Hotel Finder Date Selector Test

It looks like the team working on Hotel Finder has another new test out, this time focusing on the date selector. Here is the original experience:

Screen Shot 2014-03-16 at 8.55.51 PM …and the experimental experience:
Screen Shot 2014-03-16 at 8.56.12 PMIn both experiences the date selector is triggered in order to guide a user toward entering their travel or stay dates. In the experiment, the calendar is automatically launched in a lightbox, drawing even more attention to that step in the process.

The date selector can be dismissed by clicking the “x” in the top right of the lightbox or by pressing the escape key. If a user does not select a date by, the calendar will default to a one night stay two weeks from the current date.

This experiment was triggered by searching for “hotels in dallas” in Chrome and then clicking in through the commercial unit.

Running Hotel Price Ads? Watch this space…

Advertisers should pay attention to changes like this and consider the following:

  1. Impact to Average Cost Per Click
    Hotel Price Ad (HPA) costs are partially determined by the number of nights that a user is searching for. We’ve observed that clicks from Hotel Price Ads tend to index higher for one night stays than clicks from other metasearch properties. If this is because users are not selecting accurate dates, a more guided selection may reduce the number of one stay clicks coming through, and impact the average CPC.
  2. Impact to “hotelfinder” Conversion Rate
    A better date selector and guided date selection process could be a significant win for advertisers. If some percentage of Hotel Finder users has been skipping over date selection, those users wouldn’t always be seeing accurate availability and/or pricing information. A user that goes through this process should be better qualified, better informed, and more likely to convert.

Next Steps

If you’re running HPAs today, you might want to pay attention to these metrics in the coming weeks, specifically for the hotelfinder Search Type. It is unlikely that the traffic running through this experiment is going to be significant enough to cause a big shift one way or another, but it never hurts to be proactive.

To get a better idea of what users are doing when they come to your site, it may be worth comparing calendar interactions and events in “HPA” and “other metasearch” segments using the reporting available from your analytics platform.

 

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