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