Updated! Compare Paid Listing Sites (2011)

What makes one site work for your property and another be a complete waste of money?

Most owners have two prime audiences: Europe and the US.

If you advertise on the big 2 in the UK (Holiday-Rentals and Holiday Lettings) in the US (VRBO and HomeAway) are you spreading your marketing to reach more holidaymakers -  or are you duplicating it as many holidaymakers will visit all these sites anyway?

It is incredible what a bit of research on the Internet can do. I usually say:”If its out there I can find it” and a lot of the time it’s true. I’m also a very curious person (some say too curious). When I see a listing site making various claims I have to check it out;

Holiday-Rentals claim they are the ‘UK’s No.1 holiday rentals website with over 210,000 holiday homes from around the world‘

Holiday Lettings leads with ‘the UK’s No.1 for holiday homes worldwide’ claiming to deliver more British holidaymaker than the nearest competitor.

Owners Direct claim they are the ‘UK’s leading direct-from-owner property site’.

Home Away in the US claim to be ‘the world’s most trusted vacation rental website’ with ‘over 85 million traveler visits a year’ and ‘5 times more exposure than other sites’

VRBO claim ‘over 95 million traveler visits’

Homelidays claim the title ’No.1 in Europe’ with 50 million visits annually.

It’s no surprise, but these sites rarely offer such information. How many daily visits? Where’s the traffic coming from? How many Page Views do they average per Visit? How many visits are instantly leaving the site (the Bounce Rate)? So you have to make educated guesses using tools like Statbrain and Alexa to help guess a little more accurately. Many people say, correctly, their accuracy can be suspect. That’s not important – it’s about comparisons, and however accurate or not they are, they are consistent between the listing sites in their measurements.

What’s the result  if you combine all the information  available and use it to try to estimate how many visits an individual advert is likely to get? That’s what I did, and it actually works pretty well.

In Europe, Homelidays (of France) are the biggest site with around 142,000 daily visits.  H-R and HL and OD together only get around 90,000. But over 80 per cent of Homelidays traffic comes from France and Italy, whereas H-R, HL and OD have a much higher % of UK traffic. They do, though, get almost double the Page Views per visit than the UK sites.

In the US, only a tiny % of traffic to VRBO and HA comes from the UK, so advertising on these sites is primarily for reaching US customers. By volume of traffic, by time spent on the site, and by number of Page Views VRBO is performing much better. VRBO also has many more properties, and to rank high in a VRBO search result you have to buy more (and more) photos, which can work out as expensive. HA instead ranks by Availability Calendar freshness.

And if you calculate the likelihood of your advert being seen on these sites (by dividing traffic into properties), VRBO  in the US and Homelidays in Europe stand out.

It’s all in a FREE report, updated for 2011 using data from Q4 2010. You can download it here.