SkyGlue proves tracking pre-defined element in-effective.

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 holidaymakers. Known for their TV marketing and market innovations they are committed to offering exceptional results for advertisers and the safest site for holidaymakers.

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 accomodation 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 holidaymakers 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 holidaymakers and to continue to offer the best value proposition to advertisers.

Overview

At pureholidayhomes.com we’re interested in understanding user behaviour so that we can make improvements to the experience of using our site, and this often has meant planning ways to measure activity in keys area’s we’re interested in improving. Usually this involves forward planning and development to track the aspects we define, an approach which is floored by a bias 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, but also the things we have not thought of tracking, the things we thought didn’t matter.

In 2012 pureholidayhomes.com started using SkyGlue , 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 see summary data of what gets the most interaction. Since SkyGlue data goes directly into Google Analytics, we can see observe trends or filter for subsets of users, so 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 an continuous process since all new changes are tracked, and we have an on-going record in Google Analytics.

We also have 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 ever was before SkyGlue, and we can invest effort in improving the parts of the site which are most used.

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 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 which the greatest drop-out occurred. This increased the form conversion rate, but also doubled the number of people starting the form.

Spotting helpful features

Particularly in search areas of the site we offer various options for people to filter results. Skyglue allows us to measure the usage of every element of the page, but also 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 lead to better conversion rate for users on our site.