Heads In Beds Show - Your Vacation Rental Website Traffic Is Up, But Your Bookings Are Down - Why?

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

In this episode Conrad and Paul dive into a 2026 trend: your website traffic is up, but your bookings are down - why? 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. All right, Paul, we're back one day later, but the listener will not know that we're recording back to back. Unless I just said it out loud, what's going on? Well, my cat's out of the bag now.

What's happening? Yesterday we talked about what we thought. thought was going to be, we didn't do actually a score prediction. So I figured we should probably do a super, did you? Am I not remembering it now? I don't, I don't think I did a score prediction. Okay. I think that's, we got to do a score prediction because we know who everybody wants to win.

But what is that number? Because, you know, I mean, you know, what, did the last one end 2824? Is it bad for me to just predict the same, you know, for? score um i think yeah it was 2024 i'm gonna do something silly and i'm just gonna predict the same score 2024 Patriots win 24 all right i'm going with 21 17 oh you think it'll be a little bit lower scoring i think it'll be a touch higher scoring well i think in order for for you to get the outcome that you need it's got to be lower scoring lower scoring yeah yeah i think i think we could score 20 points don't think that's absurd i don't know we'll see

see. I guess this defense, I don't know. This is this tough defense, but it'll be, it'll be fun. It'll be fun to watch. We'll have something to, something to chirp about this weekend at the very least. I don't mean, you talk about golf. I don't think you need to worry about golf on Sunday. Yeah, well, I'll be done long before the game starts, but yeah, yeah, totally makes sense. Yeah, we'll say you're at this point, you're listening to this several weeks later, but as of our recording to be clear, this is February 5th, so it'll be interesting to see where it all flushes out. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. Talk about numbers and scores and, you know, who's going to win, who's on top, who's on bottom. That's our topic of today. That's our topic of today. which has been a little bit of a topic that you and I both hit on over the last, I would say, month or so, it's been happening more than, more than typical, more than normal, which is, hey, our traffic is up on our website, according to analytics data, but our bookings are down. Why? What's going on? So that's kind of the topic. This was your idea. Paul, and I loved it. I thought it was a fantastic one, because there's a lot of reasons for it. So number one, is this happening everywhere? Is this more isolated in your kind of roster of clients? What are you seeing across the board? And then we'll dive into some specifics why, but what do you see in here?

It has Abden Float. initially when we noticed this I think this was probably back in late October early November maybe we're we're approaching definitely four months of some of this happening but it is I would say it's it's pretty consistently across everybody now some of the initial I think what scared me initially when I started seeing the China traffic and Singapore was in there Brazil's in there again not this is not to say that traffic from if you get consistent traffic and you didn't get consistent traffic previously might still be good traffic um but this was definitely different and it's

different in how it engages with the website is different in how google is qualifying it and i also remember sergey leachko from tech spokes he had done uh after i did a post my post he had like gone to the server side. And it's not even that, you know, all these hits were happening just on the Google side of things. It's that like I think 100 of we saw thousands. He saw 175,000 hits coming to the server side of it. So part of this is is really Google not understanding what spam traffic is versus what agentic traffic is. I think there's a lot of things that go into this. But I would say roster wide outside of literally one or two exceptions. And I haven't figured out why those those are those are happening either. We're seeing some type of bump, blip, or consistent China traffic

going through. What about you? Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely seeing the China traffic. I didn't notice that it as clearly, I think you were early to it. You're the first one in my network of people and I follow online and that we interact with all the time that flagged it for me. And then I start seeing it probably in about 60% of our accounts. I'm seeing this huge influx of traffic from China. So when you go look in analytics, definitely do a country again. So that's kind of your first action in your listener is go to your analytics, look at your traffic by source because, yeah, is your traffic actually up with legitimate traffic, people that are actually going to book? And to this day, I still don't know if I have a great

reason why. I did see a little bit of a threat on Twitter the other day people talking about it. Sorry, X, people talking about it. And there is a rule you can set in Cloudflare where if their country equals China, you could make them more aggressive with like check this box to proceed to the websites outdoors, that sort of thing. So there are some solutions out there. I've not tested that yet to be candid, but it wouldn't do it for a U.S.-based visitor, but it would do it for someone outside the country, which let's be honest, right? For like 95% of our clients and 90% of the scenarios, they're only getting traffic from the US, most likely. And even within the US, they're probably only having traffic really come from five or six states in general. So,

