We’ll be taking a look at Airbnb’s current marketing activity and see if they’re missing out on anything that can increase their traffic and revenue. We’re analyzing the first quarter of 2015 in the US market.
We start by finding the sites that are competing with Airbnb over the same keywords. We see Flipkey.com and Homeaway.com at the top of the list when filtering the Accommodation and Hotel category. We run a side-by-side comparison of these two sites with Airbnb, and find out which keywords they’re competing over. The term ‘Vacation Rental’ is an important non-branded keyword that sends traffic to all three sites. Airbnb is doing well against these competitors with a search traffic share of 49.49%. However, when we exclude branded keywords Airbnb’s traffic share drops to only 14.9%.
Airbnb gets a lot of traffic thanks to its well-known brand, but its smaller competitors are winning when it comes to generic keywords. By going over this list of keywords and targeting them with SEO and PPC, Airbnb have the potential to more than double their search traffic. They can download the list of keywords to Excel for an in-depth look at which keywords to target.
When looking at Social referrals, Airbnb does well on Twitter. 5.93% of its social media traffic comes from Twitter compared to 1.52% for HomeAway and 2.65% for Flipkey. However, Pinterest brings Airbnb only 0.8%, next to 5.18% for Flipkey and 7.81% for HomeAway! Based on the traffic Airbnb’s competitors are getting from Pinterest, It might be worth investing more resources into it.
When analyzing Airbnb’s referring sites, we find Padmapper.com, which brings in 15.94% of all Airbnb referring traffic. That’s 8 point 767 million desktop visits just in Q1 of 2015
Padmapper is a map based real estate and rental search platform, with a checkbox for Airbnb listings. This is an amazing traffic source, one that Airbnb should expand with other sites similar to Padmapper, such as some of the sites on this list.
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