Here at ICND we’re all about driving more direct bookings for our clients through their websites. Our latest Direct Booking Engine websites (Axis) strive to do this better than anything we’ve developed before. They’re faster, feature rich, and customizable to fit our client’s needs. 

Combine our awesome websites with our digital marketing efforts to deliver more website visitors interested in our client’s vacation rentals (qualified traffic), and we have a tasty recipe for driving more direct bookings for our clients. 

What comes out of this joint effort by our team to both develop a cutting edge website platform (Your Digital Store) and drive qualified traffic (those interested in your rentals) is we get to see this entire process in action across many many sites.

For an optimized digital store you need both the right potential customers coming in the doors and the right in store layout to ensure your products are best displayed. 

In the spirit of never being satisfied we’re constantly incorporating the best tracking efforts to gauge the effectiveness of our websites and digital marketing efforts. 

In this continued process we found a problem that stretches across not just our booking engine websites, but all booking engine websites. Zero or low count property returns when users are searching on the websites.

Unserviceable Searches

Zero or low count property returns are known as “Unserviceable Searches,” and can and do typically lead to users abandoning the site. 

They occur when users on the website enter their stay criteria, like stay dates as well as preferred amenities and other optional filter selections, and there are no properties returned that meet their search criteria. 

The reasons behind low or zero property returns range from overall minimal availability for peak season stays, combined with or simply due to the user’s selection of available search filters on the sites. 

Add to that the total amount and diversity of inventory on a given site will all contribute to the frequency at which a site may provide little to no property results for a user’s search.

You might see scenarios similar to the Outer Banks of North Carolina where peak season availability meets high demand periods:

In these cases you may have some availability, especially early on, but less so as the year goes on towards the second peak for search demand for these very same peak season stays.

Or you might suffer from over complicating initial Quick Search filter capabilities on landing pages like your homepage of the website:

In these instances instead of showing off your properties initially with simple search criteria allowing users to reach the booking engine and refine from there, your users are seeing the booking engine for the first time with a big fat Zero for search results. 

Using our capabilities to track, log and report (User Searches Reporting) on all search criteria being entered by users for our marketing client’s websites we began to find some troublesome statistics. 

In our data collection we don’t only collect and aggregate the most popular stay dates and amenity filters being selected, but the number of properties returned for each individual search made! 

It was the reviewing of these troublesome stats that led to the development of ICND’s Suggested Searches.

What We Found Through User Searches Reporting

In some cases depending on the time of the year reviewed the number of simply ZERO search results was over 30% of all searches being made by users on the site. 

If we extended to results where less than 10 properties were returned we saw even more troubling stats, with some websites returning less than 10 properties for more than 70% of all searches made! (These were sizeable VRMs with 300+ properties and more)

At certain times of year when search demand peaks for peak season stays in many markets, these figures grow to even higher percentage values!

Often when these ZERO or low property returns occur users simply leave the website without refining their search criteria. 

These abandonment rates (users leaving the website to never return) can be really high. 

What would you do if you got a message saying “nothing is available for your search criteria?”

What you’ll want to do first is learn about your own users and how they are interacting with your site. User Searches can help accomplish this.

ICND’s User Searches Reporting

For our marketing clients we program and develop reporting we call User Searches utilizing GA4. This reporting allows us to see in real time what users are selecting for stay dates, amenities, locations and all other selectable filters on the sites. 

It’s an amazing tool to help not only gauge and understand the user experience on the sites, but also understand what the seasonal search interest is any time of year. 

We can take this information and help make better decisions for when to increase or decrease paid advertising efforts, and understand our audience better to improve the website experience.

We were also collecting the number of results returned for every search made on the site. This was the spur to develop Suggested Searches.

So What Is Suggested Searches?

For those compounded reasons we reviewed earlier including seasonality, inventory, and search bar filter capabilities, a significant number of the reviewed website users were getting either zero or low property count returns. 

While this result is unavoidable to some extent for some of these very reasons, in reviewing the reporting it seemed that in at least some instances we could potentially do something to help.

Going further, we wanted to ask if users who initially received zero or low property count returns would consider inventory that didn’t exactly match all their search criteria, but did match most of it.

What if we used the parts of the user’s search criteria that yielded more property results to display additional options when their initial search led to zero or low returns? This way, they could easily engage with these results and continue shopping.

With this idea we took off running — creating a configurable Axis feature that could be customized to best fit our client’s websites and inventory. 

Rather than users having to guess which filters lead to ZERO results, they can now see all the properties available for their exact search criteria be it low or ZERO, followed by a selection of search cards that look just like property cards containing individual searches with properties.

These can be their dates + specific amenity selections or even alternate locations they also might be interested in that are also available for their stay dates.

Lucky for us we’ve also had the best clients that were willing to let us experiment with this new idea. 

What Happened

We knew this particular feature could be promising, but that it also couldn’t hurt. 

It displays after all returned results, and every site including our own wasn’t exactly preventing users abandoning the sites by recommending random properties or asking users to revise their search filters. 

We installed Suggested Searches on our first site in mid February of 2024, set up some simple GA4 tracking and set it free.

We simply wanted to gauge how often the feature ran, how often users then interacted with it, and if they then continued through to eventually book on the site. 

Oh boy, did they ever. In this initial install for one of our dear clients we’ve seen 373 bookings in 6 months~ of running from those who’ve interacted with Suggested Searches. 

While we weren’t willing to take a chance A/B testing this feature because if it worked we’d have potentially cut those overall bookings in half, we saw this client’s direct bookings grow to unprecedented heights in 2024! 

So even if you’re cynical about the feature and you say half would have revised their search criteria and booked, you’re still capturing more than 180 bookings for this client. 

You’re also taking pressure off the reservation team to help potential guests who may then call.

Mobile users tend to engage with the feature frequently because it’s easier to use than refining filters. 

Up Your Direct Booking Game

Since this first install we’ve started promoting this feature to our clients to help drive more direct bookings and they’ve been taking us up on it too.  

There’s not been one case where it didn’t have a positive impact, and typically it’s been a literal game changer. 

Imagine booking up that last remaining availability in peak season because while you might not have any remaining oceanfront properties for their stay dates, the perfect rental for a particular user is just one block away and at a great rate too. Well, they booked it. 

Imagine you’ve got just what they’re after in a nearby destination they’d consider and now you’re automatically promoting these properties based on their search criteria. 

Our advice: Allow us to develop User Searches on your site, as well as Suggested Searches. 

You can gauge how often Suggested Searches would run with User Searches Reporting and learn about your most popular filters and stay dates.

Suggested Searches can’t impact your site negatively and even if it isn’t necessarily running as much as another site it’ll still drive more engagement which in turn will lead to more direct bookings!