Site Teardown - Analyzing Airbnb's Marketing Strategy Using Similarweb

In this teardown, we are analyzing Airbnb’s marketing activity in the first quarter of 2015 in the US market.

Finding keywords competitors

Feature Location: Website Analysis > Competitors > Keyword Competitors

We start by finding the sites that are competing with Airbnb over the same keywords. We see Flipkey.com and Homeaway.com at the top of the list when filtering the Accommodation and Hotel category. We run a side-by-side comparison of these two sites with Airbnb, and find out which keywords they’re competing over.

Understanding Search traffic share

Feature Location: Website Analysis > Traffic Sources > Search

The term ‘Vacation Rental’ is an important non-branded keyword that sends traffic to all three sites. Airbnb is doing well against these competitors with a search traffic share of 49.49%. However, when we exclude branded keywords Airbnb’s traffic share drops to only 14.9%. Airbnb gets a lot of traffic thanks to its well-known brand, but its smaller competitors are winning when it comes to generic keywords. By going over this list of keywords and targeting them with SEO and PPC, Airbnb has the potential to more than double their search traffic. They can download the list of keywords to Excel for an in-depth look at which keywords to target.

Understanding Social traffic share and finding new opportunities

Feature Location: Website Analysis > Traffic Sources > Social

When looking at Social referrals, Airbnb does well on Twitter. 5.93% of its social media traffic comes from Twitter compared to 1.52% for HomeAway and 2.65% for Flipkey. However, Pinterest brings Airbnb only 0.8%, next to 5.18% for Flipkey and 7.81% for HomeAway! Based on the traffic Airbnb’s competitors are getting from Pinterest, It might be worth investing more resources into it.

Understanding Referring traffic share

Feature Location: Website Analysis > Traffic Sources > Referrals

When analyzing Airbnb’s referring sites, we find Padmapper.com, which brings in 15.94% of all Airbnb referring traffic. That’s 8 point 767 million desktop visits just in Q1 of 2015. Padmapper is a map based real estate and rental search platform, with a checkbox for Airbnb listings. This is an amazing traffic source, one that Airbnb should expand with other sites similar to Padmapper, such as some of the sites on this list.