NB: This is an article from All About Airbnb
Airbnb has recently launched a new set of HTML widgets and badges to help hosts promote themselves and obtain more visibility outside of the Airbnb platform.
However, the social travel accommodation company is not just to giving out nice badges to its users, but is also using the same SEO techniques adopted in the past by many other websites to collect highly relevant links at scale.
In this article will go through Airbnb’s past approaches to widgets, the added value for Airbnb, the SEO benefits and the risks the company faces introducing this new feature.
Some might remember…
Those that have been on Airbnb for some time might remember that in the past the company used to offer – in connection with its affiliate program – a set of widgets that people could embed on their website to promote Airbnb.
A widget is a small snippet of code provided that can be installed within any HTML-based web page. It can display static text and images, but it can also show “live” information – such as the latest reviews – without the site owner ever having to make changes to the code.
The goal of these widgets was to leverage the existing user base to drive more traffic to the Airbnb’s website and increase the initial growth, compensating the effort of its users with a revenue sharing deal.
Despite having pulled quite a few successful growth hacks (such as the one that cleverly allowed to organically take over Craigslist), Airbnb has never really managed to get the affiliate program to properly work at scale in the same way as other acquisition channels.
After a few years without receiving much love, the Airbnb affiliate program got discontinued, and with it, also access to the HTML widgets got removed (even if live traces can still be found on the Airbnb website).
New growth opportunity with a different focus
The affiliate Airbnb widgets were initially available to all the users, but were not actively promoted and easily findable on the website.
In 2015 however, Airbnb started focusing again on the topic, approaching it from a different angle.
Instead of trying to get its users to embed content on their sites by offering a direct monetization via the affiliate program, this time Airbnb opted for a potentially more rewarding way to engage with its community.
Having grown as a company and as a brand, Airbnb is often the main way hosts get bookings, even when they already have their own website.
Conscious of this fact, Airbnb worked together with Embed.ly to roll out a first version of a new “embed listing” functionality accessible from the listing page.
This functionality was added to the site with the intent to induce users (and in particular hosts) to embed Airbnb listings on other websites to showcase specific properties and drive traffic to them.
This was presented to hosts as an additional opportunity to promote their Airbnb listing and, eventually, receive more reservations.
Beyond the Minimum Viable Product
Getting Embed.ly to create custom embeddable cards, meant that Airbnb had to spend little tech resources to implement and launch the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that could generate valuable learnings.
Having tested the new feature for a few months and having monitored the impact on numbers, Airbnb decided to proceed with the in-house development of the functionality in order to keep more control over it and to remove the (likely constantly increasing) need topay for an external service.
At the end of 2015, Airbnb moved away from using Embed.ly and launched its own embedding functionality, further expanding the use cases offering other features based on the same technology.
Badges as a sign of belonging?
Compared to the past, when the company tried to get people to send traffic from their websites offering a monetary incentive, Airbnb is now trying to leverage the high engagement, the sense of belonging and the willingness to share that are naturally existing within its community to achieve a similar, but more powerful outcome.
In addition to the embed listing widget, Airbnb released a set of badges that users can include in their website to show to the rest of the online world that their are part of the Airbnb community.
Read rest of the article at: All About Airbnb
