Pure Holiday Homes Case Study

SkyGlue proves tracking pre-defined elements to be ineffective.

Company Bio

Pureholidayhomes.com was launched in January 2010 and has experienced rapid growth, now representing in excess of 27,000 holiday homes and millions of vacationers. Known for their TV marketing and market innovations, they are committed to offering exceptional results for advertisers and the safest site for vacationers.

In December 2011, pureholidayhomes.com was acquired by the @Leisure group, The @Leisure Group is one of the largest players in the European online market for accommodation rentals. @Leisure is the market leader in both the Benelux and the German online travel markets. @Leisure offers in excess of 300,000 holiday properties in more than 30 countries. More than 1.3 million vacationers from over 50 different countries book their holiday every year with @Leisure.

Integrating into the @Leisure group allows pureholidayhomes.com to continue its dynamic growth, access to millions of additional vacationers and to continue to offer the best value proposition to advertisers.

Overview

At pureholidayhomes.com, we’re interested in understanding user behavior so that we can make improvements to the experience of using our site, and this has often meant planning ways to measure activity in keys areas we’re interested in improving. This usually involves forward planning and development to track the aspects we define, an approach that is biased to only measuring the things one might expect users to do, or the things that may be of interest from time to time. But adding SkyGlue to the site has changed this.

SkyGlue logs most clicks a user makes, whether elements are important or not, which means the things we want get tracked, as well as things we have not thought of tracking, the things we thought didn’t matter.

Pureholidayhomes.com started using SkyGlue in 2015 and used the data to study how users engaged with our search options. Skyglue allows us to follow the click-path of a single user, or to see summary data of what gets the most interaction. Since SkyGlue data goes directly into Google Analytics, we can observe trends or filter for subsets of users. For example, we can see what search options most commonly lead to a conversion, and alternatively, which have no impact or even a negative effect. This allowed us to improve the layout of our search page so that users are more likely to interact with search options that will yield the best results. This is a continuous process since all new changes are tracked and we have an on-going record in Google Analytics.

We have also discovered that the most commonly interacted with elements on the site weren’t what we had expected. They were not parts we might have considered tracking or improving, so our understanding of how users spend their time on our site is far greater now than it was before SkyGlue and we can invest effort into improving the most-used parts of the site.

SkyGlue has given us a greater understanding of our users and greater ability to measure usability across the site.

Use of forms

Forms to capture leads are important, and we make efforts to increase the sign-up rate using split testing as well as trial and error. One thing SkyGlue allowed us to do was work out the drop-out rate over a single form stage, since we could report on exactly how many visitors engaged with each field. With this insight, we split the form at the point where the greatest drop-out occurred. This increased the form conversion rate, but also doubled the number of people starting the form.

Spotting helpful features

We offer various options for people to filter results, particularly in search areas of the site. SkyGlue allows us to measure the usage of every element of the page and create advanced segments to view users by which search filters they used. This enabled us to see which filters helped users find useful results, and which filters did not help. As a result, we re-ordered the search filters on our site — more than doubling the usage of ‘helpful’ filters – which led to a better conversion rate for users on our site.