VACASA

Search Results Page Unit Card Highlight

The goal was to increase unit page level ad conversion by 10%, by highlighting specific units on Vacasa’s search results pages.

Goals / Empathize

When a guest navigates to Vacasa.com from a referring source (Google Vacation Rental, Ads, Email, Partner Sites, etc.) the project goal was to highlight the rental unit the customer selected or saw on the referring source, while also displaying other inventory to provide more a larger variety of related options.

The project scope was to follow a pattern similar to a competitor, who sent guests to a SRP with a highlighted unit card. However, this was an anomaly on Google Vacation Rentals. Most companies sent guests directly to a unit specific page.

Testing

Before starting, I wanted to build a test to get a better understanding of both potential experiences and see how people reacted to each path. I used the live Google Vacation Rentals page since both directions I needed for testing were available there. The test resulted in revealing several issues with Google’s search itself, along with the overall high cost of using San Francisco as the target locale, I saw several non-test related issues.

With this knowledge, I went back and created a controlled Sketch prototype test to correct the issues from the live test and ran the test once again on usertesing.com.

Test Results

The test showed that people had a more positive reaction going directly to the unit page, than the desired pattern of landing on a SRP with highlighted unit card.

I presented this information to the team leads, along with a reel of potential Google Vacation Rentals issues. With this information – the decision by the project lead was to still move the project forward focused on a using a Highlighted Unit Card on the SRP and see how it performed in A/B testing after launch.

Ideate

Since the ask was to add a card, but not update the current Unit Cards, I felt like it was important to spend some time ideating what future Unit Cards could like. This allowed me to walk back from the potential new direction and use that to influence the cards so they would work now, as well as with future design updates.

I felt that wider, one column Unit Cards made the most sense going forward and preceded with this direction for my designs.

I then began exploring design options that incorporated a two column Highlighted Unit Card. We also had feedback that guests had a low brand recognition of Vacasa. Since people seeing this cards would be coming from Google, ads, or other means where this SRP would be their first introduction to our brand – I also explored brand cues to introduce Vacasa as a trusted partner without leaving the buy flow.

Design

With feedback from the engineering team and stakeholders, I moved forward building out the designs in Sketch and InVision, for both mobile and desktop. Through a collaborative effort, we worked through MVP limitations, additional design variations, and then I handed off detailed documentation and specs to our development team.

Summary

The most recent results were part of an A/B test run by our digital team. The featured unit on the SRP variant was seeing more unique pageviews, SRP pageviews, and searches on the SRP. Most significant results to-date has been a 12% decrease in guest bounce rate from targeted sources and emails.