Don’t Be Fooled: How to Spot the Difference Between Responsive Websites and Mobile Optimized Websites

With mobile traffic simply exploding over the last few years, mobile website design has become a huge concern for many businesses, especially those in the travel industry. But, there are so many terms floating around that it is easy to get them mixed up.

In this post, we’re going to explain the difference between some of the major terms that are often used (or misused) to describe different types of websites that cater to guests on mobile devices. In short, today we’re going to talk about the difference between mobile optimized websites and responsive design websites.

Both types of websites attempt to accomplish the same goal of giving visitors to their websites a great experience regardless of the device they’re using. They just accomplish this differently, and with varying degrees of success.

Let’s start by talking about what each is. Then, we’ll talk about the key differences, and finally we’ll show you some side by side examples.

Mobile Optimized Websites

Mobile optimized websites were the first come on the scene (we started offering mobile websites more than three years ago). These websites are geared primary for smart phones and smaller tablets. They are generally built entirely separate from your traditional website.

The strategy with mobile websites is to use your traditional website for desktops, laptops and larger tablets, and to show your mobile optimized website to people on smart phones and smaller tablets. So, when someone hits your website, your website will determine what type of device they are on and show them either the mobile website or the regular website.

Responsive Websites

Responsive websites are much newer and now considered a best practice for all new website designs moving forward. But, they’re much harder to pull off for a web designer than a mobile website. They’re also much tougher to integrate into content management systems. Here’s why. A responsive website is shown to all of your guests no matter what device they are on. It’s the website itself that changes. Elements of the website will dynamically adapt to look perfect no matter what device you are on.

They work by querying what size your screen is and then displaying the website to fit that screen. To accomplish this, web designers have to style for four different ranges of screen size to make sure the website displays perfectly on all devices. Essentially, instead of building four different websites to accommodate four different screen size ranges, responsive websites handle every device with one website.

The Advantages of Responsive Design

While most mobile optimized websites will work just fine for many people, there are some strong advantages of responsive websites that make them better. These advantages become more and more important as mobile device usage become more prolific. Here are just a few of those advantages:

• Responsive websites look better across all devices because they offer a higher range of adaptability. It’s the difference between one website with styles for four screen sizes or the option of just seeing a regular website or a separate mobile optimized site.
• For the most part, responsive websites will keep all of your content and pages. Many mobile optimized websites will exclude content (and even entire pages) that are found on your regular site. This raised concerns with Google, which until recently indexed only the main websites. In some cases Google would serve up a page in search results that had valuable information on the main site, but that page or that information was not available to the searcher when they clicked through the search result to the page on their smart phone.
• Consequently, Google favors responsive websites to mobile optimized websites. But, they still highly favor and reward mobile optimized websites over websites that are not mobile friendly at all. In Google’s eye, responsive is best, but mobile optimized still meets its requirement and is way better than websites that aren’t mobile friendly.
• Responsive websites also save you time because you are only managing content on one website. Because a mobile optimized website is actually an entirely different website than your regular website, albeit with very similar content, you actually have to manage and host two separate websites. Now, if both your regular website and your mobile optimized website are connected to a central content management system (like LiveRez’s are), management of content becomes much easier.

Spotting the Differences

Because responsive design is the newer, hotter trend (and a best practice), a number of technology companies in the vacation rental industry want to claim that their mobile optimized websites are really responsive. Rather than just taking their word for it, you should learn to spot the differences. The great thing is that if you know what you’re looking for, the differences are pretty easy to spot.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of a mobile optimized set-up (regular site + mobile site) and a responsive design set-up. We’ll show you both the home page and a search results page at different sizes and then what they actually look like on a smart phone (in this example, we’re using a Samsung Galaxy S6).

Side-by-Side Comparison

Full Sized

Here are two websites — one responsive and one mobile optimized — at full width on a desktop. As you can tell, they both look good. But, they were both designed to look good at this size.

Half Sized (about Tablet Size) 

Here they are with the browser shrunk to about the size of a tablet. The responsive site still looks great, but the mobile optimized site is starting to display weird in spots. See how the booking box is moving over the navigation bar and the smaller images below? The properties still display okay in search results, but look at how much smaller they are than in the responsive website.

