Do you feel like you’re missing a piece of the Airbnb success puzzle? Do you wish you had an easy way to understand exactly how your property was ranking according to the Airbnb algorithm and what you should change to get more bookings?
If so, don’t miss Episode 35 of the Host Coach Airbnb Podcast where Kelvin Mah, the founder of Rank Breeze, shares his secret weapon for making data-driven decisions about listing changes.
Read on to learn the three facets of short term rental success, and three specific things to adjust to boost engagement with your Airbnb’s listing to fill your calendar and bank account!
Topics discussed in this episode:
- The 3 facets of STR success
- The software that allows you to peek into the “black box” of the Airbnb algorithm
- What 3 things to adjust to boost your Airbnb’s click-through rates
- Exactly how long to test a change to your listing
- Why you should keep your July prices high this summer
Host Coach Airbnb Podcast Episode 35 Show Notes:
Kelvin, for our new listeners, what is RankBreeze?
Rank Freeze is a software platform that helps Airbnb hosts with three things. Helps them with listing optimization, dynamic pricing, and competitor data.
Okay, let's unpack this. What was the first one again?
Listing optimization.
By that you mean knowing where you're ranking so that you can do things to improve that rank placement?
Yes. Sometimes I call it rank optimization. What we do at RankBreeze is we track all your search data. So where are you ranking? What's your click through rate percentage? What is your listing views? What is your number of impressions? What we do is we bring that data into our platform and then we let you do listing optimization tests. So for example, if you want to change your photo, you can make that change and then track how your listing is performing against your search with that change.
The Power of Photos on Airbnb
Isn't that amazing? So I know this, but I've bet a lot of people listening would find that very eye-opening. So what you're saying is literally changing the order of your photos could have impact on your views, your click throughs, your ultimate number of bookings.
Yes, because it's kind of a snowball effect: when people are searching on Airbnb, they're going to have a whole bunch of listings put on a page and those listings are going to be your competitors and you need to essentially stand out from those competitors in some way.
Typically photos are the most engaging, aspect of your listing because the more intuitive users of Airbnb, what they know is that they can go and click on the thumbnails and click to the right and they can see all your photos. However, if you don't have the right placement of photos that are engaging to drive a click, you're not going to get the opportunity for them to view your listing, because they never reached your listing because they were going through your carousel of thumbnails and the first 20 were not engaging enough for them.
This is why we're forever telling people, please don't give us 15 pictures of your front porch. We need to see the front of your space, the kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom, big amenities, like show them the brochure version and then you can get into more minutiae. When I see listings that have like the coffee cups in the cabinet as one of their first three photos, it's just not going to work.
Yeah, we see people reducing photos and getting better results because there's just a lot of fluff.
The call to action. Don't forget that. The call to action is a marketing term where you're asking someone to book your property. So it's an actual forward statement where you're being more direct about wanting them to stay at your property through text.
Typically: book now. I think we say something like, "Our weekends fill up fast, but we've got great weekday rates. Book now."
Okay. That's interesting. Put the call to action in the listing description. Yeah. You've got call to action and scarcity in there.
The Airbnb Problem RankBreeze Was Built to Solve
Kelvin, when you started RankBreeze, what was the problem that you set out to solve? What was the gap in the market that you noticed that caused you to found RankBreeze?
When I was managing properties, at first I was really only thinking about the guest experience in short term rentals, I like to say that you'v got three pillars: real estate, hospitality, and e commerce. And, when I was just starting, I would go to my listing every day to try to find it, and I did find it. But then, I would try to figure out, "okay, well, where's my listing performing for two guest counts, three guest counts, four guest counts for this weekend, the next weekend, and the next weekend after that?" I was recording everything in a spreadsheet.
Then I started to learn a little bit more about what Airbnb is, and Airbnb, just like Amazon and just like Etsy, they're marketplaces. But, besides being just a marketplace, they're actually a marketplace search engine, which means there's demand and supply elements there. I soon realized that not only was Airbnb a search engine, but they've also invested millions and millions of dollars into this search engine. So it's obviously , very important for them.
I also noticed that when I did some of the research around how to improve my visibility and have it so that every time somebody visited our city, we showed up in the first, second, third pages, I just realized that all the content and information we were getting was around, improving your rankings. And then I was thinking, "how are people tracking their rankings?" It was a need from my perspective, but also a need from what I felt in the market.
