All that said I would like to keep my budget on advertising down to about £400 per year which I think allows me one more listing ... thus the dilemma stated above. How much do others budget??
If you are spending 5% of your turnover or less on marketing, you are laughing. I spend about 4.5% and I am laughing, look:
400£ for holiday rentals.com that is for 2 houses so approx 525Euros per house.
I think for this next year I'm going to be looking at the same for 2 houses but for 1 if you follow me....I'm hedging bets and advertising else where....possibly back to basics and into newspapers etc again! So my budget will probably be increasing quite dramatically...
I spend about 6% of turnover on advertising in total, but this is across a large number of sites, none of them over £250 for the 3 properties, and all of which have brought in some business, however, none of which I can say have brought in the majority, unfortunately.
I also have a problem in that I always ask people how they found us on the internet, search words used, sites visited, but I'm not sure that the responses are always accurate. If I look at the results, at least 50% come directly from my website, but I'm sure some people got there from other smaller sites which have link to my site. They always remember the big advertising sites, such as Chez Nous and FC, or those sites xhere there is no link, e.g. HR, but I'm sure some of the smaller site references are missed.
Our marketing costs a little less than 5% of our turnover. So here's me:
I definitely get the most bang for my buck from the website, but FC, H-R and VRBO have all been roughly equally good to me. Perfect Places just sent a very serious inquiry my way, which is probably only its second. I do wish they'd let us link to our own websites, though.
I would be very upset if any one site was demanding almost £400 -- that's the vast majority of the entire budget!
Brooke,
I like to be able to link to the website directly as well, the only small advantage in this NOT being allowed is that you know exactly which advertising source the enquiry comes from. When there is a link to the website a lot of people then use my enquiry form and immediately forget where they initially saw the property advertised, so its harder to keep track of the effectiveness of the advertising sites. Or maybe there is a more effective way to track booking sources rather than just asking clients, who often don't remember??
Well, you can check out the click-throughs to your site in your webstats, but with just that you don't know how many people inquire via a click-through, just how many people actually clicked. So it does rely on the client in the end.
I really believe that a personal website is what helps a rental property stand out above the rest of the competition, and that my inquiry rate is higher for people who visit the site than for people who just view a listing site ad for us. So I'd be willing to give up a little certainty in booking origins if it means more inquiries!
Perfect Places do allow you to link to your own website. they even monitor clicks out to it. I think its a recent change so it may pay to go back and have a look at linking your site. The other good thing about this site is that they seem to have a very broad audience and pull in peopel from around the world.
You're right, they do offer a website link -- but only if you're a paid customer, and I'm still on a free trial. We aren't allowed a web link.
I understand why they do that and I'd probably do the same thing, but I think it may backfire on them, as I'm pretty sure that a listing site alone isn't as effective as a listing site linked to a personal site. I have only gotten two inquiries from Perfect Places, both of which I believe were real, but at least one of which did not convert (the other was only a couple of days ago). Although I do like their layout and integration with rentors.org, money talks. Such a low level of inquiries means I'll do the same thing I did with holidaylets.net. I like the site and everything, but I won't sign up if it isn't bringing me business.
One thing I do like about them is that they extended my free trial because they saw that I hadn't gotten enough inquiries. That's a smart move. Definitely kicks them up a notch in my eyes, and it makes it more likely that I'll get more inquiries during that time.