TK Site rebuild: Market Pages
“Market” pages were landing pages representing the major destinations / cities / locations that TurnKey offered vacation rentals in. These were the site’s primary sources of traffic and reservations, primarily through paid and organic search. Most users start off their search for a vacation rental by using destination-specific search terms like “Palm Springs vacation rentals” and “Vacation rentals Lake Tahoe.”
Given their importance as a major entryway to the site, we knew that we needed to invest in optimizing these landing pages for UX, SEO, and page speed.
Old Market Landing Pages
Original TK site market page, pre-rebuild, via Wayback Machine
We identified a number of UX issues to correct on this page, but I will focus on the biggest and most impactful: Market landing pages as a gateway to search.
More searches = more reservations
We knew that search needed to be the primary CTA on these landing pages — that the goal of the page was to get a user to enter their dates and other requirements so that they would see only homes that were relevant to their vacation plans. Using Google Analytics data, we saw that users who landed on these pages and conducted a search were 5x more likely to make a booking than users who did not.
However, using Hotjar browser recording sessions and heatmaps combined with Google Analytics, we saw that many users were skipping past the search functionality on the old market landing page. Instead, they’d scroll down the page and click on the rental listings under the hero image. There, user recordings showed us that the user would go to enter their dates on the calendar, only to find that the home wasn’t available on those dates. Some users would go back to the Market page, only to click on the next listings that caught their attention — again often finding that the rental was not available on their dates. Others would simply bounce off the site. Few went back to conduct a real search.
Based on this user data, we formed the following hypothesis:
The search panel on the Market page is overcomplicated (too many initial fields), poorly-located in the sidebar, and the orange button blends in with the orange hero banner, making it easy to miss. Meanwhile, the listings we show above the fold grab users’ attention, and cause them to click in without entering their dates, decreasing conversion rate.
By simplifying search and making it the most visually-salient item on the page, we can increase the number of searches and thus improve conversion rate.
New Market Page Search Bar
We first gathered data to support our hypothesis by using VWO to test different search bar treatments on the old market page, finding that centering the search at the top of the page and moving rental listings below-the-fold increased the percent of users who ran a search and the overall conversion rate.
With that established, we redesigned our new Market pages to incorporate the following:
1) A more visually-impactful search bar: the new search bar would be front and center on the page, stretching horizontally across the full screen. The new search button would use a unique, eye-catching color (teal). The fields would be simplified to the minimum required for an initial search (location, dates, guest count).
2) Easy to find: the search bar would be easy for users to find, following them as they scroll through the page, sticking to the top of their browser window.
3) Move rentals below the fold: showing rentals above-the-fold right off the bat was too great a temptation for some users, distracting from search. Instead, we should move rentals further down the page, encouraging users to run a search with dates before browsing through our homes.
After releasing our new Market page, we found that the hypothesis was indeed correct and that more users were searching and converting:
