HomeAway.com: How its robust web analytics makes it a leading vacation home rental site

HomeAway.com is an online marketplace for vacation rentals. Headquartered in Austin, Texas and valued at $3 billion, the site has more than one million live vacation rental listings in 190 countries to help families find their ideal vacation home rental. HomeAway connects homeowners and property managers to rent to travelers through this site.

The website home page features three different categories on its home slideshow: Trending in Travel, Dream Destinations and Vacation Inspiration. The home page also includes a U.S. map where customers can select a destination by state.

Overall Traffic Overview

Web traffic for HomeAway is pretty strong, with millions of visits per month and a low bounce rate. According to SimilarWeb.com, here are some web analytics HomeAway.com has experienced as of January 31, 2015:

• - Visits: 9 million
• - Average page views: 7.89
• - Bounce rate: 38.96%
• - Average time on site: 7:02 minutes

Traffic sources come from a variety of different sources, with more than 30% coming from directly visiting the website:

• - 32.92% direct
• - 31.36% referrals
• - 25.58% via searching
• - 2.58% social (with 84.64% coming from Facebook, 7.09% from Pinterest)
• - 7.35% mail
• - .21% display ads (mostly on Google) 

In terms of search traffic, the vast majority of website’s traffic is generated from organic search :

• - 95.09% organic search
• - 4.91% paid search on Google
• - Popular organic keywords: Homeaway, Home Away, Vrbo, and vacation rentals
• - Popular paid keywords: Homeaway, Home Away, Homeaway.com, Home Away from Home and Vacation Rentals 

Mobile
Furthermore, HomeAway has a mobile app enables customers to browse different properties through a personalized search, such as for specific amenities, wheelchair accessibility or pet-friendly options. The app also lets customers and share their favorites on social media. The site has revealed that 27% of its customers use a mobile device to view guest inquiries, according to a March 2013 survey of more than 1,700 customers.

Vacation Storebuilder

HomeAway partners with Vacation Storebuilder to provide its website platform services for its websites the company owns in the U.S: HomeAway.com, vrbo.com and VacationRentals.com. The all-in-one inclusive software solution offers HomeAway a platform for online booking, a website content management system, as well as online marketing tools and social media options. In 2014, HomeAway expanded the partnership to include one of its latest websites in its family, MyVacayHome.com.

Vacation Storebuilder website platform offers an eMarketing Toolkit for HomeAway’s websites that help increase organic traffic and conversions. Some of these tools include:

• - Search engine marketing
• - Search engine optimization
• - Pay-per-click marketing
• - Social media marketing
• - E-mail marketing
• - Landing page optimization
• - Customer relationship marketing
• - Analytics and reporting

Keywords Study

A few years ago, HomeAway did a study on its keywords to drive more conversions on its site, which uses Google Analytics to better understand its website activity. According to one case study, HomeAway’s goal was to drive more visits that generated inquiries to the homes listed on its site.

In order to do this, HomeAway needed to better understand the impact that paid and display ads were having on visitor conversions. Using the Data-Driven Attribution tool in Google Analytics Premium, Google Analytics tracked which channels and keywords drove the most traffic from the previous 90 days. Each customer interaction was assigned a credit rating, such as for clicks or displays, prior to converting into a sale.

Additionally, HomeAway budgeted their marketing investments towards identifying the right set of keywords to see the effectiveness of the Google Analytics Model Comparison Tool Report, which helped them decide the right keywords to display the campaigns on top. HomeAway properly credited campaigns and reattributed cost-per-acquisition into its budgeting and bidding decisions.

The Result

With a $6,000 test budget, Google analytics worked with HomeAway to identify a set of 20 keywords. As a result, the site saw a 23% increase in attributed conversions for those keywords after making the adjustments.

Based on the results in an increased conversion rate, HomeAway learned that keeping an open eye on changing trends across business and allocating money into the right marketing channels could enhance the profitability of their business.  Along with seeing where conversions were driving from, HomeAway also learned they should invest more money into their digital marketing efforts .

Additional Tools

Though HomeAway has some web analytics tools already in place through Vacation Storebuilder and Google Analytics, there are still some additional tools that will be useful for their overall website analytics. Here are a few tools:

Yext- online reputation management

With its hundreds of thousands of customers renting out vacation properties each year, there are bound to be reviews on sites such as Yelp.com and SiteJabber.com detailing their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with these properties.

Yext.com taps into these forums to hear what customers are saying, and even allows you to join in and respond to these reviews.

By using Yext, HomeAway will also be able to monitor any photos and video captured at their properties that are posted on social media, such as Facebook and Instagram. HomeAway will also be able to “like” and comment on customers’ content from within the platform.

HomeAway could use this platform to perform customer service with its customers, strengthen their relationship, and maintain their loyalty.

Custora

Custora is an e-commerce analytics software that predicts how customers will behave in the future: things they’re likely to buy, how much they’ll spend, even how often they’ll shop. The software offers customer-specific insight to enable brands to advertise and communicate in more effective and meaningful ways. The software helps brands find customers and persuade them to keep coming back.

It’s likely that HomeAway customers will likely want to go on another vacation, especially if their experience with HomeAway was a positive one. The platform enables you to segment an segment customers by campaign, source, medium, keyword, A/B testing and more. Through Custora, HomeAway can analyze its customers’ lifecycle and nudge them to be repeat vacationers through this vacation service.

Conclusion

HomeAway.com has already seen a lot of success through Google Analytics and Vacation Storebuilder. Through using additional tools like Custora and Yext, the company will be able to grow and maintain its audience even more through developing relationships with them and studying their behavior patterns.