Heads In Beds Show - Barry Diller at Expedia VERSUS Google: Vrbo Spends $300m On Google Ads Without ROI?

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

In this episode Conrad and Paul break down Barry (Expedia CEO) vs Google: The Vrbo Episode where Barry Diller of Expedia exposes the $300m in ad spend for Vrbo that did not appear to drive the same "profits" that Vrbo was used to in the past.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingTechEmails Tweet (Barry's Email)🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. Hey there Paul, how's it going? Just fantastic Conrad. We are opening the week here on a high note, I think. I'm personally opening the week on a high note.

We've got a five-game winning streak for the Vikings, a seven-game winning streak for the Timberwolves, six-game winning streak. One of them like that. But I'm feeling pretty good on most things, sports right now in Minnesota. That doesn't happen a lot, so I really have. You've had a history of really having some quality programs there that you've gotten to watch. So yeah, this is, it's, I'm feeling good right now. It's, this is the time of year where I'm usually in the doldrums a little bit. I'm feeling modestly good here. So the weather is crisper,

but the winds are brighter. Here's the other thing we do have a little bit. It's, it's 47 right now at 1030. It's not terrible. It's supposed to be 60 today. It's the other thing. We do have a little bit. It's 47 right now at 1030. It's not terrible. It's supposed to be 60 today. It's supposed to be 60 this week. He weighs up there. That's exactly. I joked, I think last week, putting up Christmas lights a little early just to make sure that you're getting ahead of that because the last thing you want to do is sit out after on Black Friday or the 1st of December, whatever that is, and you're freezing trying to put up your Christmas lights. So it is, I've been working ahead a little bit, but I don't know, I guess we'll see.

It's beach weather for now. I'm not down in Myrtle Beach, but I feel like I'm closer than I have been usually. Honestly, it was a horrible weekend here from a weather perspective. Friday was nice and then Saturday, Sunday, it just rained both days, which is not common that we get pretty much 48 hours of rain in terrible weather. So yeah, that's not ideal. But it's it's all good.

Yeah, some of those wins on the basketball side, I think came at my team's expense. And as far as watching football right now, tuned in bright and early to hop on and watch the Germany game. And what a shame, by the way, because there were supposedly all these German Patriots fans, because they would frequently show the Patriots during the Brady era. In Germany, they said they only show a few games per week and that one frequently made the cut. And so all these guys got their bratwursts and their beer and they're out there drinking and they had to go watch that.

That doesn't lose the Patriots a lot of fans here in Germany. I don't even know how to say I'm sorry in German, but I feel like I should learn how and say that to those poor German fans that had to go watch that. Just brutal. Yeah. I sent that screenshot yesterday of, oh, about 12 consecutive drives that just didn't seem like they were that compelling.

Puns, puns, puns. Yeah. And before you sent that text message to me as well, there was, there hadn't been any turnovers to be fair. So I was going to send that back, but I didn't want to send it back because I'm like, oh, the second I send that, bam, it's going to go to the other guy. And then of course, five minutes later, maybe 10 minutes later, bam, it goes to the other guy, maybe a little bit after that on a potential game winner.

So yeah, it's hard. It's hard to build excellence. You know what I mean? When everyone else is trying to, right? And that's the one thing that sports exposes that actually is not always exposed in business to bring it back to vacation rentals. Sometimes you're not really competing against your competition as much as you think you are.

It's more like you're competing with the guests. Can you provide the guests a good experience? Can you provide your client a good experience? And sure, maybe the grass is greener on the other side. Maybe it's more like you're competing with the guests can you provide the guests a good experience can you provide your client a good experience and sure maybe the grass is greener on the other side maybe it's not though and if you do a good job like you're not necessarily measured head-to-head against them as often as people think i think in their mind they think it more than it actually is true in my opinion sports is very different sports is head-to-head you against me my team against your team and when you're not good enough you get exposed pretty quickly like the other guys are trying to so to speak the colts don't want to lose the saints don't want to lose

they want to win and it makes the games competitive and interesting. And that's what makes them fun to watch. You know what else is fun to watch? Grab some popcorn because Google is in a trial right now, an antitrust trial. I think you've been following it a little bit more closely than I have. So you may have some more nuance here. But I saw this email the other day, I follow this account called internal tech emails. It's a Twitter account. I'll link it in the show notes for folks to check it out. Even if you don't have Twitter. Yeah, it's a hilariously engaging account in my mind, because what they frequently show is from these audit documents, they show actual emails that an executive at a tech company might write. So it's also interesting to see behind the curtain

a little bit of how does Barry Diller, in this case, who's a billionaire, how does he write emails? And so we won't read the whole email. that'll be a little bit dry and boring. But I thought I'd read page two of the email. So to get back up a little bit, here's the context. Barry Diller sent an email Thursday, December 12 to 2019. So that'll have been what three years ago, the subject of the email was Google slash AIC slash Expedia to Philip Schindler, who's the senior exec, I believe at Google. And the first part of the email basically says, I appreciate you trying to help us here at Expedia during these tough times. And this was actually before the tough times I would argue actually are happening. This is pre-COVID, right? December 2019. I guess COVID was a thing in China, but it wasn't really a thing in the States yet. So yeah, so it's basically

