Improve Your Airbnb Performance Using Airbnb Insights | Tim Hubbard

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. You've heard it before. They say that we can't manage what we can't measure. Right. And so this week, we're going to be talking about a couple metrics or a couple places you can go to measure the performance of your listing, more specifically with Airbnb. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. We'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals. Quick actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio. I'm your host, Tim Hubbard. Last week, we talked about some of the changes you can make to boost your listing to make sure that it shows up higher in Airbnb search results. So if you haven't watched that yet, check it out. This is sort of like the sequel to that one, because oftentimes when we make these changes, it's kind of hard to know if they're actually impacting our listing. Right. Well, that's what this week's about. We're going to talk about some of Airbnb's insights to help us uncover whether or not these changes are actually effective or not. So the first one, and you can find these by going to your Airbnb listing and going to Insights. You'll see quite a few different parameters there. But I want to talk first about average overall conversion rate. And this is. This is made up of three components. The first one is first page search impression. So how often is your listing showing up on the first page of a search result? It's really important, right? And it's important to measure this. If you see that it used to be showing up, but now it's not. Well, maybe something changed. Right? The next piece to this overall conversion rate is the search to listing conversion rate. So after you've shown up and a potential guest has clicked on your listing, they're moving a little forward in the process, Right? Hopefully you're going to convert them, which means they're going to make a reservation with your property. And the third piece of this overall conversion rate is whether or not they actually book your property. And so you can see all of these metrics online, just go to Airbnb. They also have a handy dandy little report, an Excel that you can. An Excel file that you can export by month. If you want to run some of the numbers and stuff yourself. We're actually going to talk more over the coming months about metrics. They're really, really important. And I gotta say, I'm a little guilty of not monitoring or measuring quite a few of the financial metrics of my properties and my portfolio. Why? Well, everything's just been growing pretty well, but adding a lot of properties, and they're all making money. You know, I always run the biggest base metrics, make sure things are profitable, make sure that decisions I make have a good roi, return on investment. But there's so many, so many more little metrics that we can break down that really help us uncover what's going on with our properties. You know, our average response time and what day of the week's the most the busiest, and. And why. And when do we get the most questions and why? Maybe one property's not holding up that well and it's identical to a property right next door. So I want to continue to break down a few of these things that are available for you on Airbnb. I've got three things, actually, and then I've got a fourth one that is really helpful. And it's going to be for some of you out there that have maybe multiple properties already in the same area. Another easy way to measure your performance. So that first piece is average overall conversion rate. How many times are you showing up on the first page, how many people are clicking on your listing, and how many are actually booking your listing? Now, there's a lot of reasons why you might show up on the first page of the search results, right? Some of those we talked about last week. But these metrics are going to allow you to measure that. So if you do make a change, make sure that you monitor the difference between month to month. So, number two, are your average page views going up? Are they going down? Make sure to think about everything you can that might actually be impacting that score outside of your reviews, because reviews are the third thing that are going to help us monitor performance of our. Our property to see if it's doing better, if it's doing worse, hopefully you're getting lots of good reviews. If you're not, then something is clearly wrong, Right? For me and all of my properties, if something happens twice, or if we get a review that mentions something twice, most of the time, luckily, if there is a negative, our guests are mentioning what they didn't like in the private feedback. But if you see something that pops up in the private feedback twice, it's a change that you need to make with your property. So make sure that you are monitoring your reviews. And this brings me to the fourth way to measure our property. And this isn't, unfortunately, going to be available for everyone out there, but it's if you happen to have two properties that are pretty much identical, maybe a duplex, for example, in the same area, or, well, you can easily make a change to one and not make the change to the other one and measure the difference between the performance of those two properties. Now, everything else, of course, would have to be equal or basically equal. So your pricing would need to be the same. If one of those listings had great reviews and the other ones, the other one wasn't so, well, well, then you wouldn't really be able to measure this that easily. But if you do have two properties that are very similar in the same area, it's a really easy shortcut to be able to measure changes. Something I'm doing with quite a few of our properties in our portfolio right now. So real quick episode for you this week. We just want to make sure that we're measuring the performance of our properties so we can uncover why they may be getting booked more, why they may be getting booked less. So we can do that by looking at our average conversion rate. That's on Airbnb's Insights. Remember, that's made up of three things. The first piece is your guests. How often do you show up on the first page? How often are people actually clicking on your listing? Then how often are they converting over into a reservation? So that's the first piece. Second piece is just average page views. How often is someone finding you over the course of a month? Maybe not on just the first page, but you know, going through searches. So that will go up and down based on month. But remember to account for season.

If you made a big price change or anything like that, it's very likely going to affect those page views. The third piece is making sure we're monitoring our reviews. We all know how important that is, but it's good to measure that over the life of our property as well. And the fourth piece, if you happen to have two properties are very similar and you want to know if some of the changes, some of the changes we talked about last week to boost our search listing, if we want to know if some of those are actually helping, well, then we can compare these two similar properties to each other. So I know for some of us, measuring and monitoring all this isn't our favorite part, but it's very important and it doesn't take a long time. If you want, you can just go in Airbnb and you can download their monthly report, which is going to give you most of that information by itself. So it's not going to take more than a few minutes. Good thing to be checking on. I hope your properties are doing really well and they're staying booked. Airbnb just hit 100 million bookings. Can you believe that? 100 million bookings. It's crazy. We're living in different times, aren't we? So I hope you're doing well. I'm getting ready to head off to the airport here. I'm going back to Colombia. Really excited to be going back. It's been quite a while down here in Brazil. It's nice to have that flexibility. Airbnb short term rentals have allowed me to do that, so I hope they are working well for you too. And until next time, have a wonderful week and we'll talk to you soon. If you're looking for a ton of free resources, well you can check out the links in the show notes or head to our website restmethods.com where you'll find free guides, house rules and my ebook on finding the best short term rental properties. Thanks for tuning in.