yeah, it's messy in analytics because you have to check if they're actually visiting your website back to your point of like, are they taking your script and just firing it somewhere else, which is kind of annoying? Or are they actually visiting your website and looking at it? Is it also a person or is it a, you know, a bot, if you will? That's a whole other layered discussion. But yeah, as far as like your analytics data. If you're assuming X number of people have come to my website, double check that assumption for sure, you know, before you get, you know, too far along in the process and see what it is. And if you can put like little tiny road bumps in place that don't harm your actual visitors, like a cloud flare, you know, check this box type thing, then I think

that is worth considering. And I'm going to test that with probably like our worst two or three and just see, you know, how that goes or how that does as far as filtering it out. I was going to say it was an interesting correlation because I did. I asked for one of the sites to kind of early on. I was like, ooh, let's take this off. Let's exclude this traffic coming through. And what was interesting initially was that even though they were making the changes on the back end of the website and the DNS,

we're still getting some of those sessions to come through. Again, that was just strange to see that come through. But also as that China bot traffic was increasing, we were also seeing a trend of booking.com bookings increasing. And when we turned off that bot traffic, sure enough, booking.com took a nice little slump, not all the way off. But again, that was just interesting. And one off, I'm not going to say that that's the full trend. But it was very interesting to see once a post site transition, we're doing some things with an end of a site, transitioning a site to a new site to new webmaster, all that stuff.

It was a good time to test. So it was interesting to see kind of that parallel of once the. China traffic, once the bot traffic, once, again, I think it's agentic traffic, kind of picked up again. We've seen booking.com bookings also begin to perk up again. So is that really what it is? I don't know. But I do think that it is, that is a trend more towards what we talked about yesterday, AILMs, and that new type of traffic that is hitting some of these websites that Google just doesn't know how to categorize yet. I mean, that may be the case too, right?

Like we're trusting that the data, it's like any data platform, we're trusting the data is actually accurate. And who knows, you know, if there's, I mean, think of all the referral spam stuff. This was happening a lot more to me a few years ago than it is now. But it was horrible at one point in analytics. You'd load it up and there'd be all these referral traffic spam sources. I feel like that's gotten significantly better.

I'm not saying I never see referral spam anymore, but it's far, far less than it used to be. That's for sure. Yeah. So that's kind of part of the, you know, part of the process as well. So 100%. Yeah, check that. You know, do if you can, like, again, where are our top, you know, 10 or 12 states most likely is where you get 90% of your bookings if you're like most for our clients.

There's some exceptions. Like we have a client, Hawaii. There's more variety there. But even that's mostly West Coast biased. You know, go and do a dig in there and see kind of what's going on there because I think that's a huge, you know, huge thing. You know, and basically the broader point I'd have here is like two websites could both have 50,000 visitors a month. But the source that traffic could mean so much different, right? Not only the, let's assume it's all quote unquote legitimate traffic that comes from social versus search versus email.

versus all these other direct traffic, etc. You could have vastly different results. So that's part of it. You just can't look at one number and be like, oh, I know what's going on my website because the session number is just not an accurate depiction of the quality of what's coming in, which is ultimately what leads to people actually making a booking reservation.

Yeah, I mean, I think that people, we'll talk about band and new metrics all the time, but traffic is not a good measurement of how your website is performing, how your business is performing there. That is a very, very small subset. And quality is certainly more important than quantity on our side of things. We want quantity, but we want the quality to come with that as much as we can there, because we all know that outcome is much more positive for us there.

Yeah, couldn't agree more. So the next thing I would look at is like, okay, we've gotten a little bit past the obvious, which is just total sessions, people coming on the website. Okay, what should I look at that? If I'm looking at my analog traffic, what are some things that I look at? So we're in the process of kind of rolling this out for everybody. It's just kind of slow going because it's somewhat tedious depending on the site. We have to do it somewhat manually.

But I think doing just a simple GA, you know, Google Analytics booking funnel is the way to go. So having events for something like, you know, starting the session, page view, home page view, that sort of thing. Entering dates and getting to the search results is kind of like I consider that kind of like step one or you could call it step two if you want to in the funnel, but that's really a starting point. Then it's property page views. Then it's start checkout. Then it's finished checkout. Right. So there's kind of like those four stages that everybody has to go through.

Yes, there are some exceptions. Like if someone were to enter straight in a property detail page, they would not have done a search beforehand. but that's not very common in my experience, or it's certainly not the first visits to the website, that people would do that. And you can still check, by the way, property detailed page view to start checkout, to finish checkout.

