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It looks like this conversation has petered out, but in case anyone’s interested, here’s my theory about the conversion rate. My thinking is based on the stats for my 3 listings, each of which is a private room in our home—they’re very similar, but for whatever reason their relative popularity seems to change over time (mainly, I suspect, because of search rank). Anyway here are the stats:
8.3% w/ 48 views in the past 30 days
3.6% w/ 192 views
8.2% w/ 61 views
My hunch is that a listing’s conversion rate is closely tied to its search rank. When I had a trial subscription with smartbnb, I learned that the listing w/ the 192 views is one that appears high in the search rank, whereas the other two listings come up significantly lower.
The way I figure, if a listing appears among the first ten when someone searches, it’s more likely to be seen, so it will have more views, but it may have a lower conversion rate since many users will want to browse through the first 10 listings. On the other hand, if a listing shows up in the top 50, it’s less likely to be seen, so it will have fewer views, but a larger % of those views will result in a booking, since users presumably wouldn’t keep searching unless they weren’t satisfied with what they had found in the first 10 listings.
So far as I can see, this metric is meaningless, at least in my situation, since my listing w/ the lowest conversion rate—but also the highest search rank—is the one that gets the most business.
I believe the conversion rate is a huge determinant in where AirBnB ranks your listing in the search results.
Mine was .9% a month ago, so I got new furniture and took new pictures, and now I’m up to 1.7%. I only had two July bookings this time last month, so I got my act together and improved my listing, and now August is almost fully booked.
I am not concerned about the booking or conversion rate as long as my occupancy rate is above 50% (Meaning my Airbnb is booked 1 out of 2 nights available). Occupancy is what you can really manage because it depends on price, availability, location, amenities, reviews and service, etc…
Booking or Conversion rate depends on the views your listing gets. It can be in the low teens or single digits but it does not mean people don’t like your listing, what it means is that for every 10 people viewing your listing, 1 or 2 are booking. That is an excellent ratio if you ask me… Why ? Because, say your listing is for 1 bedroom and 1 guest, but you got viewed by a person looking for a bedroom for 2 guests 20% of the time, this means 2 out of the 10 views are wasted on these people that WILL not book. 20% your listing is viewed by people researching airbnb. 20% will book with someone else and guess what ? 20% are looking for a date that you already have booked !!! The rest may be planning and budgeting for the future and/or will book your place !!! That is your 100% of the views with the 20 or less BOOKING or CONVERSION rate. You have really no control over who is viewing your listing other than airbnb… Most of the marketing is done by Airbnb but you can do some FB, Twiteer and other stuff but still, not much control over show views the listing.
Where you have good control is in occupancy rate, pricing will definitely be what offers more control since you can offer a bargain if your occupancy rate is low. Encourage good reviews and have good service is the 2nd most important item in the list. People will not book if service and reviews are bad. And thirdly, the listing itself, it has to attract people. A bad description and/or photos will not attract too many visitors.
Shoot for bookings of 1 out of 2 nights available every month. If occupancy drops below 50% any single month, take action. Forget about conversion rates, you have little control over that.
I want to revive this topic in light of AirBnB’s recent changes when it comes to booking statistics.
I am specifically concerned with “booking conversion”. I am fully aware that this is not necessarily an accurate or even important number. As people have pointed out above, the most important number is of course occupancy which is pretty much the hardest data that you can have. But I am still interested to know one thing which is:
What constitutes a “good” booking conversion. I have seen the number 0.5% thrown around but I can’t see that backed up anywhere by any resources online. Is there some sort of range that people are aiming for? Any guidance or resources would be much appreciates.
For info, our booking conversion is currently 0.35%. I can see from the 365 days viewing option that we once had booking conversion at 5.98% but that was at a time when we were accidentally quite underpriced. So my thinking is that anywhere above 1% would indicate that you might be underpriced. But at the same time, 0.35% seems quite low and might conversely indicate that we are over priced (or there is something not right in the description or photos).
What doe people think? Is 0.5 to 1% the sweet spot? Or is this too low?
