or traffic segmentation excuse me um so it is so it's unless you have a I know a lot of traffic coming from the paid side of things or you have a lot of traffic coming for the organic side of things direct is still going to be your main driver of traffic because it does all get

lumped in and there are going to be people who are coming directly to your website as well but whew it's it is it's now seeing the again those hundreds or thousands of of different hundreds of thousands of sessions that are coming in and just muddying the water. Like that, that's the data is, oh, up 30%. Great. But let's tell the other story is that we're actually down 15% in non-direct traffic. And let's find ways to maybe improve that as well. So I think it provides that smokescreen of maybe some other areas where those people out there who are focusing on

hey, your sessions are up or your users are up, make sure that you understand what's happening behind the scenes here. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Yeah. Yeah, and it is frustrating because, like, we have clients that I look in their traffic and I don't like doing all this filtering, so I just kind of go in there, stock standards, start looking at, you know, traffic acquisition year over year, and then you realize that, like, yeah,

there's a lot of junk in there. So that is unfortunate. I will say, though, generally speaking, direct traffic from the right markets, from the right places is a good brand-building sign. Like I don't want to skip past that. Like I don't want someone to think like all direct traffic is bad, which I don't think they would out of what you said there. But just like a note that like direct traffic coming in from the types of places

that you typically get guests from is probably a really good sign that your marketing is working better. So I'll I'll digress there. Oh, we had our notes here, a single page traffic drop. In my mind, it's like mostly blog informational content. And look, I mean, we can do a whole, again, a whole long stump speech on this and Google changes and all that kind of stuff. But long story short, basically. Google is continuing to summarize your content. That started way back.

when, right? This is like feature snippets started doing this back in, well, that would have been 2013, 2014? What I feel like was the first time I saw featured snippet. Now we're in like super AI max, you know, Gemini summary mode of AI snippets, essentially featured snippets, which is like, we're going to take your whole article, rip out all the important bits, slam it on the search results. And like, there goes your click buddy. Like it's gone. So now you go look at analytics here for year. You're going to go, hey guys, you guys, you guys are managing the blog. What happened all our blog traffic? It's down like 30, 40, 40, 50 percent. And then you go do ranking check and you're like, oh, ranking number one, but don't clicks on it because they summarize the whole article above.

So, yeah, just be aware of that. That's not new. That's been going on for many, many, many months now. But just realize that, like, your blog traffic is almost certainly down year every year, if your content is ranking in a somewhat similar position. And we don't like it. And there's also nothing we can do about it, unfortunately. Right. The only time I've seen this be, like, impactful outside of a blog. You're right. Blogs are where it's most important. Images, too. I've seen images where if they're tagged previously and you do a website transition, sometimes those don't come over quite the same way. as well or if your PMS changes, same thing.

But I have also seen a couple of rental listings that somehow dropped off the site map and somehow got robots, you know, no follow, no index on the robot side of things. How it happened? I don't know. But that's the area where if you do see something like, you're probably not going to catch it on the analytics side. You're probably going to catch it on the PMS side of things where it's just not, you're not as able to, it's not as visible anymore.

or when it's on the site. I mean, if your bookings are down, you're probably going to catch that in the PMS. But I did, we've caught a couple 404s and a couple knowing that no endash no follows that it's just, it's kind of silly that that happens behind the scenes in some of these website builders,

but they do, especially if you're going with people who are a little more custom, that may not be as familiar with the space and are doing some redirects and APIs and connecting all together there. So that's something where probably not as common on, like, if you're working with ISE and B, real tech, anybody else out there.

But it's one of those that I, if you're not catching it in your PMS, I think you've got some other issues, maybe that you have to uncover there as well. Yeah, I would encourage people to consider, you know, monitoring those things. And I do agree that like things can change at the moment's notice very much unintentionally from any of the major vendors.