Smart Phone Sized

Since you don’t always have time to check out a website on your phone (and you need to do this to really tell if a website is responsive), here are both of the websites with the browser shrunk down to about the size of a smart phone.  On the mobile optimized website, things are really starting to go wrong. The booking box is way out of place, and big parts of the page are missing, like most of the navigation bar and most of the text. And, on the search results page, you can’t even see the search results.

In comparison, the responsive website still looks great. The elements are now re-arranged to look great on the smaller page, and all the information on both pages is still there. The nav bar is still there, too. Everything is the same. The display of the content has just adapted to respond to the screen size.

Now, to be fair to the maker of the mobile optimized site, they were never intending for people with devices this small to actually get this version of the website. As you’ll see in the next section, people actually accessing this site on a smart phone are shown a different, mobile-optimized site.

However (and here’s the sticking point), to call the website below on the right a responsive website just simply wouldn’t be true. 

On Actual Smart Phone

Here are the websites side by side on the new Samsung Galaxy S6.  You’ll notice that the mobile optimized site has now switched to its mobile version, where the responsive website is showing pretty much the same content as when you shrunk down the browser. The big difference here is that the mobile optimized site is now missing a lot of the content it was showing on the home page.

Conclusion
Now that you know the difference between responsive design and mobile optimized, you’ll know for sure what you are getting when someone is trying to sell you a new site. But, if you have any further questions on the differences between responsive design and mobile optimized sites, feel free to give us a call at (800) 343-2891. We’d be happy to help.

Learn More About LiveRez
LiveRez is the most widely used software platform for professional vacation rental managers. The company’s cloud-based, end-to-end platform offers fully integrated solutions for reservation and property management, websites with online bookings, trust accounting, CRM, housekeeping and maintenance, reporting, reviews and more. LiveRez is a proud Gold Sponsor of the Vacation Rental Manager’s Association (VRMA).

Visit LiveRez.com to learn more:

• Take a Demo
• View Features
• Read Testimonials

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How to Use Google Analytics to Improve Your Vacation Rental Marketing Efforts

Today’s marketing professionals know that marketing is more of a science than an art. And, everyone knows you can’t be scientific if you don’t run tests. For that reason, Google Analytics is perhaps the most powerful free tool available to marketers today.

The following blog will give vacation rental managers a general overview of how to use Google Analytics to measure (and improve) their marketing efforts. We’ve tried to make the concepts easy enough for even beginners to understand.

We’ll start by breaking down the important information Google Analytics gives you about your website and then end by giving you some guidance on how to use this information to improve your marketing efforts.

How many people are visiting my site?

You can find this information under the audience section of Google Analytics.

Watch these numbers carefully. Getting more people to your website and having them view more pages is generally a good sign and can mean more bookings. If your website traffic starts to drop, this should alert you to look closer at why the traffic could be dropping.

Unique Visitors (Now Called “Users”) – How many unique people have visited your site. Only counts each visitor once.

Visits (Now Called “Sessions”) – How many actual visits people have made to your site. Counts each visit to your site, even if it is a return visitor.

Pageviews – How many pages have been viewed. Each visit can include multiple page views. Most people will view more than one page on your website.

Where are they coming from?

You can find this information under the acquisition section of Google Analytics.

These numbers are important because they show you what channels are getting visitors to your site. This will help you determine where your marketing efforts are paying off.

Traffic Sources – This tells you how visitors found your website. Here are the main categories of traffic sources:

• Search engines (organic) – These are people who found your website via a search engine’s non-paid (or organic) search results. Google no longer tells you what term they were searching for.
• Paid Search – These are people who found your website via a search engine’s paid search results. You’ll need to be participating in a program like Google Adwords to get these types of results. Google will even be able to tell you what term they were searching.
• Website Referral – These are people who came to your website via a link on another site. Google will tell you what website they can from.
• Direct/None – This is an open-ended category which basically means that Google couldn’t track how people found your website. There are multiple reasons for this. The person could have directly typed your website address in their browser. They came via a bookmark. They came from a secure site that strips the referrer information. They clicked on a link in an email client that strips out the referrer information.
• Campaigns – This is generally a special type of traffic that you are driving yourself. You’ll need to use special URLs to track this type of traffic. Most email marketers will put a special code at the end of their URLs to track people who click on their links. To learn more about tracking your marketing efforts in Google Analytics, click here.

