The direct links feature in Vacation Rentals adds a direct website link to your vacation rental placesheets, as well as additional messaging and fallbacks when a price isn't available. Users clicking the direct link will be sent to your website, providing additional flexibility when your listing is not available for the user’s desired itinerary.
For Structured Data Markup, Google will automatically create a direct link from the crawled URL. Google will also append the URL parameters utm_source=google and utm_medium=vacation_rentals.
For an XML list feed, in order to enable direct linking for your vacation rental, you will need to include a website URL for the property when creating your listing feed. Please refer to our Hotel List XML Reference for further guidance and examples on how to implement your website. Here is an example of a listings file with the website link:
<listings >
<listing>
<content>
<attributes>
<website>https://hotel.example.com/hotels/123456</website>
...
</attributes>
...
</content>
</listing>
...
</listings>
Best practices
- Verify that your website URLs are valid and up-to-date, as they can be expected to generate significant traffic.
- Add a tracking variable to each URL in your listing feed. Clicks on direct links won’t be reported in any ad campaigns, so this will help you identify and attribute the source of traffic.