I mean, we've had weird stuff happen to our own website. Like, you know, plug in updates occur now automatically. like weird stuff can happen, server updates, etc, et cetera. So yeah, big fans, obviously of like H-Refs and they have like an automated crawling function, which is great. I don't think it replaces doing like an SEO audit through ScreamingFrog or anything like that. In my opinion, I still find those tools to be superior. But Screaming fog is a little bit clunkier with scheduled stuff and like automatically run stuff. Like the A-R-Rexhaer runs in the cloud. Like it runs remotely. It's not running on your computer locally. So I find that to be a valuable tool. But yeah,

your SEO team should be catching that within a reasonable time frame of something like that were to occur. so you want to be certainly very, very aware of it. So maybe actually that's a good dovetail then, Paul, into this concept of like, when is the reason to panic? We kind of said there maybe some reasons not to panic. Like, what are some reasons to panic? So Algo updates, tracking, breaking, maybe booking, tracking, breaking, or other like kind of red flags to look for, you know, drop-offs in certain pages,

which kind of red flags really would be the ones where you're like, oh, shoot, we need to look at this more. I mean, anytime you're seeing organic traffic have a pretty, big shift and a big shift like immediately that's the thing we know there's going to be fluctuations you're going to like if you're looking depending on the cadence you're looking there if you're looking month over month you're going to see fluctuations probably five to 10 percent sometimes we excuse me month over month stuff like that probably see that week over week as well that's the people that's different people doing different searches at different times um so i think that that's something that the ebb and flow there is one thing. 20% is there, that number, that kind of that magical number where my eyes start

to say, whoa, what's happening here? And again, it depends on the site, depends on a lot of different factors there. We can go down that rabbit hole. But anytime you're seeing it go down and stay down, I think that that's something if you're not regaining the rank, if you're tracking the keywords as well, if you're not regaining the rankings, that's a problem. If you're not getting that traffic back, that's an issue as well. Now, again, search is changing. We know that, but your website should not perform. Like, if it has been performing well, it should not start to perform poorly based on just an algorithm update. That's something that I still have not seen a core update really impact the vacation rental space to like a great degree where it's like, oh my gosh.

We're done. Like it is. Now we've seen the schism of impressions to clicks from Google, certainly. But nothing where a core update has tanked all of our rankings. And everybody's like, okay, wave the red flag. We're in some big trouble here. So that's where I would say, you know, it is. It's anything north of 15, 20%.

And your number may be different there as well. But a lot of it does. It depends on the time frame over which you're looking and measuring. and taking into seasonality, taking in the search. I mean, I think you can also go into an ads manager, go into a SMRUS, go into an AHRFs, go into some of these areas and start to look at the search volume and see, has the search volume trended in the same direction

or has it gone down? And again, once you're seeing those two things, maybe, you're seeing that the number is down, you're seeing that the trend is not that way. Big old red flag and let's figure something else out there. But what do you think about that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think obviously we've all done that if we've worked in SEO for any length of time.

We see the Algo update. We panic check, et cetera. And boy, I had an issue earlier this year, you know, with a client who launched a new website. And Google just hated this new website at first. And I was checking those rankings every day. And every day I went in and search console and analytics. And I'm seeing just like down, down, down, traffic wise.

No known issues. You know, site was indexed fine. Little delay and weird things like the Favicon didn't show up. But Google just hated this new website. And, you know, it really had me nervous. Like this was a brand 20 plus year history, you know, ranking well and doing really good job. And I thought we had dot all of our eyes and crossed all of our T's. And then we launched this new website.

And it was just a total disaster for a little while. And then all of a sudden we went from ranking on the third page, the second. And then we just kind of went 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, be back right where they were, which is first. So, yeah, a sudden traffic drop. New website, super common. Algo update. Like Paul mentioned, super common. But yeah, double check all the obvious things, right?

No index tag. You can lose your titles. You didn't lose your meadows. He didn't lose a bunch of internal linking. Obviously, penalties do still occur. I think they're pretty uncommon, my experience. I don't see a lot of sites that are quote-unquote penalized, but algorithmically filtered, whatever term you want to use.