How are they interacting with my site?

You can find these numbers in just about every section of Google Analytics. You can look at these numbers overall in the audience section, per traffic source in the acquisition section or per page in the behavior section.

These stats tell you how your website is handling visitors. Are they engaging with your website or leaving? Improving these numbers will improve the overall conversion and performance of your website.

Bounce Rate – The bounce rate of a page is the percentage of people that enter your website via that page (i.e. landed on that page) and then left your website without visiting any other pages. Generally, a high bounce is a bad thing for vacation rental websites because a traveler needs to visit more than one page to find and/or book a vacation rental property.

Exit Rate – This is similar to the bounce rate, but slightly different. This measures the rate of people that leave your website via this page. They don’t necessarily have to land on this page, but this page is the last page they visit. Pages with high exit rates are generally performing badly and should be addressed. The only exception would be a booking thank-you page which is only hit after a guest makes a booking.

Pages Per Visit – This metric shows you the average number of pages a visitor hits when they come to your website. A higher number of pages per visit is good because it means they are interacting more with your website.

How is all this making me money?

As a vacation rental manager, you make money when someone makes a booking. While it’s much tougher to track bookings made over the phone, it’s fairly simple to track bookings made online. The key thing you need to look for is the page a visitor is directed to after they submit their booking. On most websites, this is called a thank-you page.

You can assume that every time someone hits your thank-you page you got a new booking. So tracking how many time people hit that page is important. In marketing speak, people hitting the thank-you page is known as a conversion.

So, your first goal is to find out the URL of the thank-you page. Once you find that you can set up a goal in Google Analytics. For more information on setting up goals in Google Analytics, click here.

UPDATE: Google Analytics now has eCommerce tracking. For tracking online bookings, this is an even more powerful way to examine your performance. It tell you things like what property was booked, for how many nights and what the total rental rate was. LiveRez has already pre-installed this code on all its partners websites, but you’ll need to enable eCommerce tracking from Google Analytics. Click here to learn how.

The next thing you want to do is isolate how people got to your website and the path they took to making a booking.

1. Where did they come from? Find out the traffic source for the conversion under the Conversions > Goals > Overview (then click on “Source / Medium” in left-hand pane).

2. What path did they take to make the booking? Once you’ve set up a goal in Google Analytics, you can see the path to that goal by going to Conversions > Goals > Reverse Goal Path. This will tell you what pages they visited before making the booking.

3. How are your channels are working together? Check this out by looking under Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels. This will show you an idea of what channels are assisting conversion. For example, let’s say the person first came to your website from a Google search. Then they came back to your website after seeing one of your re-marketing ads online and made their booking during that section. It helps you assign the booking credit to both channels. Remember, your marketing channels are always working together.

How do I use this information to improve my marketing?

As marketer, you really only have a few goals. There are lots of ways to get there, but really only a few desired outcomes:

1. Get more people to come to your website (or call / email you).

2. Get them to book one of your properties (or at least give you their information).

3. Make sure you get the best return on investment while completing steps 1 and 2.

First, let’s look at step 1. Your goal should be to get more people to your website. To do that, you want to improve the performance of your marketing efforts. So, you should always be asking yourself these questions:

• Am I utilizing all the channels possible to get my brand and my properties in front of potential guests?
• Can I improve the efficiency of any of my current marketing channels?
• Where should I be spending my marketing budget and where should I be focusing my marketing efforts to best increase my ROI.

Google analytics can help by showing you where traffic to your website is coming from and how much of that traffic is converting to bookings. With this information, you can easily determine where your marketing efforts are improving (or where they need improvement), and you can also easily determine your return on investment for each one of your marketing channels.

Next, let’s look at step 2. This deals with how well your website is performing. At this point, you’ve got the traffic to your website. Now you need to make sure your website is converting as much of that traffic as possible to bookings. You can use bounce rates to judge the performance of your landing pages, and exit rates to find pages on your website that may be making your visitors leave. And, you can use pages per visit as a gauge of how engaged your visitors are. As you begin to identify and fix problems on your website, you’ll start to see more of your traffic converting to bookings.

Need Help?

If you’re a vacation rental manager that needs help with your marketing efforts, give us a call at (800) 343-2891. LiveRez offers both the technology and the hands-on services you need to improve your marketing. And, we have years of experience and results to back it up.