The Crystal Ball For Airbnb Ranking
If you are listening to this podcast, you're getting this piece of education that 99 percent of hosts don't have, which is when you start a listing, everything's going great the first 30 days or so you're getting traffic, you're getting bookings, and then all of a sudden things go cold. Without RankBreeze, you would have nothing to tell where you're actually showing up in search. And that's why you don't realize what's underlying your loss of bookings. The first time I met Kelvin, I told him that I felt like RankBreeze was a crystal ball to peer inside the black box that is the Airbnb algorithm. I feel that way today.
I agree. It's also a beautiful feedback loop. You can change something and then watch and see what happens when you're not ranking well. Change something and see the rank change, hopefully in the right direction.
Exactly. The feedback loop is super important because if you're not using something to measure your impact, you're essentially swimming blind.
How many short term rental investors is RankBreeze currently helping?
We have a few thousand.
That's fantastic. But that's also an opportunity. It's not a few million, right? So it's a secret guys. This is kind of like your secret weapon. We get the questions, "is that market overcrowded? Is it too late to get involved with Airbnb?" Not with these secret weapons - it certainly isn't.
I absolutely agree. You only have 5, 000 people using your tool, which is revolutionary, well that means the millions of other hosts aren't. And that you have all of this data to help you make great decisions and drive your properties to the top of search ranks. So Rankbreeze truly is a crystal ball or magic wand for Airbnb success!
Advice for New Airbnb Investors
Kelvin, do you have any advice for new Airbnb investors who are just getting started?
I think when you're stepping into the short term rental realm, understanding that there's those three pillars that I mentioned earlier, which is real estate, hospitality, and e commerce. RankRease focuses on that last pillar, which is e commerce. And whenever you set up a property and you get all your guest experience tightened up. Don't forget about your pricing and your search strategy. That's I think something that gets missed a lot of times when you're setting up your property for the very first time. Airbnb is a search engine and you don't want to work against it. You actually want to work with it, but that's really just fine tuning your overall search funnel, right? So, making sure that your impressions are over your similar listings, making sure that your click through rates are over your competitors, and making sure that anytime you have a breakdown in that search funnel, that you're fine tuning some elements of it.
For example, if you're noticing that your rankings are declining and your booking rates seem to be okay, your listing views seem to be on par, except your click through rates don't seem to be the same as your competitors. Then you sort of know that in order to improve your click through rates, you need to most likely adjust one of three things You can adjust your photos, your cover photo in particular, and you can adjust your title and then perhaps price as well.
That's awesome. Kelvin. You know, what gets measured gets managed. And RankBreeze is there to measure things so that we can manage them for growth.
The Biggest Value of Rank Breeze for Airbnb Investors
What do you think the biggest value that RankBreeze offers to Airbnb investors?
When it comes to investors, we have a feature called the market scanner and it's a Chrome extension and what the Chrome extension does is it allows you to go to Airbnb and you can look at statistics about how much revenue a property is making for the next three months. So, it's not predicting the revenue. It's actually looking at what the current reservations are for that data, because sometimes when you're looking at other places like Air DNA, for example, you're kind of getting this projection of the yearly revenue of a property.
We don't provide that. But, what we provide is more like market monitoring and trying to understand how the market conditions are. What you can do, if you have the Chrome extensions installed, you can go and look at a few listings, see the occupancy rates and the current booked revenue for that property. When you're ready, you just position the Airbnb map. And then in the extension, there's a little button that says, get market port, you click that button, and then, we will pull all the data for that area that you have set on the Airbnb map. And we're going to collect all the listings, crunch a few numbers, and then present back to you some data around the whole market.
Okay. Rather than just the individual listing. See, I told you it was a crystal ball.
If you're an investor plus the operator, you can connect your Airbnb listing to rankers, and then be able to see all your search data, and then make better decisions on different listing optimization theories. I like to call them theories because you're really not sure, but at least when you're making that change, you know that, "okay, this photo works better than this photo and I can see it based on the data and I'm going to stick with this photo now."
Data-driven decision making, smart.
Best Airbnb Change Testing
So Culin and I have talked about RankBreeze , multiple times on multiple episodes of the podcast. And we've talked about the basics of how it works and how to track your listings, page rank. Can you take us beyond the basics?