Check your links. You might have a bunch of weird spam-y looking back links there. So definitely something that pops up, unfortunately. Redirects as well. Redirects and URL mapping. Very important, especially if you have a lot of that time. Again, we talked about it a little bit there, the top of funnel traffic, the blog posts.

That's still traffic that's very beneficial to your website. It is hugely important for people who are in that inspiration, travel planning, and whether or not we're going to get it moving forward with AI overviews, we'll see, but it's still there. It's still being referenced in some way. Your brand is still popping up somehow in a reference there, even if it's there. So I think that those, don't, please make sure your redirects are in place. We've both been through those issues where it's just, it gets ugly in a hurry, and it doesn't work well for you in the end. The website will not survive the same money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At some point,

I think that your SEO can be harmed so much that yeah, it almost becomes like a permanent black mark right on the site's record. And I mean, luckily this never, you know, did that. This never happened. But like, it's certainly something you have to be aware of. So could not, you know, could not agree more. So yeah, sudden traffic drop. Traffic flat conversions are busted. Most common one, right? Like your traffic's great and there's no bookings coming in. And I'm saying like you were doing 60 bookings a month and I are doing none, something's broken almost for sure, right, barring some kind of weird like COVID type event, you know, where everything's canceled or a hurricane or something like that. But yeah, you know, like double-check everything from a tracking perspective.

Yes, this may require talking of seven different people ask me how I know about getting tracking working, but I would double-check that. Really like, by the way, sites that have a custom thank you page only for bookings, because then at least if the tracking's broken, I can see if bookings are occurring. So it's like, okay, people are getting to the confirmed thanks page, but they're not, we're not seeing an e-com data flow in. So like, that tells me that one is working out the other. Not a big fan of these sites that were like you check out. And then it's just like success.

Like it doesn't actually like bring you to a unique URL. So note for the devs out there. We'd like a unique URL on the thank you page. So yeah, if that now that truly is the case, like traffic's kind of flat, but there's nothing broken. Everything's worked properly.

I would go back and double check sources. There probably is some huge spike in unrelated traffic that you think is up or you think maybe your organic traffic fell a ton, but then direct traffic went up a little bit from bots. And then you're like your your net is zero, but like you lost all the relevant traffic that you were getting. that's where I don't love these metrics, but looking at stuff like engage sessions or time on site or with GA4, it is pretty easy to build these events. These have a little more value where it's like date search, start checkout.

Like those are all little thumbprints along the way of like a bot's not going to go to your website, put in dates. Look at a property page or three. Add a credit card. Go to start to checkout at a credit card. Those are all human based activities. So if you are seeing some stuff that you're just like doesn't make sense, look at some of your steps of your quote unquote funnel or whatever you want to call it your booking flow and then double check that there's not like massive dropoffs on one of those. areas because maybe your checkout's fine, but like a lot of people can't get to it because your date search is busted. So like they're coming on the homepage trying to do a date search and it

it returned zero listings. Again, ask me how I know about that one. So that one again, so on that, so it's like they would do a date search any date search they did and no results were coming back. So it's like nothing was wrong on the checkout. If you thought it was a checkout problem, you were wrong. It was earlier in that booking flow process. So yeah, a lot of and again, this could be 10,000 different reasons. But it's kind of like you just go back first principle, start again from the beginning. And we always say this, Paul, and we forget to do it sometimes. At least I do. I don't know if you are as well, check on your phone as well. Like 60, 7% traffic is on your phone and you go look at your desktop, everything's fine.

And then you open your phone and it's like, oh, no, it's broken on mobile. It's not a desktop. So that one got me again recently too. That's, I mean, we just saw something. It's more about kind of this next topic on the list, a spike in bounce rate or drop an engagement rate on the checkout pages. That's something as we were doing an audit of a booking process. We did.