Learn More About LiveRez
LiveRez is the fastest growing vacation rental software provider for professional vacation rental managers. The company’s cloud-based, end-to-end platform offers fully integrated solutions for reservation management, trust accounting and online marketing, with high-ranking, high-conversion dynamic websites and an extensive affiliate marketing program. The company is a proud Gold Sponsor of the Vacation Rental Manager’s Association (VRMA).

Visit LiveRez.com to learn more:

• Take a Demo
• View Features
• Read Testimonials

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Infographic: Why You Need a Mobile Version of Your Vacation Rental Website

LiveRez recently released an infographic detailing the need for mobile websites and outlining the success its partners are having after launching mobile versions of their respective websites.

The infographic (included below) shows that on average about 20% of the traffic LiveRez partners are getting is coming from smart phones. It also shows that, on average, partners with mobile versions of their websites are getting nearly three times more mobile bookings than partners that do not have a mobile website.

One LiveRez partner, Vicki Swigart of Red River Real Estate, calculated her first-year return on investment at nearly 900 percent.

And the exciting thing about these booking numbers is that they only account for bookings that were completed on mobile devices. The numbers don’t account for bookings where travelers did their initial research on their mobile device and then completed their booking over the phone or from a laptop or desktop. That process is much harder to track. But, if you could quantify those additional bookings, the numbers would likely be even more impressive.

To learn more about LiveRez mobile websites, visit LiveRez.com/mobile or call us at (800) 343-2891.

Learn More About LiveRez
LiveRez is the fastest growing vacation rental software provider for professional vacation rental managers. The company’s cloud-based, end-to-end platform offers fully integrated solutions for reservation management, trust accounting and online marketing, with high-ranking, high-conversion dynamic websites and an extensive affiliate marketing program. The company is a proud Gold Sponsor of the Vacation Rental Manager’s Association (VRMA).

Visit LiveRez.com to learn more:

• Take a Demo
• View Features
• Read Testimonials

Did you like this post? Please consider “liking” it and sharing it on your social media channels via the buttons below. You can also follow us and get notifications of all new posts via the “Follow” button in the bottom right-hand part of the screen.

How Additional Vacation Rental Websites Can Supercharge Your Niche Marketing Efforts

As competition increases, every day companies are moving toward niche marketing strategies. In the vacation rental industry more than ever, guests have specific needs. Owners have specific needs. And, these constituents are finding you through specific search terms.

Seeing this evolving trend, a few years ago LiveRez launched the practice of creating additional websites, called microsites, for its partners, so they could further target additional niches. These microsites come in addition to a partner’s main website, but are fully integrated into the partner’s existing reservation system.

That’s right: multiple websites, one reservation system.

Armed with additional websites, many LiveRez partners have been able to target specific niches and use this strategy to get search engine traffic, more bookings and attract more owners to their rental program.

Here are a few example of how partners have used microsites.

• Targeting different locations
• Targeting different communities within a location
• Targeting specific resorts
• Targeting specific condominium buildings or associations
• Targeting specific vacation types (fishing getaways, Disney vacations, romantic getaways)

There are many benefits to using microsites in a niche strategy.

• You can fine target specific keywords
• You can use a targeted approach to attract new owners (for example, pitching your services to a condo association and telling them they’d have their own website dedicated entirely to condos in that complex).
• Website content can be better optimized for the audience and, as a result, help increase your conversion rate.

To learn more about LiveRez microsites, visit LiveRez.com/microsites or call us at (800) 343-2891.

Learn More About LiveRez
LiveRez is the fastest growing vacation rental software provider for professional vacation rental managers. The company’s cloud-based, end-to-end platform offers fully integrated solutions for reservation management, trust accounting and online marketing, with high-ranking, high-conversion dynamic websites and an extensive affiliate marketing program. The company is a proud Gold Sponsor of the Vacation Rental Manager’s Association (VRMA).

Visit LiveRez.com to learn more:

• Take a Demo
• View Features
• Read Testimonials

Did you like this post? Please consider “liking” it and sharing it on your social media channels via the buttons below. You can also follow us and get notifications of all new posts via the “Follow” button in the bottom right-hand part of the screen.