You can still measure that part of the funnel. But I think that's the next thing to look at, which is like, okay, if we've got all these, whether it be legit or real traffic, you know, or bot traffic,

it's almost like it doesn't matter because a bot's not going to go through and end during dates, look at a search results page, click around four property detail pages, start a checkout and finish a checkout. That's what a user does, and that's what we care about.

So I would say that's the next thing to look at. The only downside is the GA4 funnels aren't perfect because you can't go back. You can't go back and compare previous months and previous time periods. The data kind of stays there at a somewhat temporary basis. I think it's like 60 day windows or something it's there for. So you have to like save that data or just like go do the calculations a little bit more manually, like export all your page data and then group pages together. So it's a bit of a pain.

But at least you could do something like that where like if you had like a scorecard system in your company or you had some sort of like measurement just every month you would like, we're recording this beginning of February. You just go in and pull all your January stats, 27,000 sessions in the website, 12,000 them did a search. You know, that led to maybe 14,000 page views because people on property pages because people look at multiple pages. Of those 14,872 started the checkout and then, you know, 125 finished. I got 125 bookings. So that's the number that you kind of get to at the end of the day, how many bookings and the revenue, of course, from that. But all those other

numbers give you a pretty good tail, in my opinion of like what's going on on the site. So that's kind of something we're working on. I'm sure you've done some similar stuff in the past, but what's kind of your view of how that should go? Yeah, I think that that's where being able to visualize that at a landing page level or a destination page, you know, where the pathway is and how far people are getting down that experience. I mean, I think that that's something where when all your traffic is hitting the home page or it's not getting down to the subpages, you know, you can start to see that in some of that reporting in Google Analytics. So I think that being able to identify that, you know, using events, I think is really helpful. But for those people who,

don't have those events set up just to be able to understand what is the flow. I think that is doing the example booking, taking that example booking, seeing the pathway that you are taking, making sure you're understanding how many people are hitting those types of pages. So your properties page, you're all rentals page. Some of those pages that you know are making it into, whether you're doing the search or not, they're getting to those pages, that's still making it further down the funnel. So understanding that pathway is super important. And then again, if you can get even further granularity with that in Microsoft Clarity

and actually watch these people navigate through the process, I think that's where everything we can say here is something that can be supplemented, having clarity on the website, be able to see track, do some of these session recordings, heat map, and stuff like that, because it's going to tell you where people are falling off in the funnel, where people are falling off in the booking process, where, again, you can kind of measure the quality of that traffic as well, but really understanding not just the numbers behind getting through that funnel, but once they're getting through that funnel, then watching them go through that funnel and seeing if there are any user experience pain points. User interface pain points, absolutely.

But where you, I think that the rage clicks, the quickbacks, those are small little things and probably can be overvalued sometimes. But if you're actually looking at those sessions and just focusing on what is causing that, is it a pain point with your photo gallery? Is it a pain point with your pricing? Is it where are those pain points popping up? That way, I mean, we're going to talk about some of those as well here coming down, coming down the item. But you really start to visualize that experience that people are having and why they are falling out of your funnel.

I will say I'll do a small detour. If you're okay with it, which is the number one question people have at that stage is, okay, yeah, guys, but what's a good conversion rate on each step of the funnel? and people don't like this answer, but it's true. It doesn't matter is the quick answer. You need to measure your own performance, and then you have to figure out how to improve it over time. Now, are there red flag numbers that I see, like, for sure?

Like, if you have a checkout conversion rate of like 2%, something's super off, right? Like, for the most part, you should be able to get closer to 10, 15, 20% of people who start the checkout, you finish. But again, if you're 12 and I say the average is 15, you're probably fine. Like, that's probably, like, unless you feel like there's something that's very obvious there that you're missing.

