ShareSuperbowl ads are looked forward to and watched as avidly as the game itself, and often present the very best animations, computer generated graphics, and celeb’s, but HA’s Superbowl ad has, to almost universal acclaim from the public and media pundits, bombed and under pressure from critics has been pulled from it’s website and now [...]
Profile
Claiming to be the world’s most trusted vacation rental website, they have 230,000 listings. They share the same lookalike website as Holiday-Rentals in the UK and essentially offer the same type of deals (they are the same group). They own vrbo (the US’s largest holiday rental site – but there is no cobranding and vrbo stands alone with its policies and pricing) and also own OD and HL in the UK, Homelidays and Abritel in France, Fe-Wo Direkt (Germany) and a host of smaller European sites.
Size and Traffic
They take the 2nd largest traffic in the US, behind (way behind) vrbo. Like H-R they haveone of the highest Bounce Rate of all major listings sites, at 39% (Bounce Rate is the number of visits that immediately leave the site without going further). It’s true all websites have an element of Bounce (this site has a 23% rate) but by internet standards 39% is high.
Average Pages viewed by Visitors is around 4.7 – visitors are staying on the HA site less time and looking at less information than they do on vrbo.
They may have 230,000 listings but many are non-display, from advertisers on their other portals (such as H-R in the UK) with free, cut down, listings pulled through to HA. These are non display ads.
Traffic and size can be a reasonable measure of how well your advert is expected to do. The problem with HA is the same as H-R; the judgement whether visitors are actually looking at non-display adverts (the free ads pulled in from other sites). The simple calculation (total adverts divided by total traffic) gives HA a low result for Average Traffic Per Property, comparing much less favourably than vrbo. The reality is probably that a majority of visitors aren’t bothering to scroll through non-display ads; but how many, we can’t tell. Whichever way you cut the numbers and whatever reasonable assumptions you make, though, HA’s performance (and likely performance for you the owner) is less effective than their direct competition. Bear in mind that’s a general assumption – there’s just not enough good data around to be precise (and HA aren’t about to release any to us, are they?) The vast majority of traffic comes from the US, so if you’re looking for UK audience you’ll need alternatives (only 2% is UK based).
Pricing
If you’re considering both the UK and US market its actually slightly cheaper to buy HA advertising and upgrade to H-R through them (you get the full 12 photos on H-R included although H-R only normally offer 4) – but you’ll lose out on the free listings on H-R’s other 10 smaller european sites, for what they’re worth. A vrbo upgrade is also excellently priced, though you’d have to ask yourself why would you want to be on both HA and vrbo.
As well as 12 photos the $329 gets you Google Maps and the usual Availability Calendar. But you don’t get a link back to your own website.
Based on my benchmark to compare all sites (12 photos and 4 weeks of featured listings) HA will actually cost slightly less than a vrbo direct comparable advert by about $50, though with vrbo you get free links to our own website (in my view worth a premium on any price) and substantially more traffic and higher Traffic Per Advert stats.
Visit them here
