Guest Author: TJ Mahony, CEO & Co-Founder, FlipKey.com
(Former Managing Director at Compete)

Many moons ago, Carl Query and I helped create Compete.com. After working at Compete for five years and watching it grow from a little start-up to an industry leading web analytics firm, Carl and I decided it was time to start our own company.

Armed with a little angel money, an idea and Compete data we set off to create FlipKey.com – a community driven travel site to help consumers find trusted vacation rentals throughout the world, by providing real reviews of verified vacation rental properties.

I’m happy to report Flipkey.com is doing well and would like to share concrete examples of how Compete data helped us successfully get FlipKey.com off the ground.

Sizing the Market – Leverage Traffic Statistics to Measure the Opportunity

I will not profess to be an expert in writing business plans, but I can say that any decent business needs to know its market’s potential. If you can’t provide evidence of “how big” you could be, then there is little reason for people to get excited.

Vacation home rentals provide a great lodging option for vacationers. There are over 6M second / vacation homes in the United States which are rarely occupied by the owners. To help pay the bills, many of these second home owners will rent their beach homes, winter chalets and lake cabins to vacationers looking for a more personal, and often more affordable, lodging experience. It’s a brilliant example of P2P commerce; however, the potential can only be measured by how many consumers are aware and interested in staying in a vacation home vs. a hotel / resort.

Using Compete data, FlipKey measured how many people actually considered a vacation home accommodation as determined by unique visitor traffic to leading vacation rental listings sites (e.g. vacationhomerentals.com) and vacation rental property management sites (e.g. allstarvacationhomes.com).

Using Compete data we were able to determine over 30M domestic consumers consider vacation rentals each year. When accounting for the popularity of vacation rentals in Europe, we were able to confidently estimate over 50M consumers worldwide are seeking these unique accommodations…

Customer Acquisition – How will you attract visitors and how much will it cost you?

Last year I attended the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco and was able to listen to Reid Hoffman (PayPal, LinkedIn, Angel Investor Extraordinaire) discuss the keys to a successful start-up. Reid boiled it down to one point, “what’s your customer acquisition strategy? If you don’t know or you don’t know how much it’s going to cost you then you don’t have a business”.

I took Reid’s advice to heart.

Step 1: Using Compete customized ‘Site Referral’ reports, I was able to analyze the referral sources driving traffic to existing vacation rental sites. The data was pretty definitive – SEARCH (go figure).

Step 2: I knew it would take time for FlipKey to climb up the relevance rankings on Google, therefore SEM was the only immediate channel that could afford FlipKey access to substantial visitor traffic in the early stages of the company. As we all know, SEM can get expensive, so we needed to accurately estimate the types of key words we would need to bid on and how much they would cost.

Using Compete Search Analytics we downloaded a report of every search term in the Compete database over the last year used to refer visitors to sites in the vacation rental market. We then applied these key terms to the Google Estimator. After a few hours of copying and pasting we had a robust spreadsheet of 17K relevant key terms and a solid proxy for how much SEM would cost.

Buzz and Awareness – Let the words of consumers sell your value proposition

FlipKey is focused on delivering a community driven travel site to help consumers find trusted vacation rentals throughout the world, by providing real reviews of verified vacation rental properties. It’s easy to find reviews of hotels online, but nearly impossible to find a robust collection of vacation home reviews.

FlipKey works directly with vacation rental managers to provide a proactive guest review cultivation system. To help highlight the potential of guest reviews in driving more bookings, FlipKey conducted a survey of 400 consumers through Compete’s behaviorally targeted survey panel.

Relevance of Sample: Compete contacted consumers who exhibited interest in staying in a vacation home based on visitation to leading vacation rental listing and manager sites.

Results:

• 78% of vacation renters indicate they are significantly more likely to book a property that provides feedback from prior guests
• Only 16% of vacation rental guests were asked to leave an online review
• Had all participants been asked to leave a review, 81% would have recommended the unit, 16% were neutral and only 3% expressed a negative experience

By presenting the words and opinions of real consumers as measured by Compete’s survey panel, FlipKey was able to communicate its value proposition to the market and provide valuable research that had not previously been available.

Concluding Remarks

As of today, FlipKey has been a live service for little over two months and already represents 50,000+ vacation rental properties. Over 50 management companies have begun using FlipKey’s guest review platform and several partnerships are underway to bring FlipKey to an increasingly wider audience, both domestic and abroad.

Starting a new business and/or creating a new product requires more than data driven insights; however, I am witness to the advantages afforded by leveraging unique data sources like Compete to develop a business plan, guide tactical strategies and effectively communicate a service’s value proposition.

I admit it, I am in favor of the small guy. The independent webmaster working exclusively in his underwear. For the tech savvy small guy life just got a lot easier.

Why Life Got Easier for the Tech Savvy

If you work for and by yourself market research can take days or weeks to perform. Free tools like SEO for Firefox aim to simplify the equation, but most competitive research stats are just estimates of potential and traffic. They are not granular enough to provide the actionable data needed to give you immediate solutions.

And at the end of the day, even if you look at competing sites and have many of their marketing stats in front of you – like site age, link counts, and page counts – you can’t be sure how well they are doing.

With Compete.com Search Analytics, you instantly know how well they are doing, and what keywords are their most important. Running a Search Analytics report tells you what keywords send them the most traffic, and a weighting of each word’s volume of their total traffic.

How to Use Compete Search Analytics to Dominate Competitors

Compare those traffic stats against the algorithmic criteria needed to rank for those keywords and you have a good idea how much effort is needed to rank and how much reward each keyword brings.

If you have an authoritative site you can look for top performing niche sites in your vertical and clone their success with little effort.

If your competitor has a large authoritative site you can still beat them by aligning your site to rank well for the most profitable keywords.

Why Life Just Got Harder for Lazy Publishers

All webmasters with a large pool of content have accidentally ranked for keywords that pay well. Your own stats are a great source of keywords, but now that services like Compete.com exist you need to be aware that others are going to find your hidden gold. It is going to get harder to stay profitable while staying hidden.

If someone else who has a more authoritative site finds those secret keywords that are easy to rank for they will take them from you.

Balancing Links vs Content

If you already have a lot of content but limited link equity work on deploying effective link building strategies. If you already have a lot of link authority, work at picking off top keywords from weaker competing sites and weave them into your site’s structure.

The Problem

Bloggers create large pools of relevant content, and due to the social nature of blogs many bloggers have built up significant trust with search engines. But, as mentioned in Brian Clark’s Teaching Sells report,
some bloggers get thousands of visitors a day, but can hardly afford a cup of coffee for their efforts.

The big problem with blogging is that there is an echo effect to it, and bloggers end up chasing the same keywords that other bloggers are targeting, and many of these have limited commercial viability.

The Solution

Instead of comparing your blog to other blogs, you can step outside of that echo chamber by comparing your site to commercially oriented sites in your field. Blogs have significant authority and Google’s algorithms tend to prefer to rank informational pages to commercial sites, so you should be able to outrank commercial sites for some of their most important keywords.

Continue reading “Guest Post by Aaron Wall: Why Most Bloggers Need a Day Job to Afford a Cup of Coffee” »

We love hearing from our users, and love it even more when you find a cool useful way to use Compete.

Gary recently used Compete.com to analyze how one of his client’s traffic compared to its closest competitor. He quickly discovered:

Gary Stein is director of strategy for Ammo Marketing. He has been working in interactive advertising for nearly a decade, writes a column for ClickZ, and maintains a blog on advertising and media trends. Gary lives in San Francisco with his family.

David Utter of WebProNews adds:

Loyalty is the keystone to long-term success. Customers who keep coming back make it easier to sustain a business, since the cost of acquiring that customer has been repaid.

If two competitors have been running neck and neck for customers within a niche, that steady loyalty looks great, but those spikes in interest for the other site have to be intriguing. How are they consistently building offers that boost traffic?

The spikes will prove instructive immediately to the site publishers. If they rise above and then return to a baseline of traffic, the offer probably performed as it should have.

When a website’s traffic lives and dies on the offer, with no loyalty, it means someone needs to take a closer look at the business and its visitors beyond that marketing effort. Are they abandoning shopping carts at the shipping price screen? Do they arrive at a landing page of product information, and then exit?

The reactions may indicate something the business can change for the long-term good of the website. With all things being equal, customers who only stop by and convert when the price is right are telling the site publisher what they think of the everyday business.