It's not necessarily an extra feature of RankBreeze, but I would recommend that whenever you're going to test something, try to test one thing at a time. I know it's very difficult, But generally try to test one thing at a time and then leave that for at least, a week's time. We have a default in RankBreeze where we're defaulting to two weeks now, because we noticed there was a lot of questions around how long do I test this for? In general, you want to have a whole week of data preferably. You want Monday all the way through to next Monday, so you can at least see how your listing performs over weekend. In addition to rank placement recently, I've been seeing some new market insights.
So are you tracking factors in addition to search result placement?
Yes, we track search rankings, so not only do we track where your property is performing, for every available date that you have opening your calendar for every guest count, which is quite big. If you think about it, there's a lot of different searches. But yes, we're also tracking your click through rates, your impressions, listing views, and your conversion rate - that's how many people landed on your listing, and then made the booking decision.
Also your overall conversion rate and your overall conversion rate means how many people saw you on the search results page and then ended up booking your property. It also seems to also illustrate how you're doing versus similar listings in your area. Are you getting more impressions? Or are your impressions going down? But everybody's impressions are going down because it's going into a slower season.
What has surprised you the most as you've grown Rank Breeze.
From a host perspective, I've just noticed that people use RankBreeze in different ways that I was not expecting them to. So for example, they would include it as part of their sales tactics. So they would essentially use RankBreeze as a factor to stand out against, competing property managers. So, that was pretty interesting. I've also noticed that pretty much everything is testable. You kind of have this default of things that you want to test, which is like: your title, your description, your photos, maybe some of your Airbnb's amenities of course. But also things like parking status was an interesting one. Also, adjusting your host profile. So going from, where it's big property manager style, and then changing that profile to a host profile, which is like a regular person profile.
Keep Your Airbnb Pricing High in July
Also noticing that data evolves over time. It doesn't sound as surprising once you say it. But, we recently looked at conversion rates across the board. So we looked at 4,000 different Airbnb listings and we looked at the conversion rates and what we noticed is: the overall conversion rates between April to June were about 1% to 2%. So that's pretty much the standard. If you can think about overall conversion rate, but then in July, the conversion rate jumped all the way to nearly 10%, which is huge. That's like a 10 times increase, which really tells me that you can really hold strong with your high season pricing because you know that the conversion rates for all the 4,000 different properties all shapes and sizes had about a 10 percent overall conversion rate in July.
We are hearing it here first from the data analytics that it's gonna be a great summer for short term rental hosts! You can have some confidence that you know that your conversion rates will stay strong. So, it's looking like a good summer out there!
Airbnb Trends
What other trends do you see coming down the road here in the next year or two? What have you noticed? What are you seeing changing?
I can say something around my thoughts with Airbnb, in particular, the last updates that they've done. They released the category update, which I think a lot of people freaked out about. It was pretty interesting to be a participant in because we were also freaking out about that as well given our business. So, there was the categories update, and then I think there was the rooms update afterwards.
And now they've had the icons update. I personally think that those updates are not really that monumental. I think that Airbnb is finding their stability. They're trying to implement more AI into their platform, and data in order to probably adjust certain things. But, my thought on that is that I'm not quite sure if there's going to be these huge major updates because I don't know exactly what else they're going to do.
Hopefully they do surprises because I think there's some cool elements like guest favorites, for example. As a guest for me, I love guest favorites!
As a host, being a guest favorite makes me very happy also. Don't get overexcited about some small changes in Airbnb because the things that have made you successful as a host to this point will continue to be rewarded.
If any of our listeners want to explore RankBreeze a little bit further or get in contact with you or someone on the team, what are the best places to find you?
You can go to rankbreeze. com and reach out to us there. We also are starting to get a little bit more social., So Instagram and YouTube
You've got , an inexpensive paid trial as well, right?
Yes.
Perfect. Well, thank you so much. I'm excited to continue to watch RankBreeze grow and new things roll out and tell more and more listeners how they can use this crystal ball to improve their success.
Should you need an Airbnb coach to help you find the right market, property, and help you set yourself up for success - feel free to book a free 30 minute coaching call with us. We LOVE helping new investors avoid pitfalls and find financial freedom through Airbnb investing!
