Airbnb Stats: Valuable or Worthless?

Question

Hey, I find the Airbnb stats to be immensely confusing. I think they used to be more helpful in the past and they made some changes and now they're not so valuable.

I see weird and different values for my Airbnb stats depending on if I'm using my laptop or phone to view them. And there’s also weird menus and sub menus that you have to click through to view different stats. And the menus and sub menus and configuration options to view the stats are confusing and different on laptop or phone 🙈

Is anyone getting any benefit from the Airbnb stats???

One thing I'm trying to do is to test different cover photos to see which ones draw a greater % of click-thrus (which seems like a reasonable thing to test).

I'd like to be able to view the Airbnb stats to see, for each cover photo I test, things like what % of people click through on it. But I can’t make heads or tails of these Airbnb stats. You would think this would be one of the most obvious helpful stats that Airbnb can provide, but I’m struggling with it.

Anyone else having better luck with the Airbnb stats?

JD Martin · Answer

I've had no luck with their stats or with any of the stuff VRBO posts up there. As best as I can tell on both sites, the algorithm looks something like this:

Cheapest price>least restrictions (cancellation, # of days minimum, etc)>Premier/Super host>Review Scores>Most discounts (weekly, last minute, etc)>Regular revisions

Ryan Moyer · Answer

The numbers don't make sense to me, based on their descriptions.

The most dubious is "First page search impression rate"

Airbnb defines it as the percentage of time your listing shows up in the top 10 results when a guest searches for a location/date.

I have 30 listings in a market with 20,000+ homes available, and they all have a "First page search impression rate" of 40-60%.  Nevermind the unlikelihood that any ONE of them is appearing in the top 10 that often (especially at the rate we're getting bookings, I know we're not showing up on the 1st page nearly that often), it's statistically impossible for 30 listings to show up in the top ten 50% of the time even if our 30 listings were the only ones in the entire market, instead of there being 20,000 other listings.

It makes no sense.  Some of these listings are dead on Airbnb, way down on page 17 on Rankbreeze etc (others doing much better).  Airbnb basically lists that metric as 40%+ for every single Airbnb property even though statistically it's only possible for most properties to show up in the top 10 well under 1% of the time.

How the hell can 20,000 properties in a single market all show up in the top ten 40% of the time?

Andrew Steffens · Answer

I gave up on their more "advanced" analytics a while ago unfortunately.  I had an employees logged in to our account same time as me and we had different stats.  Now, I typically only use them to skim stats on reviews and the more basic items.  Even then, it is glitchy at times.

Collin Hays · Answer

Pretty much worthless.

Michael Baum · Answer

I am in the same boat. Stats are all over the place.

I will say that I think ours are more accurate due to the limited number of STRs in our area. It is easier to parse it out, but still, not as valuable as I would like.

Airbnb Stats: Valuable or Worthless?

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