The Advantages of an Integrated Content Management System for Your Vacation Rental Website

Your vacation rental business is fluid. You can’t wait days or even weeks if you need to make a change to your website. Your website is simply the most important place people can go to get information about your business. So, it only makes sense that you should have the power to change the content on your website in real time.

In today’s post, we’ll look at the different options available for managing vacation rental websites, and examine the benefits of having an integrated content management system.

Option 1: Website Built by Independent Web Design Company (no CMS) – This is a very common situation for many vacation rental managers. Their property management software does not have an integrated website (or the integrated website is sub par), so they work with a third-party web design company to build and manage their website. While the third-party designer can build a custom design, the designer will need to make sure it can integrate properly into your software using an API or an iframe for your property listings and calendars. The problem is that many third-party web designers do not offer a content management system, which means you will need to go through them to make any changes to your website. Every update generally costs you more money, and sometimes you can wait days or even weeks for the changes to be made. Not to mention, third-party designs can cost $5,000 to $10,000 dollars or more.

Option 2: Website Built by Independent Web Design Company (third-party CMS) – Some web design companies can build a website for you and attach it to a third-party content management system, like WordPress or Joomla. Some even have built widgets for your properties and your calendars. But, the problem is that you will need to log into two different systems to make changes. Changes to your website content will need to be made through the CMS, and changes to your properties and calendars will need to be made through your property management software.  Because the two systems are different entities, they don’t always work together as intuitively as you’d expect.

Option 3: Website and CMS as Part of Your Software – One thing that makes LiveRez different is that we design your website for you based on the tested best practices we’ve used in developing high-conversion websites for hundreds of professional managers across the globe, and we also include a content management system within our software. Because our property management software and our websites are part of the same software system, they work together intuitively. You can change most of the content on your website right from the same software that you use to manage your rentals. When you make changes to your properties, your rates, your specials, etc., they are automatically reflected on your website, too.

So, with LiveRez, you really get the best of both worlds. You get an optimized website designed to your specifications, an integrated content management system that works intuitively with your management software, and you don’t pay for third-party design services or pay for making simple updates to your website.

To learn more about LiveRez-powered websites, visit LiveRez.com/websites.

Learn More About LiveRez
LiveRez is the fastest growing vacation rental software provider for professional vacation rental managers. The company’s cloud-based, end-to-end platform offers fully integrated solutions for reservation management, trust accounting and online marketing, with high-ranking, high-conversion dynamic websites and an extensive affiliate marketing program. The company is a proud Gold Sponsor of the Vacation Rental Manager’s Association (VRMA).

Visit LiveRez.com to learn more:

• Take a Demo
• View Features
• Read Testimonials

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Vacation Rental Websites: Creating Property Pages that Convert

The property pages on your websites are one of the most crucial steps in your conversion process. They can either wow your potential guests or send them off to browse your competitor’s inventory.

LiveRez puts particular importance on these pages, and gives you the ability to present your properties in the best light, answer travelers’ questions before they are asked, and drive additional bookings and revenue to your bottom line.

Below, we’ll examine some on the key elements of LiveRez property listings, what makes them so different and how they stand out from the competition. Along the way, we’ll include images to show you examples (just click on the image to a see a full resolution version).

Images

Unlike most of our competitors, LiveRez allows you to display your images up to 800 pixels wide. As we noted in a past post, increasing the size of product images can help you increase your bookings.

But, the size isn’t the only important thing here; the use of space is efficient, too.  The layout of the photos on the page maximizes the real estate on the page and doesn’t waste space. Pictures run right to edge.

Furthermore, the gallery tabs and pop-out lightbox slideshow options enhance the viewing experience.

Videos

LiveRez lets you easily embed videos on your property pages, so you can tell the story of your property through this engaging medium. Check out the example below:

Maps

LiveRez makes embedding Google Maps simple. Just enter the longitude and latitude of your property in the back office, and LiveRez does the rest.

HTML Customization

While LiveRez has a solid WYSIWTG editor for people who are not as technically versed as others, the software also offers the ability to add your own HTML to the property listings to unlock additional display possibilities. In the example below, we use a simple html table and some icons to enhance the amenities section.

Pricing

One of the cool things that LiveRez offers is different options for displaying the price on your property page.  Up front you can optionally include the total price, average nightly rate and any discounts from specials. You can also include rate calendars below in a different section.