Maybe it's worth spending a half day, reviewing each step of the funnel and figuring out how to improve each step, step of it. But then you have to go back to your web developer and kind of go step by step and improve those elements. But at least, again, it's giving you a picture of like how people use their website. And I think what you'll notice sometimes, actually, by the way, is as your site gets more traffic, much bigger, larger in terms of sessions, your conversion rate each step might actually go down a little bit. As you find that relatively common is like your convert, quote unquote conversion rate gets worse, but your volume of traffic gets higher. But at the end of the day,

you're making more money. So it's like, do I want a high converting site that does 10 bookings a month? And it converts everybody who comes to it almost. Or they're one of the low converting site that does a thousand bookings a month. And I'm making, you know, a lot of money off of it. it's like, you know, that's what you want. So yeah, I think there are some like red flag things that you should look out for like, wait a second. Why are so many people coming to this page and not going to the next page? But I also think, unfortunately, there is often no magic bullet. There's not like a pill you can take that will improve these things. It's really just going like tediously step by step by step by step to kind of figure out where are all the areas from

Grubin. And it is tricky because we just onboarded a client somewhere recently. It was a template site from one of the major platforms that, you know, I don't say the name because I have some criticisms of it, but one of the major platforms that you would, you know, you would know, one of the top three most popular PMS software is out there. They just have a template site. And I'm like, there's things I don't like about it, but I had to tell the client, I'm like, hey, client, there's nothing we can do because like we can't control their template.

We can give them a suggestion and idea, but like there's no editing capability we have of this site. That's why in many cases for larger clients we work with, they end up building a custom site because they find, okay, I don't like the way this goes from property page to start checkout. The button doesn't look how I wanted to. I want to change it. And they find on a custom site,

they can do it on a template site. There's just, that's what it is, you know, for many of these major PMSs is. So, yeah, that's part of the puzzle as well, which is know your numbers. Yes, try to improve them over time. But don't sit there in panic if you're 2% below average on one particular metric based

on what some quote unquote expert tells you because there's so much nuance in that that you know, at beach market comparing yourself to a ski market, spending the time a year. There's so many factors that I think you can drive yourself crazy, honestly, in that one. I mean, I can remember as partner or client, whatever that we both worked with that the complaint was that as they had a big increase in organic traffic. But the conversion rate went.

Yeah. It was because people were using the site more as a travel guide. It was not just the straight trip planning process of this vacation rentals, vacation rentals here, lodging in this destination, accommodations here. They were coming in on blog posts. They were coming in on subpages and group pages and items that they take a longer time to get those conversions. You may see those conversions come through in that attribution report down the road that says they had, two organic visits. They had a direct visit. They actually hit a paid ad and a social ad.

Wait a you paid for them after you got them organically. That hurts a little bit. But at least you can see that pathway that people are taking and understanding that one of the items I put in my reports is for every booking that comes through, where did they land? What page did they land on? Are they landing on the community page? Are they landing on a rental specific page? Are they landing on the home page? More bookings take place when they land on a blog post and then make their way through the process. It's funny, but that's the way it happens. So I think that's the thing is we can give you these recommendations,

but every user is going to be different. I think that's where trying to understand some of that nuance of the numbers are going to say what they say, but truly understanding how people are doing it, and I think you have to do it as well. You have to put yourself in the shoes of your homeowner or your guest that's going through and using your site. I think property managers may not think that they're marketing experts,

but they can go through their own site. And I bet they're going to find a lot of this stuff just as easily as we would, just as a user. And I think that's where give yourself some credit there. If something looks funky, feel confident in calling that out to your web services coming and doing something like that because these are the insights that I think we overlook sometimes as members of digital marketing or the market, greater marketing community here is that it's easy to overlook the things that we just take for granted the table stakes sometimes

that aren't really in place or the table stakes as it were. So yeah, it's a tough conversation when that's a tough one of those conversations when your organic traffic does. And we've talked about it on some of our SEO episodes is that, yeah, part of you getting more organic traffic for not as travel-related keywords is that you're not going to have a higher conversion rate, but you are going to have an opportunity to market those people down the road if you have the right pieces in place, your Metapixel and your retargeting tags and everything like that. So look at it, look at it holistically, look at the full picture here, and this is why we're having the conversation.

Yeah. Well, you know, it's, I think oftentimes, and I've said this a lot before in the show, like we talk about scorecards or one metric or one number to optimize it. But yeah, when you're having these kind of conversations around traffic being, you have to dig under the surface. That's why you have to look at the funnels. You have to look at like you said, all the traffic by sources. You've got to evaluate these things because you don't really know until you dig in. Maybe what the problem is. I don't know. I think sometimes, too, like keep in mind, your sample sizes are very small.

You know, if you're listening to this, you probably don't have enough sample size to really truly know. There's an element of almost randomness to it to some degree of how these things go and how things are, you know, proceeding in your own business. And like at a client who had like a bad weekend and emailed me, what can you learn about it? And this is actually for us, like a decent-sized client. But I'm like, I don't know. There's not a lot to learn. Like you had 19 bookings this past weekend. The weekend prior, sure, you had 31, but I'm like, in the grand scheme of things, that's not a big deal.

