Rest, relaxation & runaway conversionsHow we increased website booking rates by 50%

Attacat Services Used: Search Engine Optimisation, Conversion Rate Optimisation

Cottages and Castles are one of the Scotland’s leading holiday cottage providers with hundreds of beautiful and grand properties available to choose from online. Our conversion rate optimisation (CRO) work produced some pretty impressive results (even if we do say so ourselves):

How we did it…

Developing a unique value proposition (UVP)

A lack of a strong UVP or benefit is a very common conversion roadblock. Cottages and Castles were no exception and there was nothing visibly differentiating their offering over their competitors’.

We spent a lot of time speaking to company staff, trying to understand the Cottages and Castles culture and philosophy so that we could formulate some tasty UVPs together. What we came up with were three unique, credible and appealing statements to motivate users to start their property search on our page. Check it out:

• Widest range of hand-picked properties – Choose from luxury  5* Scottish castles to affordable country cottages for a truly memorable experience
• Individually inspected – Around 700 properties are individually inspected to ensure they always meet your expectations
• Regional representatives – Our team are based throughout Scotland and are able to provide you with the back-up and local knowledge you need during your stay

Creation of the ‘cottage finder’ (…I wonder what that does)

User testing sessions and analysis of rivers of website navigation data highlighted that the major problem in the user experience was the initial property search. The search function that would allow users to narrow their choices and whittle down their list was not being noticed.

Users were clicking on a property listing without knowing if this had the features or facilities that they wanted.

Our first hypothesis solely focused on developing an easy and intuitive solution that enabled our users to find the list of cottages they preferred within two or three clicks at most:

The quantified results

Every decision in the Attacat CRO process is based on being able to prove any uplifts with real numbers. The combination of both changes gained an increase of 50% in bookings. That sound? That’s the Cottages and Castles sales team being run off their feet.

What next?

If you are the decision maker at your company think about asking for a raise because you’re about to become ‘unfireable’.