We took a look at the phone, my phone version. and I'm looking at about 20 pixels in the middle of a big banner on top and a big banner on the bottom that were, yeah, providing some semi-important information, but way more important, like a big screen for a desktop or something like that, where it could breathe a little more. I mean, we could barely see more than a single description, excuse me, not description, but the headline and kind of the metadata for the vacation rentals, much less see the images as well. So I do. I think that that's something that when you, you're making the small design tweaks that maybe you're referencing something on the desktop version of the website, I think any time you're submitting a support ticket based on a design

element or doing something like that, make sure you're like sending a screenshot of both mobile and both the desktop, just so you're thinking about any of those things and you're checking in after as well. I mean, we talked to what it means, you know, maybe it's a plug-in, maybe it's software issue maybe you made a design tweak that looks better on the desktop side than it does on the mobile side um i do i think that that's something where we were able to identify you know in the audit as well but we were seeing a increase or a decrease in the engagement and not the bounce rate on the checkout page but they weren't they weren't completing it and we had a lot of traffic going there and looking at the mobile experience i'm not surprised they were it was a bad

experience that was happening there. So yeah. I think it's like a rare thing that we don't have enough, right? It's just like that looking at our page from like more of a beginner's eyes or like someone new to your brand. Like I was I was talking to someone about that recently. I'm just like you have to pretend that you don't know anything about your company and come in here. And there's something about that, right? People who struggle to like see things from other people's perspectives. Like I know there's people that sometimes have a hard time with that. But that was kind of my sense of it when I was talking to this person. I'm like, you don't say anything about your company. Like I know nothing think about you. For all I know, this company is run by whatever, right? Some random people that I've

never, you know, don't exist or whatever the case may be. And I'm like, you've got to put a lot of trust signals out there to be like, here's me, here's my background, here's my company and all that. And he's like, well, I'm comfortable doing that. And I'm like, okay, then get comfortable with like terrible conversion rates, I guess, right? There was no magic pill that was going to solve that. So yeah, could not agree more that that's like a key part of the process is going and looking at again from the beginning and saying like, how are people actually perceiving this? So could not agree more there. What's next on your list? What are the next thoughts that you want to dive in time. I mean, I do. I like kind of the, we admitted that we had Jim and I do

do a little bit of the outline here, but I like this, this sanity check. I mean, this is something that this is what I use personally or pretty close to this. You know, it is. Like, I mean, here are the three things to kind of look for. Is this a macro or is this a micro trend? Am I looking at a small window of time or am I looking at a larger window of time? Because that does make an impact on how emergent the decisions you're making about them about it are. We talked about the real-time aspect of it to just,

it is. You shouldn't be making make-or-break decisions based on a seven-day window of data. That's just, that's not the thing. So again, you're comparing period over period or period year-over-year. I think that's another thing where because of our seasonality,

If you're looking at period over period and you're comparing a high season month from a shoulder season month, that's never going to look good. So I think that that's something we want to take into consideration there. Two, is it happening across all channels? If it's just organic, is it just PPC? Is it just social? Is it an email? Is it direct? What's happening?

Is this something that is it across the whole website or is it just campaign or channel specific? Take a look at that. And then, again, talking about the curves, talking about the seasonality, doesn't match your booking curve. Do these numbers look right? You've got access to the PMS data. A lot of the times we don't have access to the PMS information behind the scenes. So we're reliant on you to kind of connect some of those dots and tell the story to make sure everything is lining up in that way. Because if it is matching what we're seeing, okay, yeah, it's not happening directly, but we are seeing it on the OTA side of things or we're seeing it on the META side of things.

What does that look like there? and how can we kind of confirm that information and make sure that, yeah, is it a big deal? Is it a little deal? And nothing's a little deal. Everything is a big deal, but how big of a deal is it there? So what do you think about? I mean, does that match with when you're trying to go through and maybe quantum, or trying to do a little QA and trust but verify?

