Verified Case Studies Variable
As with all new variables, verified case studies will start out as having a nominal impact on the HT Score in their first year at roll out and will increase in importance over time to ensure that all vendors have time to prepare for the update.
How Do Case Studies Help Buyers?
Verified case studies are incredibly important towards HTR's mission of delivering an unmatched hotel technology search and selection experience for hoteliers around the world. It's also the first step towards increasing benefits based selling throughout the site to help hoteliers visualize and imagine the possibilities of leveraging digital products by seeing real examples of their peers who are using them and the outcomes they are achieving instilling urgency, trust and FOMO to drive adoption of tech in the global hotel industry.
Can Case Studies Determine the Leader in a Category?
While case studies are a nominal part of the overall HT Score (<3%), they can be the determining factor in a close race where two companies have maxed out most other variables similar to how this can happen with Google's Search Algorithm. Here is an example of how this can happen:
Example Scenario and Analogy of Google Page Speed Algorithm Update
- Imagine that 2x websites with amazing and mostly similar domain authority each have an excellent blog post about 'gardening tulips'
- Imagine blog post A consistently ranks ahead of blog post B but has really poor page speed and user experience metrics.
- When Google rolls out the user experience update, despite ranking better across other metrics, post B could move into the lead.
If you notice your rank change in a category where you have close competitors in the rankings this can be easily resolved by just making sure that you at least have some verified case studies published for buyers.