I mean, is that maybe that's typical. And then what we found, what we figured it out really, it to be, this past weekend, we think, is just the weather. Like, as soon as the weather started getting better in this destination, things weren't up a little bit. All of a sudden, booking started coming back in. So it's like, okay. Like, we can't take too many decisions off. You know, I've done a rance before on A-B testing, I think, on both LinkedIn and the show before. But everyone wants to run AB testing.

that if you use some of these softwares, they'll tell you after like 10 or 12 conversions, like, oh yeah, like we think version A is winning versus version B. Any proper true A-B test needs closer to a thousand conversions, conversions, not visits, in order to really be confident that it's like optioning or option B. So you are probably, like for most of our clients, that would be like two years of their bookings on their website potentially, right? For some of our clients that would be a month or two. But for most of our clients, that would be the case.

So that's the thing, too. Don't drive yourself crazy over tiny sample sizes. Like you just probably need more volume of traffic to solve a lot of your woes. That's something that just as a greater thing we're talking about here is that it is. It's small sample sizes are always going to be, have those ebbs and flows. And you are going to see some up weeks and up. It's, I think putting those, it's important to see those. It's important to track those and monitor those.

But putting those within the scope of, okay, month over month, period, this month over last year, same month, same time periods. the more you expand it out, the more everything kind of pulls to the mean and the average kind of takes hold there. That's again, when we see these big spikes, that's concerning. We can see these direct spikes. That's not what we're looking for because it is over time.

You should see that consistent growth or steadiness or whatever that looks like there. But I find myself, you know, if I look at a week over week report and I see we're down 30%, and well, yeah, we sent an email. Yeah, I didn't send one to the day. It's no small little cyclical things that you fall into that pattern and you want to be that into the details,

but sometimes it is less beneficial to be that far into the details and taking that broader window. And again, two weeks, 28 days, 30 days, 60 days. See the differences between those, the patterns, the trend lines, the shifts. but ultimately, whenever you can kind of default back to those higher levels of, you know, bringing it back to the average and not seeing those big swings. I mean, if there's consistent big swings, then different conversation. But yeah.

Yeah, yeah, no, I'm not saying don't look at your sample, your data and try to figure out what the cause may be. But also, again, don't, don't look at such small sample sizes and go, oh, man, I've learned so much from this. Yeah, I think that's. I mean, so other reasons to dig under the surface a little bit more. And you've touched on these so far. But I think price and fees, rights, I mean, what it comes down to, you know, and it's so interesting the shift I think that's happened over the past, let's call it like six, 12 months because a lot of laws are coming out with respect to how we show fees and rates

and things like that. I think that's probably overall helped our conversion rate. I think, yes, don't like going to a checkout page and seeing initially one price. And then they go to the later and they see the other price. And they see the volume of fees, right? There's almost a certain element to it where it's like, all right, whatever you're doing in the back end accounting wise, what you're doing in the back end accounting wise. But the guests, when they see five different light items for fees, they don't like that.

That's something that never has helped conversions, you know, as far as why people would choose a booking. They're not like, oh, man, I'm really happy there's a $50 fee on there for admin processing. Love that. You know, but if it's just wrapped in the rate and then you just see it on the last step or you see it, hopefully a little bit early in the process of some of these laws now require, you're probably going to be in good shape, right? It's probably fine in that respect.

So I would say, like, yes, you're, now that doesn't mean to say that they're happy with the price that they see if they're shopping you and comparing you. you against 10 of the people and your fees and rates are higher for the same quality of properties they can find somewhere else, whether it be an OTA or another direct booking site, that's obviously not going to hurt you. But I think probably my assumption would be based on the day that I've seen and what I feel is the trends over the last little bit of wrapping things more into one solid number that people can see is probably a good thing. I don't know what your take is on it. It's, I would agree with that. I think that it's one of those things that it's, you never

want to be in a race to the bottom on pricing. That's definitely not where we want to be there. But I think about it is. It's the transparency. We're not the ticket brokerage area, so we're not really seeing that. But it was. I think it says fee. People think that's a tax. It's not going to any municipality.

