Friday, October 28, 2011

Growing on

Three months on we feel pressed to update.

City sites are now 18, with just a 6% growth (notably and finally Amsterdam rentals), but the main improvement is on sites like A'dam itself and Dublin now featuring decent numbers of apartments listed. Apartments are now 2,069 keeping the pace shown with the last update and growing 55%. With 751 Instant Booking apartments the ratio is now gone down to 36.3%. Still very reasonable.

Last but not least New York is finally also a .com and not just a .co.uk.

And now a look at the details.

Cities Reference features an Alexa of 66,000 (growing 3% in traffic). On Analytics traffic is stable at 32% of Roman Reference; traffic month on month is down 8%, year on year though - which is what really matters - gains yet more speed at 862% growth!
Time on Site 9,02 and Bounce 36.7% are as usual the best of all. One note here is necessary. Since the overhaul last March/April 2011 the parent site -Cities Reference- has become the venue of mostly owners as opposed to the single city sites which gather mostly travelers. Different behaviors here reflect well our underlying strategy of envisioning owners as partners in business and travelers as clients. No wonder apartment owners show a higher level of stickiness to the site.
Other than that it must be stressed that time on site has been growing a robust 12.5% compared to the last update, while bounce has remained largely stable.
CR Facebook page: with 543 fans, starts getting decent

Roman Reference
Stats: with Alexa of 62,000 (growth 6.5%) is performing at one of its best standards ever. Gathering distance from Cities Reference despite our prediction.
Analytics keeps pace from all the other websites. Growth year on year slows down slightly to +11%. Month on month is down 11%.
Bounce and Time on Site: at respectively 38% and 6.05min are really good for a traveler centric kind of site.
Rome Apartments: with 751 apartments it keeps growing 13% from update to update, it's a 50% growth if annualized, so very robust considering this site can by all means be considered mature at this point.
Visitors Vs Apartments/month: 20.1 so slightly improved, this is the best metrics when looking at traffic. 49 is the ratio for Instants.
Instant Vs On Request: stable at 41%
Conversion: on Ecommerce is 1.57% which is 3.2X compared to the industry average. We'll track growth on this from now on. Conversion on online bookings is 79.7%, lower than average, which is odd for a low season period, this is likely due to October that, being highest season, has received a lot of last minute bookings for On Request apartments. On the other hand November is too slow to make up for it.
Booking requests: 879 in line with the low season tide.
Client Reviews: 2,276 we'll start checking its growth from now on.
RR Facebook Page: 412 fans

Paris Reference
Alexa: 105,000 up 20% and firmly third website
Analytics: Still third website at 12.6% of Roman Reference's and 40.4% of Cities Reference's speed and keeping the 4th site (New York Reference) at 17.7% of its speed, so the traffic measure is comparatively not bad, although the year on year measure stays put in red at -3.9%. Time on site is 42.4% less than RR (not great and worsening) and bounce is 45.7% higher (ouch bad metrics in Paris!!).
Apartments: Still 3rd with an amazing growth rate of 96%! This measure largely makes up for the previous when looking at the future.
Visitors VS Apartments ratio/month: bound to drop dramatically with the recent flow of apartments: 5.3, although it keeps stable for Instant apartments at 53 per apartment. A note here is due. 53 per Instant apartment is higher than Roman Reference therefore worth noticing. Instant apartments in Paris are getting booked out faster than Rome and they are likely what determines the dismal figures for time on site and bounce rate. Working on the Instant figure in Paris becomes the key to success.
Instant VS On Request: Down 50% with just 10.2%, ouch!
Conversion on Bookings: it's 0.87% on ecommerce, still better than industry average but almost just half of Roman Reference. Conversion on online bookings is 62.3%, which is good in general and improved lately despite the bad numbers above, which again comes to demonstrates that this site needs at least double the ratio of Instant Apartments to start delivering.
Bookings are just 7.5% of Roman Reference, so... going down. Still by far our second site in terms of booking requests.

New York Reference: A lot of things have improved in New York. Finally a .com for it, finally the USD as the main currency, finally our team on visit to the Big Apple to promote it for good, a lot more apartments!
Alexa: at 1,035,000 is up 132%.
Analytics: Shows it up one to our 4th position. 2.2% of Roman Reference so slowing a little on that measure. Time on site is 41% lower than Roman Reference, so improving consistently and getting to be slightly better even of Paris. Bounce is 13% worse than RR, so again a lot of improvement and a lot better than Paris Reference.
Apartments: It's now our third on apartments, up 5 position. With 149 apartments it grew 224% after our trip to New York.
Visitors VS Apartments: It's 2.2 which doesn't surprise with a sudden growth of 224% on apartments. The real measure to look at is towards Instant Booking apartments where it has 36.5 visitors per apartment which is rather good actually.
Instant Ratio is 6%, so 3X better than the last update, clearly the visit to NY brought reaped some interesting results.
Booking requests: Easily our third site in terms of booking requests with 1.6% of RR and 24.5% of PR. Not bad.
Conversion on booking requests is 7.7%.
Analysis: New York, in spite of recent legislation against vacation rentals, pulls a lot of weight and has a lot of potential.