Tabbed Layout

With LiveRez, you can use a traditional long-form property layout or use a tabbed layout to organize your content and keep more of it above the fold.

Reviews

LiveRez’s guest review and survey system is integrated in with your property listings, allowing you the option of showing reviews on both the property and the management company right on your property page. Statistics show that reviews and ratings from past guests increase buyer confidence and lead to more bookings, especially when they are shown to travelers during the shopping process itself.

Calls to Action

Calls to action are one of the most important elements in any marketing environment, absolutely crucial for web conversion and an extremely important factor in getting more bookings. LiveRez sprinkles bold calls to action throughout your property listing, making it easy for the traveler to take the final step in the booking process.

Check out our Additional Resources

These are just a few of the ways that LiveRez’s property listings can get your more bookings. For a more in-depth look at what makes a property listing perform, check out the free recording of our recent webinar “10 Ingredients for Property Listings that Generate Bookings” at our downloads page.  This 30-minute video is packed with ideas for improving your property listings.

Learn More About LiveRez
LiveRez is the fastest growing vacation rental software provider for professional vacation rental managers. The company’s cloud-based, end-to-end platform offers fully integrated solutions for reservation management, trust accounting and online marketing, with high-ranking, high-conversion dynamic websites and an extensive affiliate marketing program. The company is a proud Gold Sponsor of the Vacation Rental Manager’s Association (VRMA).

Visit LiveRez.com to learn more:

• Take a Demo
• View Features
• Read Testimonials

Did you like this post? Please consider “liking” it and sharing it on your social media channels via the buttons below. You can also follow us and get notifications of all new posts via the “Follow” button in the bottom right-hand part of the screen.

New LiveRez Search Option Makes Finding and Booking a Vacation Home Even Easier

LiveRez’s calendar search option makes finding available dates for a property that much easier for guests.

LiveRez recently launched a new feature for its vacation rental websites that makes finding and booking a vacation rental even easier.  It’s called calendar search. And, while the part of the functionality has been an option on LiveRez websites for a while now, a few recent additions really make it that much more powerful.

Via the booking box on LiveRez-powered websites, the primary way guests search is by entering in set arrival and departure dates, and then setting preferences for the types of homes they want (bedrooms, location, etc.). This type of search is the industry standard, and works great for many guests.

But, what if the guest has flexible dates? Or what if it’s a last minute booking and a lot of homes are already booked? That’s where calendar search is so powerful.

Calendar search allows guests to search by a flexible arrival date and then shows each property’s occupancy calendar in the search results. This way, the guest knows the exact availability of the home. Recently, LiveRez made the calendars themselves interactive, meaning that the guest could just click on the arrival date and then click on the departure date, view the property and/or make a booking right from the search results page.

Additionally, LiveRez updated the look of the calendars to make it easier for guests to recognize check-in days and check-out days.

What makes this search so powerful is that it gets guests thinking like reservationists. And, when you can get a guest to think like a reservationist, it makes filling your calendars that much easier.

Guests uncover more reservation options. And, you get more bookings.

Let’s take a closer look at how it works.

Step 1: Guest search with calendar search, entering a flexible arrival date.

Step 2: Guests view the search results and see each property’s calendar.

Step 3: Guests pick their dates right from the property calendar, and then they view the property or book it right from the search results page.

To learn more about how LiveRez can help you improve the vacation rental experience for your guests, owners and employees, call us at (800) 343-2891 or email Sales@LiveRez.com.

Learn More About LiveRez
LiveRez is the fastest growing vacation rental software provider for professional vacation rental managers. The company’s cloud-based, end-to-end platform offers fully integrated solutions for reservation management, trust accounting and online marketing, with high-ranking, high-conversion dynamic websites and an extensive affiliate marketing program. The company is a proud Gold Sponsor of the Vacation Rental Manager’s Association (VRMA).

Visit LiveRez.com to learn more:

• Take a Demo
• View Features
• Read Testimonials

Did you like this post? Please consider “liking” it and sharing it on your social media channels via the buttons below. You can also follow us and get notifications of all new posts via the “Follow” button in the bottom right-hand part of the screen.