It's it's a tax on them and a tax on their fund. It's you're taking money away from them that they can. And you do. You have to justify the cost and you have to justify the fees. But every fee they see, that's $50. I can't spend at the beach. That's $50. I can't spend at the pool. At the this, that's that's that's that. That's one less meal that I can have. Would it be baked into the rate anyway? Yeah, it would. But that's not the, I mean, that's not the reality of how,

you know, psychology works for them. So, so I do. I think that that's, however you can present that in a way, that's nice. I gentle. It is. I think that that's something that, I mean, pricing is one on those that I'm happy I don't have to deal with it. I'm happy that I don't have to deal with like hitting revenue numbers from a occupation stamp or an occupancy standpoint or a revenue rev par on those numbers. Nope, nope. I just like get the traffic. I'll get you the traffic and let's make sure that it gets through the funnel in a timely fashion. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it sounds simple on the surface, but then you sort of dig under the hood and you're like, wow, there's a lot here to this piece of the process. That's why we typically don't talk a lot

about rates and pricing and all those kind of elements because we don't pretend to be experts in every single particular thing of the business. That is its own thing. But I will say this, it's very obvious in the marketing side when the rates and pricing and things like that are very off, right? Like you can see the performance numbers be like, wait a second, you know, we got all this traffic here. People were interested. They clicked around them. They saw the price and they didn't like what they saw. So what I remain skeptical of, to be honest with you though, is this idea that small changes on a direct booking site make this massive difference. Like I don't think that people are making a decision to book at 212 a night and then they're, you know, and then you go to 206

and they're like, oh, yeah, I'll book now. And it seems like that's what some of these pricing rate softwares do. Also, this idea of, like, a last-minute guest is always a guest that's willing to pay less. I don't know if that's actually the case or not. Again, look no further than the airline industry where last-minute guest pays the most. And your behavior patterns that they enforce on airlines is buy your ticket, you know, three to six months in advance. And then pay more, by the way, if you want to be able to change you or refunding or whatever the case may be. So it's funny how in short-term rentals, vacation rentals, we do the opposite, which is check-in comes closer.

We start dumping rates. when it's like the price that pays is the price they pay, right? Like regardless of someone happens to check in three days before, or excuse me, book three days before or 30 days before or 300 days before. In theory, it's like you just have to present the best value compared to your competition. So I wish we could get away from that. I wish we would get away from dumping rates because I don't think that that's actually the answer a lot of the time, to be honest.

And I think, I mean, it's, I think, unfortunately, like, if it were just property management company consumer, I think it'd be more straightforward of like you would, there would be some given. The fact that there's a third party of a homeowner involved, I think that that just adds so much complexity to that, the pricing game at least. I mean, it is. That's again, something that fortunately we don't have to deal with and you just got to try to make sure everybody has as much occupancy as possible there and focus on those hits. But I do. I, you know, just in conversations with these property managers, you know that that's a part of it. Like it's a part of every decision that they make is I have to take care of my homeowners

or I have to make sure that whatever decision I make that's supposed to get more guests or be helpful, positive for the guest has to also be beneficial or explainable or whatever that is on the homeowner side of things. And I think that that adds as much uniqueness to the pricing as anything else does because you've given that somewhere along the lines, you told that homeowner is how much we're going to make. Or you gave them some type of projection, you know, and you have to fall in line with that.

And that proceeds a whole other business operational item there. So, yeah, I think that that's a friction point that you don't get to control. You know, some of these other, you know, some of the technical side of things of, you know, talking about login wall, layout shifting on on the website. Like the user experience, those user experience items that people, are actually going to literally stop someone from booking. That's where at least you can control it. And that's something that we've seen met multiple times on different sites there.

Yeah. No, yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think, I mean, having the right offer in front of the very audience sounds simple. And like, as marketing people or just say that and we're just like, oh, yeah, I have the right offer. You know, people nod their heads. But it's like, yeah, the actual nature of doing it is the hard part and doing it consistently. And when things go off the rails, how do you improve it?

I mean, there's so many layers to that, but could not agree more as it were. So yeah, praise, you know, prices that sort of thing. I mean, we touched on it earlier, but just to kind of wrap this up in this sense, technical friction, any sort of micro frustration or like micro, I kind of feel like it's like sandpaper. Like you're trying to get from one step to the next step and then your hand hits a bunch of sandpaper. It doesn't feel good.