There is no ‘sweet spot’ in terms of conversion rates there are too many variables to take into account. You have to set a conversion rate for your business across the channels you use to market your listing.
Why is this important for you though? What changes do you feel you can make to alter your conversion rate on Airbnb? @Suntory
Because it impacts on how I might price the listing. A conversion rate of 50% would suggest to me that you are priced too low.
As you say, there are too many variables - with the exception of price. For example, if you live in a very poor location, eventually the listing is priced so competitively that people will still book you, knowing the location is not great. So, to answer your question, the quickest and easiest change I can make on the listing is price. So that goes back to my first answer above.
This data might not relevant to you however it is to me. You might call it personal interest.
On a monthly basis, we get around 95% during the summer, dropping off to around 80% for the shoulder months. Winter is dead here, we’re lucky to get 25/30% and that’s with rock bottom rates.
Then we have fiestas and a Moto GP in May which usually gets us around 75%, but that’s all high value bookings, three times summer rates. Keeps me in Oloroso for a few months
Our conversion rate, according to BDC, is miserly compared to our competitive set, but very often we’re getting bookings and they aren’t. It’s easy to check their calendars when they’re listed on Airbnb and VRBO as well
We could bump our summer stats by doing one nighters to fill gaps, but to be frank we simply don’t want to work that hard.
Yeah May is a big deal here, almost three weeks of partying essentially, with the bonus that you’re making lots of money.
Unfortunately we lost the lot this year, were almost full, only a few midweek nights left that’d gone nearer the time. August starting to look healthy, but having a buffer day between bookings will take its toll on occupancy rates.
I think the cheapest thing to do is to tweak your photos if there is room to make them more attractive, and see if your conversion rate goes up.
If pricing is what you are trying to determine, why not try dropping your price and see what happens?
I improved my net income by increasing my price and having more vacant days, which may equate to a lower conversion rate, or maybe fewer looked but a greater number booked – I didn’t even look at that. The only metrics that matter to me are profit and my peace of mind index.
I get that if you’re a hotel you have such a level of fixed cost that minimizing vacancies (and as a secondary maximizing conversions) is essential, but not sure how relevant this is for Airbnb unless you’re a big operation with payroll, etc.
I very much agree with your sentiment. I am not after maximising occupancy. Nor am I interested in maximising booking conversion. In fact, I think that there is a strong argument to keep both at a reasonable level. I am following a similar strategy to yours (I think) and have increased prices which means we have a similar turnover compared to last year even though we have fewer bookings. We are interested in hosting only guests who really want to stay with us and can appreciate the amount of work we put in the place: this might mean that our booking conversion is actually quite low (around 0.3% at the moment). What this figure indicates to me is that this probably filters out a lot of people who might not necessarily appreciate the level of detail of the listing.
When I started in 2012 I rapidly ramped up to 12.5%. After all the incentives for new hosts its dropped out of sight. I also don’t know if the same person coming back to the site a few times, as many do, counts as one person viewing or multiple views. I suspect the latter.
I almost never use the Airbnb performance tools because I’m down to just two listings and have very high occupancy rates but was encouraged to see all the data available earlier today when tooling around in the new dashboards. My most popular listing which has been booked just about every single weekend for the past 3 years has a conversion rate of .1%
The reasons I would never use conversion rate are: I keep a lot of my weekdays blocked for returning business travelers and found that my high prices and relatively high guest limits are appealing to weekend warriors, I charge per-guest-per-night fee’s, and my rules are pretty explicit. I don’t want to appeal to everyone, so low conversion rate is perfectly fine by me as long as I’m consistently getting great guests at the prices I want.
That being said, being able to slice the data into past and future periods is a very nice upgrade and data will always be king so it’s great to see Airbnb making more of it available to hosts. I’ve tracked a lot of statistics about my reservations in google sheets and was constantly irritated that I couldn’t just automate data dumps directly from Airbnb. Still a LONG ways to go and the app is still pathetic for anything other than messaging but progress is progress!