LiveRez Adds Enhanced Functionality to its Google Analytics Integration

LiveRez recently added the ability for its partners to view more data about their guests’ online shopping habits through its integration with Google Analytics.

As a part of this upgrade, LiveRez has added additional support for both ecommerce and demographic reporting within Google Analytics.

Ecommerce Reporting

The ecommerce reports focus mostly on online bookings. For each booking made online, the report in Google Analytics will show the following data points:

• Transaction Number
• Name of Property
• Total Reservation Cost
• Total Tax
• City, State and Country where Booking was Made
• Number of Nights Booked
• Whether Reservation was Booked on a Computer, Tablet or Mobile Device

Demographic Reporting

According to Google Analytics, the demographic reports “let you see not only how many of your users visit over a date range, but also who those users are, and how their behavior varies by attribute (e.g., male vs. female).”

These reports will show the following data points:

• Traffic by age
• Traffic by gender
• Traffic by interest

Activating These Features in Google Analytics

IMPORTANT: In order to see these new features within Google Analytics, you’ll need to activate them. See the instructions below for more information on activating these features:

Setting Up Ecommerce Tracking within Google Analytics

1. Click Admin from the menu bar at the top of any screen in Analytics.

2. Use the drop down menus to select the Account, Property, and View.

3. Click View Settings.

4. In the Ecommerce Settings section, click the toggle so it says ON.

5. Click Save at the bottom of the page.

*LiveRez has already installed a custom ecommerce tracking code on its partners’ websites.

Enabling Demographic Reports in Google Analytics

1. Go to your left-hand menu in Google Analytics, and under the “Audience” section, click on Demographics and then Overview.

2. This will pull up a new interface in the main window. Click the “Enable” button to turn on the report.

*LiveRez has already installed the demographic tracking code on its partners’ websites.

Please note that according to Google, it can take up to 24 hours before you could start seeing data populated in these reports.

Learn More About LiveRez
LiveRez is the fastest growing vacation rental software provider for professional vacation rental managers. The company’s cloud-based, end-to-end platform offers fully integrated solutions for reservation management, trust accounting and online marketing, with high-ranking, high-conversion dynamic websites and an extensive affiliate marketing program. The company is a proud Gold Sponsor of the Vacation Rental Manager’s Association (VRMA).

Visit LiveRez.com to learn more:

• Take a Demo
• View Features
• Read Testimonials

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The Danger of Buying and Renting Back Links for SEO Purposes

Never contract with an SEO company that buys or rents back links. If Google catches you, it could send you to the end of the line.

One of the primary ways that Google ranks your vacation rental website is based on how many links from other websites are pointing back to your website.

When Google first came on the scene, this philosophy helped make their search results more relevant. Google believed the quality and quantity of links pointing back to any website helped determine the legitimacy of that website. Basically, they viewed links as a vote for the quality of your website. The more votes you had, the more legitimate your website was.

The quality and quantity of these links, along with their relevance to the keywords people were searching, helped Google decide how they should rank websites in various search results.

But, as more people began to understand how the Google algorithm operated and realized how important it was to rank high within Google search results, they started practicing link building – that is, finding ways to increase the amount of links that point back to your website.

Done the right way, link building can help your rankings. But, done poorly, link building can now actually hurt your rankings. In the past months and years, Google has released new updates to its algorithm that actually punish certain link building schemes. They view these schemes as methods by which people try to game the system.

The Dangers

But despite these new updates, there are still many third-party SEO services that engage in these now outdated link building schemes. Some will guarantee you a certain amount of back links. Others will outright sell you back links or rent you back links.

Because of this you need to be very careful about who you contract for SEO services. Make sure they are building links the right way, and not simply buying or renting links, or participating in some elaborate link sharing scheme. These practices can sometimes have positive results in the short term, but when Google catches on, it generally severely punishes websites engaging in this type of link building.

As a general rule, you should NEVER buy or rent back links.

If you don’t believe us. Here it is, straight from Google’s Matt Cutts, who heads up the company’s Webspam team:

How to Know if You’ve Been Penalized

A good indication that you’ve been penalized is an immediate and significant drop in your search engine rankings. But, when Google penalizes your site, they generally notify you through a program called Google Webmaster Tools.

If you have Google Webmaster Tools set up, you’ll see a warning like the one below under “Search Traffic” (left-hand column) and then “Manual Actions” (collapsible menu item).