So that could be a slow website. Again, I think there are people in our industry that I've encountered my career that obsessed over website speed. And they're like, oh, if we're making a half second faster, we're going to see this huge lesson performance. I just personally am not seeing that in my career. Like, I think you want to make the website as fast as you can, absolutely. I also don't believe that at some point, there's very.

clearly diminishing returns. Amazon claims there's these few benefits to it. They have more sample size than anyway, so I believe Amazon. I don't think they're lying and they put a lot of infrastructure behind it, making the website very fast. But at the end of the day, I think that most vacational managers have a relatively motivated person. As long as your site's loading in a three-second window or less, you're probably fine.

There's probably not massive gains to be had from loading in 2.5 or 2.75 seconds. So I would say there. But as there is, like, the website's slow. Or again, like you go from page to page and you have issues navigating to the next page. Buttons are covered. Use it on your phone. I mean, it's so funny how, and I'm guilty of it. We've done a whole pot.

I think we do an episode on this one time where it's like, we do audits all the time in our desktop and our computer because that's how you and I work. And that's how a lot of our clients are at work and they're using these desktop computers. But 75% of traffic sometimes on the phone, go through the whole website, your whole booking process in your phone. And you'll be shocked where it's like, oh, wait, I opened a credit card field and it opened a keyboard for text, not a keyboard for numbers. Okay, something small, but like fix that. There's little elements to improve there. So now are those things that if that was the case last year,

then it's the case this year when you're doing year of your comparison. you could say, well, that can't be the reason why. Well, no, some of these things are more just like making improvements that will improve your overall performance. But 100%, there's a lot of little things that come into play. And the more like simplicity you have between those different steps I talked about earlier, date search, property, detail page view, start, checkout, finish checkout. Any little technical sandpaper you clean up and make a nice smooth surface is probably going to improve your performance. That's, I mean, just jumping back on the page speed thing, I do.

I think here's the thing is that even the fastest websites in our space, we're working through a PMS API of some kind. That's that we are just automatically, we're a B plus at best. That's, for site speed, that's the best we can hope for. So just take that with the grain of salt that it is.

And that's, you know, you want, yes, you want it to run smoothly. It is a ranking factor in SEO. How big? Depends on more the user experience than the actual paid speed.

So the other thing, I think it's important to, when you're doing some of that testing, as much as it hurts to clear cookies and remove your cash, get an uncashed version of your websites and whether it's using a new browser or using something like that. I can't tell you how many times I have, same thing. Test, test, test, test over and over. Now you've got a cash version of the site.

Yes, it runs very quickly. But if you run that same site on an uncash version, it's much slower. So, yeah, and just some of those technical friction points that we may not notice and find ways to to find your way around the black hole of, uh-oh, it's the same stuff over and over, and I'm not noticing anything different. Yeah. I think it's incognito is great, but even finding a new browser to test on and doing things like that, I think is helpful as well.

Yeah. Yeah. And there's a website, you know, kind of checklist thing that we gave out previously before. So if that is of interest to you, definitely send me an email. I have my little template that I'll give you. It's something we do when we're onboarding the client. So there's a lot of things in there you can find. again, is every one fix going to improve your conversion rate a thousand percent now?

But it's like kind of this collective like smoothing of the process that makes a lot of sense. Well, wrapping on this one, so we talked about this one kind of previously, but again, go back and figure out what you were doing last year. This sounds simple sometimes. You're like, oh, I remember what I did last year. It's like, well, you may not. Like we had this client, for example, a huge decrease in traffic year over year in a report, down 40, 50 percent.

And I was like, why was it like, why was it about last April that this did so well? Go and pop open, you know, our notes, start scrolling back, scrolling back, oh yeah, we hosted this influencer that had a million YouTube subscribers. during that time frame and he posted the video, you know, the second day of the month, and we saw all this additional reach. And we didn't do a video without influencer this year, at least not during that month. And it's like, yep, that's what did it. Like we had all this traffic last year that we're not going to have this year.

So, yeah, a lot can be, occur that are not even like weather and things like that. I mean, that of course happen. But just things outside your control. You know, obviously we've had like a horrible cold snap of weather here in the southeast. That is really hurting any last minute demand. This is typically very poor booking months for us anyways here at the beach. February is probably your lowest demand month by a pretty wide margin. But, I mean, it's just gone through the floor.

the amount of cancellations and stuff that our largest client has had here locally is unsettling, as it were. But you can't control the weather. We had five inches of snow. What are you going to do? By next week, it looks like it might be better weather. But you just can't control the weather. Some things are just outside your sphere of influence.

