Statistics - please share

John, the problem with using averages to make a business argument (or a business decision, for that matter) is general averages are meaningless, particularly when pulled from wide-ranging data.

For example, the average annual temperature in the US is about 54.5 F. Based on this average, you could pack a light jacket and a pair of keds for a trip to Minnesota in February. It's the average temp, it must be right.

Likewise, if you try to apply your averages and stats to a 3-room B&B with a room rate of $120/night and annual occupancy of 35%, you'll see they don't work. We can not all change our size, our rates, our occupancy, our location, our target market segment etc to fit your model. If we all did, it would kill one of the best things about B&Bs--our many variations.

Hi Bree,

I only shared the statistics that I have readily available.  I understand that some B&B's see less than this, some more - these numbers were averages and that is the nature of them.  I tried to make clear in my post that I thought this sample size was biased as well based on the number of listings I saw in other directories.  Ultimately it should be based on ROI as we've said.  If you get more than $1 back for every dollar in, then that is a positive.

I'm curious though - do you have conversion numbers?  If your booking engine supports it, you can setup Google Analytics to tell you exactly how many bookings and for how much money each is come from any referring website.That is ultimately more important than traffic.

What sticks out to me in your numbers is that we seem to be driving at least 6-10X more than iloveinns is driving, yet we are only 1.8X their least expensive listing with a link to your website, and Inns.com - which is driving as much traffic as iLoveinns is included in our price.  This doesn't even take into account whether or not our traffic spends more time on the website or better converts into bookings - both of which we tend to see.  How do you feel about their price-to-traffic ratio?

It seems innkeepers would be happy if all of the directories delivered a similar price-to-traffic ratio, or even better a similar price-to-bookings/revenue ratio, although with 7,000 inns so geographically dispersed, it would be hard to do.  I do think that really does gloss over a lot of things though - like time on site, convversion to bookings, etc. - all very important things.

Each directory has different strategies and benefits for your membership dollars that may or may not lead to direct traffic, but may lead to exposure.  Don't take this as promoting please, but your membership dollars on BedandBreakfast.com also includes participation in our contract with Google where we feed them every B&B including geo codes and url's so all of our B&B's show up in local.  We've had this with them for three years now - it doesn't result in extra traffic through our directory, but it is a great benefit.  We also do a recipe feed with them whereby we include ik recipes, and you all know we feed them consumer reviews.  There are others as well - we feed every property now to Vast.com, ASU Travel, LA Times, and will soon be live on Away.com, Uptake, and Realtrips.  So you as a property need do nothing more - we put your listing up on all of those sites.  I believe this is something we do that differentiates us, and it takes quite a bit more effort.

Again, please don't take this as promoting our site - I am merely trying to demonstrate additional value beyond traffic stats you get for the $349 you are paying.  If you are questioning the "why" it costs $349, then it would help to know the "what" comes along with it.

I don't expect every innkeeper to see the numbers I posted - it is just the averages we have from our BE customers.  There was certainly a range as well, particularly with BBonline with one property showing similar ratios from what you are looking at.  At a high level, quantcast stats give a decent picture.

Swirt - you know what would be interesting - is to have an area where innkeepers could post their quarterly referral numbers anonymously - then you could aggregate them so the information would still be private for the innkeepers protection, but everyone could see the actual stats.  That would be pretty cool.

As you all may or may not know, RezOvation has thousands of customers – and enables full referral url revenue and conversion tracking through Google Analytics.  We are not allowed to publish data from any one given customer, but we can aggregate this data to draw some meaningful conclusions.  Since you are talking about website tracking and statistics, this could be useful. 

1)      We took a random sample of live properties using our system for the past few months.  These properties had to have been live since at least May 1 (and we did not look at initial go-live date), and at least on BedandBreakfast.com (so we could make comparisons), with Google Analytics working at least for referral tracking. 

2)      I took their referral data for traffic between May 1 and September 24.  Looked at Top 50 referrers, and recorded any of the following sites traffic and/or conversions if conversion tracking was setup:

a.       BB.com

b.      BBonline

c.       BNBfinder

d.      Lanierbb

e.      Iloveinns

f.        Theinnkeeper (my new favorite bb.com plagiariser)

3)      It is difficult to analyze, because each property may or may not use everyone, requiring BedandBreakfast.com’s traffic to be compared separately each time against other sites to make it apples-to-apples rather than just looking at an aggregate number.  Here are the percentage of properties using each of the following sites:

                                                               i.      BBonline – 40%

                                                             ii.      BNBfinder – 40%

                                                            iii.      Lanierbb – 67%

                                                           iv.      Iloveinns – 53%

                                                             v.      Theinnkeeper – 27%

4)      I then looked at the ratio of traffic, time on site, page views, bounce rate compared to BedandBreakfast.com for each of these sites.  For clarification – I only counted a site’s numbers if the innkeeper was using them and BedandBreakfast.com – I didn’t just total up all the metrics for bb.com’s sites, then total the metrics from other sites – comparison was made only if an innkeeper was using both and only for the metrics that corresponded to that innkeepers site.  I then aggregated the numbers together to give ratios of traffic sent and other metrics.  Here are some highlights:

The takeaway from this sample size is that on average, BedandBreakfast.com has more inns (which we know to be the case) and they are getting more traffic on average from BedandBreakfast.com than anyone else.  It should be noted that our sample is probably not indicative of the entire market – it is clear in the % using others sites.  We know that BBonline has more listings than most other directories – yet we didn’t see that in our numbers – which tells you that there must be some amount of bias.  What isn’t biased though is the amount of traffic that these properties are getting.  When they are using other sites, BedandBreakfast.com is sending a lot more traffic…  5X as much as bbonline and bnbfinder, 12X as much as Lanier, and 50X as much as iloveinns.  Also – time on the site for iloveinns and theinnkeeper were quite bad.  Inns.com sends about the same amount of traffic that Lanierbb.com sends as well, far less than BedandBreakfast.com, but it is included now in the price of BedandBreakfast.com, and the time on site is far better than even the other directories.

I have conversion data as well, but this needs to be properties that use our Booking Engine, and have everything setup using Google Analytics – AND use the various directories.  This is a smaller subset, but the numbers are still compelling. BB.com averages roughly 4X the conversion of BBonline on average.  For the other sites – it is rare to see much conversion on traffic at all.  Seriously – out of all the traffic I see, there are only a couple bookings TOTAL from all the other sites for May 1-September 24. 

Anyway – since we are on this subject, thought that would be some fun data for you guys to mull over.  I’m sure every B&B sees different results and it is clear that there are some innkeepers here unhappy with their traffic from us, but these numbers are not that far off from those posted on Innkeeping.org, and they are from a third party tracking system.  I'm guessing a year from now, as we continue to get more innkeepers to adopt full referral revenue tracking, we will have even better data.

okay I'm late here and we joined just in July,  but what I have for two rooms is

Show DETAILED listing impressions: Month to date = 156 Total, year-to-date = 495 Total, last year = 13

CLICK THRU to MEMBER'S HOME PAGE: Month to date = 128, Year-to-date = 326, Last Year = not a member

RIki

we are brand new, but so far this is what we have and we are not listed with B&B.com or anyone else. just our web page, and listed on the freebee sites (with just two rooms, and no budget you do what you have to). don't know if this helps. we had 17 reservations for this month. These are actual visits to my site. people who went to my site and viewed my pages.

 I don't do the featured property nor do I have availability on there so those rows are taken out when I could.

I have not been a member since 2002 or 03 due to poor performance and then joined bbonline which was doing a better job for us (reservations) until lately.  The new owners do not seem to be marketing the site as well as the POs.  

I do agree with Bree, though that people have become more educated in how to search so are finding our individual sites more and more frequently.  Where the directories come in handy the most is when someone is looking around but does not have a specific town set for their destination.  They also are used by those that have fallen into the routine of their use.  

I have been toying with the idea of rejoining B&B for a year to check the stats but the cost for a link listing is so steep.  Marketing 101 - a successful marketing campaign is one that returns 10 to 1.  If we all used this measurement as a sign of success, I wounder how many keep renewing?

I just went "live" yesterday & a few of you were looking but here it is:

Detailed MTD= 18

Click thrus to homepage MTD= 3 (one is me checking it)

I probably slept thru this earlier discussion but does this reflect unique visitors??  I hope so!!

Thanks for sharing, so far.

As you can see we here in Virginnie, even with the sponsored links on google from BandB.com are going in reverse.  Not forward.  I might ask this again at the end of the year if you won't mind, to take in the full year.

Is this what you wanted?

Still haven't joined, or I'd freely share...

=)
Kk.

This is a membership I let lapse, so I'm afraid I can't help  The weird thing is that I have had 2 sets of guests leave reviews with them after our membership expired and while we have no listing on their website, I can do a google / yahoo search and come up with a direct URL to the reviews. 

Show DETAILED listing impressions: Month to date = 122, year-to-date = 1209, last year = 2162

CLICK THRU to MEMBER'S HOME PAGE: Month to date = 79, Year-to-date = 715, Last Year = 1088