Comparing Visitor Traffic on Vacation Rental Web Sites

1. Introduction There are literally hundreds of vacation rental sites that you can use to advertise your vacation rental property, varying from large, well established sites, to smaller sites that focus on a particular geography or niche market. However, with so many sites to choose from, which vacation rental web sites will bring enquiries and bookings for your particular vacation rental property? Compare Owner Holiday Rentals (http://www.compareownerholidayrentals.com) recently developed a method for comparing the visitor traffic to different vacation rental web sites. Although there are lots of other factors that will influence the number of enquiries and bookings your vacation rental listing generates, attracting large numbers of visitors to the site is absolutely key. If the vacation rental web site on which you are listed does not attract visitors in sufficient numbers, then no matter how good a job you have done creating your vacation rental listing, this will not translate into bookings. Hence, comparing the level of visitor traffic on vacation rental web sites is a good first step in assessing their relative attractiveness. 2. Measuring Visitor Traffic to Vacation Rental Web Sites It seems logical that the larger sites should attract the most traffic, but it would be nice to have some objective way to compare the number of visitors to the various vacation rental web sites. Measuring visitor traffic on the internet is an approximate science at best, but there are a number of ways getting an indication of the number of visitors to a particular vacation rental web site: a. Published Statistics from the Vacation Rental Web Site: Most sites don't publish statistics on the number of visitors. Understandably, sites are careful about protecting this information as it may be considered sensitive. An exception is VRBO, which claims "over 20 million visitors annually". However, even if we did have information from all the vacation rentals web sites, it would be hard to ensure that each site was measuring in exactly the same way ( for example, do you only count unique visitors or do you count the same visitor who returns more than once ? do you include visits by search engine "spiders" or not ? ). Hence, statistics published by the vacation rental web sites are not a very reliable way to compare visitor traffic to their sites. b. Alexa Rankings: Many people are familiar with Alexa, which is part of Amazon.com. Alexa publish traffic rankings for all web sites, and ranks sites from the highest traffic ranking ( ranked number 1 ) downwards to lower traffic sites that rank in the millions. Alexa's rankings are based upon a statistical sample of internet users: specifically, they are based on users of the Alexa tool bar. Although there are some important "health warnings" with the use of the Alexa traffic rankings (see www.alexa.com for details) , they are widely regarded as being reasonably reliable, particularly for sites with a traffic ranking of less than