But you've got to dig into that and understand that a little bit. It could be stuff that you did, like the influencer example. It could be stuff that's, again, sort of in the broader ecosystem, economic shifts. People always say, oh, elections are bad for people going on vacation and stuff like that. I've now been through a handful of elections running buildup. It seems to kind of be the case. a little bit. I don't know if COVID year was like that, the, that Trump Biden one, but other than that one, I feel like it's been like pretty, it tends to be a little bit weird during these election years. People don't book at the same pace, typically speaking as they were. They do in a year before, year after that. So just other things I've noticed. But yeah, keep an eye on all that kind of stuff. You know, maybe there's an explanation there. Also, I'll maintain what I said earlier, don't drive yourself crazy trying to understand it. You know, I think that one thing you can do always like, like, you know, I think that one thing you can do, like, hey, why'd you book with us? What, you know, why choose us? What are you looking to do for a vacation and learn from them and just try to find more people like them. That's probably really good. You know, step to lead people with for sure.

There are a whole bunch of shifts and trends that happen that are completely outside of our control. I mean, it is. I mean, look about, you, you have the influencer example. You also, I mean, the solar eclipse examples. Oh, there you know. Think about some of these things. We've got the World Cup, you know, nobody can control whether or not you're hosting

the world, whether you're a host city for the World Cup. We've got some interesting trends that when people look, when people in Kansas City and Miami, me look at their numbers in June and July, as opposed to last year in the previous year, and then next year and the year after, obviously, there's going to be a big blip. I think that is as much as you can, yeah, you want to understand the blips. Understanding the trends, sometimes that's just going to be out of our control. And you can, you can put a narrative around it. And I think that's where, like, in Google Analytics, when they added annotations into kind

just the dashboard in the system. I think that is something that people underutilize. I'm guilty of it as well. I do it every once in a while and then I look back and like, ooh, I wish I would have noted something else in here as well. But there are some tips and tricks just to be able to start to make, put some markers in the place to at least try to understand some of these things. But yeah, I think that's when it's external for a reason.

You know, we just can't control it. So understand it. note it, learn from it so that if it does happen, if it trends comes around again, you're ready for it. Yeah, I mean, sometimes there's the case too, right, ride the wave. If you have all this interest and you get a lot of demand of bookings for it, get as many as you can because you never know if that's going to happen again. So totally makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, so don't feel alone or weird in this.

This is not something that I would say has been uncommon in the last few months. Hey, we're getting more eyeballs, but we're not getting more bookings. What's going on? And there's often a lot of root causes for them. The tricky part is you kind of got to diagnose yourself a little bit. But sometimes that means changing things one by one or using your best judgment and saying, okay, I know I can't scientifically test this. I just have to use my judgment here.

Try this, you know, let it go for at least a week or two minimum. Hopefully if I see some kind of impact, I can go back from it for there. But I will say know your numbers. Like I did LinkedIn post on that recently. It's surprising to me sometimes how often people will say how they feel about performance versus how performance actually is. Like I do think that you should spend the requisite, you know, 25 minutes digging under the hood a little bit first before you go and say broad statements.

I always dislike, you know, when we talk with a client and they say things are bad and then I go look at the numbers and they look good. And I'm like, okay, educate me on what I'm seeing here. And then sometimes I'm surprising the client with their own numbers about like how their booking paces or demand is or whatever. And they say, oh, well, it felt busier last year or it felt different last year. And I'm like, okay. So, you know, maybe that's the rational side of my brain talking. It's like, let's get the numbers first. Let's get some accurate data to the best of our ability. And then let's try to make the best judgment call from there. But you are always going to be acting from imperfect information. So take action, learn from it. Try something different

once you kind of have a little bit more data under your belt. And I do believe a lot of your success does come down somewhat to intuition and judgment. And that is ultimately what a small business always arrives on of those things. You can't always just, yeah, decide to act only when you have all the information, because you are never going to have all the information, which Bezos talks about a lot when he was running Amazon. But I digress. Yeah. All good. Paul, any other thing else we should say here before put a bow on this one and put it up on the shelf? I think we're good. Tie this one out. Yeah. All right. All right. All right. Well, if you're made it all the end, dear listener, you are awesome. Hope you have an awesome rest of your day, rest of your week, rest of your month.

Hope things are going to be good for you and that you're going to have not only more traffic, more bookings. But if you listen to this, maybe you're somewhere in that other scenario. I need one favor for you before you jet. Go to our podcast app, iTunes, Spotify. We get the most downloads there. Click five stars. Leave us a review. Leave a smiley emoji.

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