Is this kind of what you're doing there as well? I think that was the right word right there at the end, yeah, or the right phrase. trust but verify because I don't know and like all these analytics platforms too like you got to trust that they actually match the PMS data you know I don't know if you said that a second to go either but like to me that's where a lot of mistakes can occur is that the data doesn't flow in perfectly to analytics and then you're you're looking as a marketer to a platform that you think is right and then the client has the actual source data over here and they don't match up and then you're making bad decisions because you're like you don't know you don't have the full picture right like it's um

we just watch this movie the running man on amazon prime total side right here but the premise that movie one of the premise is that the network can control and do these deep fake videos that are very realistic. And so I was feeling about that analogy of like, yeah, I feel like sometimes looking at like deep fake reports or like things that I think are a certain way. And I'm like completely convinced my mind this is what I'm looking at. Then I'm going to talk to the client and like they have different data.

And then they're really unhappy, you know, about the results. And I'm looking and I'm like, are we looking the same thing here? Like, are we on the same page? Because I'm looking at it and I'm feeling like we're in the right spot. And then they go back and look over there. And it's like, nope, that's not going away. So very much a hard lesson learned, but one that I certainly have, you know, had to do before and had to,

you know, goes through the hard way, for sure. It's, it's, it's, it's what makes our job so much fun. You know, we get to read and interpret the data. And that's, that's, that's, that's, you know, it's, we're going to tell a story. We have to use the data to tell a story. And, you know, that's something that, it's easier to tell a story when it's gentle curves. It's the U-Shame.

We like, we like the bell curve. The bell curve kind of is, is nice to keep it in the, in the medium there. But these things happen, spikes happen. I mean, we started getting China traffic, and then we started getting other traffic. And Google Analytics isn't perfect. And you have to know when to really have a bit, you know, when to call it out and when to just say, okay, let's sit and watch and make sure that it is. Don't panic. Look at the big picture.

It is. Ultimately, a single small trend line does not impact the whole lifetime of the website and should be dealt with appropriately, I would say. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. No, that, I think, is a good summary of it. I don't know if I have a lot more things to kind of put in the end there.

I would say just, you know, at the end of the day, it's like use the best information you can always, you know, the limitations of these platforms. You talk about that before. The panic never gets you anywhere, by the way. You know, go read a stoic philosophy, if you will. You know, what we thought were problems today. You know, they thought were problems thousands of years ago. And, you know, it's all just relative to what we're focused on.

So, yeah, use the best information you can. Build a model that makes sense for you. Know what you're looking at. Use your source data if you can to kind of back up what you're thinking. It looks gives you stuff that your PMS dozens. You're going to be aware of that. And, you know, to your success, as it were going forward. You know, let's say we were wishing someone at the end of this podcast, Paul, success.

They want us to be successful, too, right? They listen to the podcast, presumably they got some value out of it. What do they have to do? What do they have to do in order to do that? What's some action they could take? I think they should go to their podcast app of choice. They should probably leave us a five-star review because they appreciated all the valuable insights that we delivered this week. And in the summer, we're going to need some praise because it's going to be rough. I mean, Conrad and I, you know, we're entering some crazy time.

So go to that, you know, podcast app to have choice and give us five stars because you love us. You love to keep listening to us. And we love to keep giving it to you. nothing would bring me more joy than like opening my podcast app, let's say on a Saturday or a Sunday, and opening up the heads and bed show feed and seeing more reviews. That would be like, that would be an amazing. And my birthday is coming up, by the way. This I think this is coming out around my birthday.

So if you're listening to this, a free birthday person you can give me. Don't leave a podcast review. It's going to cost you nothing. What the best gifts get someone that excites someone and cost them nothing? Where else can you get that? Not many places. Not many places. I'll get there.

Or a Porsche 9-11. So either podcast review or podcast reviews, please. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can send that my way. If you need my address, just send me a DM or an email and we'll get that shipped right out in a jiffy as it were. So we appreciate it. Thanks for listening.

We have some fun here at the end. Hope you have an awesome rest of your day. And we'll catch you in the next episode.