"They spend a thousand dollars on ads, don't get a booking, and go: I just threw a thousand dollars down the drain."
— Conrad, revenue management consultant
He wasn't describing one operator. He was describing a pattern he sees constantly. Someone invests in marketing, gets no clear return, and concludes that the marketing didn't work.
But that's not usually what happened. The marketing probably did its job. It drove traffic. People clicked. People landed on the page. And then something happened between the click and the bounce that nobody tracked.
The money didn't go down the drain. It went into a gap that nobody is measuring.
The space between click and booking
Here's what a typical ad journey looks like for a vacation rental. Someone sees the ad. They click. They land on the listing or the direct booking site. And then they leave.
In the operator's mind, that's a failure. The ad didn't convert. Thousand dollars wasted.
But the click itself cost money. $8, $12, sometimes $20 per click depending on the market. That visitor wasn't free. And when they leave without booking, that cost is gone. Multiply that by fifty visitors, a hundred visitors, and the drain becomes real.
The operator doesn't know what killed the conversion. So they can't fix it. And the next thousand dollars of ad spend hits the same wall.
The ad gets blamed for a problem that happened downstream. But blaming the ad doesn't recover the money. And it doesn't stop the next click from costing another $12 and bouncing for the same unfixed reason.
What Conrad calls breadcrumbs
Conrad has a word for the small actions that happen before a booking. He calls them breadcrumbs. The date search. The availability check. The photo scroll. The pricing page view. Each one is a signal. Each one tells you something about intent.
A visitor who checks three different date ranges is a different signal than a visitor who bounces after two seconds. A visitor who makes it to the payment page and drops off is a wildly different signal than one who never clicked "Book Now."
But in most operators' analytics, both of those visitors look the same. They're both "sessions." They both count as "traffic." Neither of them booked. So they both get filed under "didn't convert."
The diagnosis matters. Where someone dropped off tells you what to fix.
The attribution problem nobody talks about
There's another layer to this. Even when an ad does lead to a booking, operators often can't prove it. The guest might have seen the ad on Tuesday, browsed the listing on Wednesday through Google, and booked on Friday through a direct link they saved. In the operator's analytics, that booking came from "direct." The ad gets zero credit.
So the operator looks at the ad spend, sees no bookings attributed to it, and kills the campaign. Meanwhile the campaign was actually working. They just couldn't see it.
"Some of my competitors will just spend $1,000 a month, $2,000 a month for a small business, and just do that every month, and never change it, never really look at it."
— Conrad
Some are overspending on channels that don't convert. Others are killing campaigns that were silently driving bookings they attributed elsewhere. Both problems come from the same root cause: no visibility into what happens after the click.
The conversion layer that doesn't exist yet
The infrastructure to track this full journey exists. Ad to search, search to page view, page view to booking. Hotels have used it for years. The vacation rental industry hasn't built it yet.
Most operators are looking at two numbers. How much they spent and how many bookings they got. Everything in between is invisible. And that gap is where the money drains.
Every visitor who bounces is a sunk cost. Every click that doesn't convert is money spent with no return. And when the same problem kills ten conversions, twenty, fifty, the operator is paying for the same failure over and over without knowing what they're paying for.
The thousand dollars wasn't thrown down the drain. It was spent acquiring visitors who then encountered friction that nobody measured, on a journey that nobody tracked, with drop-off points that nobody analyzed.
The money did its job. The rest of the system didn't. And until the system gets fixed, the next thousand dollars will drain the same way.