SEO Done Right

If you’re a LiveRez partner and looking for someone who you can trust to run your SEO and SEM efforts the right way, check out our in-house SEO service. Our SEO team always has your long-term best interests in mind and will never cut corners in their SEO tactics. To learn more about our SEO program, call Juston Clarkston at (208) 639-6121 or email J.Clarkston@LiveRez.com.

Learn More About LiveRez
LiveRez is the fastest growing vacation rental software provider for professional vacation rental managers. The company’s cloud-based, end-to-end platform offers fully integrated solutions for reservation management, trust accounting and online marketing, with high-ranking, high-conversion dynamic websites and an extensive affiliate marketing program. The company is a proud Gold Sponsor of the Vacation Rental Manager’s Association (VRMA).

Visit LiveRez.com to learn more:

• Take a Demo
• View Features
• Read Testimonials

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5 Tips to Get More Traffic to Your Vacation Rental Website

Check out our quick tips on getting more traffic to your vacation rental website.

The first step in getting more online bookings is getting more traffic to your website. While there is no catch-all solution to getting qualified traffic to your website, here are a few helpful tips to consider.

1. Focus on SEO – Organic traffic from search engines is free and normally very qualified, meaning that the people visiting your site are in the market for renting a vacation property. Here are a few tips to improve the way Google ranks your website:

• Target Realistic Keywords (when you’re just starting, you may want to focus primarily on longer, more specific terms)
• Create Content That is Unique and Helps Your Guests
• Optimize Your Pages for Keywords (Page Title, Meta Information, Headings, Alt Tags, etc.)
• Create and Attract Back Links (links that point back to your website from other websites)

2. Create Pay-Per-Click Campaigns – Google Adwords allows you to bid on top search terms and pay to be listed on the first page. You’ll pay only when someone clicks on your ad, and you can set budgets so that you don’t overspend. If done smartly, Adwords can offer a huge return on investment for your marketing efforts.

3. Send Marketing Emails – As a professional manager, you probably have already gathered a big list of past guests and prospects that you can send marketing emails to. Marketing emails are a great way to entice people to book your properties and to keep your business top of mind. Furthermore, email marketing tools like Mail Chimp and Constant Contact are fairly inexpensive, leading many marketers to say that their email marketing efforts give them the best return on investment among their marketing channels.

4. Try Google Re-Marketing – A little known feature of the Google Adsense program is the ability to record what visitors come to your site and then show only these visitors display ads on other sites. Any website that runs Google Adsense ads is eligible (and there are tons of sites online using it). Once a guest comes to your website, they’ll see your ads all over the internet. Google Re-Marketing generally comes in at a lower cost per click than Adwords and allows you to get a massive amount of impressions.

5. Don’t Forget about Social Media and Blogging – Creating and sharing content on social media channels is a great way to grow your online following and create consistent streams of traffic to your website. The content creation and sharing process can even help with your SEO efforts. Here are a few tips to get you started:

• Initially, focus on the big channels: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and your blog.
• Submit your best website pages and blogs to social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Reddit.
• Try running promotions that are exclusive to your followers (or require a person to follow you to get the benefit)
• Try advertising on these channels. It’s a great way to grow your followers.
• Make sure to share all the content you create on these channels. You always want to include a call action in your posts, whether it is asking the person to like your post, retweet your post, follow your blog, click on a link, etc.
• Use a free program like HootSuite to schedule your posts in advance.

These are just a few quick tips to help you get more traffic to your website. Check out some of our other blog posts to find more information on marketing tips and tricks.

Learn More About LiveRez
LiveRez is the fastest growing vacation rental software provider for professional vacation rental managers. The company’s cloud-based, end-to-end platform offers fully integrated solutions for reservation management, trust accounting and online marketing, with high-ranking, high-conversion dynamic websites and an extensive affiliate marketing program. The company is a proud Gold Sponsor of the Vacation Rental Manager’s Association (VRMA).

Visit LiveRez.com to learn more:

• Take a Demo
• View Features
• Read Testimonials

Did you like this post? Please consider “liking” it and sharing it on your social media channels via the buttons below. You can also follow us and get notifications of all new posts via the “Follow” button in the bottom right-hand part of the screen.