pre-COVID. And he said that Expedia's business was having some difficulties. And he said, it's funny that you claim to be wanting to help us right now, because I think it's your fault, Google's fault, that Expedia is not in a great position right now. So that's an interesting claim to make to a Google executive. So this was the snippet that really caught my attention. I think this is the thing worth discussing and how it all ties back to this podcast. I'll quote Barry directly. First, directly below is a chart showing the payments from one of our subsidiaries, Verbo Travel, also sidebar here really quickly. Interesting that Verbo, I looked it up, rebranded in March of that year from Vrbo, all caps to, or sorry, V-R-B-O, all caps to Vrbo. And yet the CEO of the company does not properly capitalize. It should be capital

V lowercase R-B-O and it should be Vrbo, not V-R-B-O. I digress. Back to the email. Has made to Google from 2015 to 2019, five years, Verbo has made has received the same amount of visits 500 million from Google, the visits never much changing from year to year, yet the money that Verbo has paid Google has doubled every year. So they spent $21 million in 2015. In 2019, they spent $300 million on Google ads, one would assume mostly search ads, although he doesn't display that in the actual email. Incredible, no seems to me pretty devastating example of Google essentially squeezing out all the profits from a company that has spent a huge amount to organize information and create an efficient marketplace on vacation properties on behalf for the benefit

of consumers, end quote. So basically, Barry's arguing here, perhaps if you're a pro Expedia person, you would say Vrbo is trying to provide service in the marketplace. They need traffic to connect the host or the property manager, our clients that we deal with, the marketplace. They need traffic to connect the host or the property manager, our clients that we deal with, the traveler. They obviously pay for a lot of traffic from Google to make those connections a reality. And Barry's argument is that I spent a lot more money, but I'm not getting more value for my money. I'm spending more money in traffic, but that traffic isn't necessarily getting cheaper or it's not even a reasonable level of 5% a year inflation or something like that. It's way in the sidebands there. And then he goes into some more detail in the email and why he's unhappy. I'll

quote one more bit from it and then we can dive into it. Philip, I'm the senior executive of companies that collectively spend over $6.5 billion a year in media, the majority going to Google. I don't want special treatment. I believe in competing, but it seems I'm in a challenging position because of Google. And then there's more in the follow-up emails that you can follow in here. So what was your reaction? I sent this to you this morning and I'm assuming a challenging position because of Google. And then there's more in the follow-up emails that you can follow in here. So what was your reaction? I sent this to you this morning and I'm assuming you get to poke around and read the text. It's pretty interesting email, isn't it? It's a great email.

So this is something where, now Philip Schindler is someone where if you listen to the Google marketing live events, this was the keynote. This is the guy, he's the director of search, whatever it is. It's not Jerry Dipler. I think he's Google ads guy, but this is the Google search guy. This is, I'm not, this is not, he's always seemed a little salesy, maybe a bit slimy. That's something that's, I don't know. I think you just get into that persona of, you're just going to be this guy who just is the face of Google. So there's a couple parts that really stand out.

I think the numbers are wild. It's just, it is. To be able to see it laid out that clearly, we've had this, literally the same amount of traffic. I'm sure there's a little wiggle room in there, but 500 million and you're paying that much more. And again, the fact that he's calling out the company that has spent a huge amount to organize information and create an efficient marketplace. You don't think that they were working closely with that is phrased in a way that it's right out of Google. Some of the other documents we're seeing of this is how you're supposed to create a marketplace to benefit.

They've done all the right things. And I think that it's very interesting that they know what's supposed to be happening when they make these changes and they're not happy. Like it's very interesting. I think one of the other first parts on the first page, Google's policy of constantly shrinking free search in favor of their own ad products and other disintermediating policies is harsh, hurtful to those who depend on a fair marketplace. That's the thing. Like when you read further down the thread, when they asked Sundar about it, the CEO of

Google, he said they're actually frustrated by the, what is it, the experiences? It's the inclusion of like travel blocks and the google search results right so remember expedia is much bigger than just our vacation rental world although we are impacted by it because now there's these vacation rental blocks that show up from google which expedia doesn't really benefit from directly i would argue maybe indirectly so if you do a search in the hotel space which we have some clients in the hotel space as well do a search for myrtle beach hotels we actually have a client who previously ranked number one for that keyword and this is going to sound ridiculous, but it's very true.

It almost didn't matter because they ranked number one beneath ads and beneath this organic block of hotels. And so their click-through rate was sub 1% on a 350,000 per month search volume keyword. So it's awkward because the CEO of that company who we got ranking number one briefly for that keyword, basically was like, he thought we were like, our data collection was wrong. He thought we were lying to him. I don't know what he thought. He was like trying to figure out the truth of the matter. And I was like, Mr. Client, basically, here's what happened. We got your ranking number one. And it almost doesn't matter because there's so little traffic for us to grab onto. It's like a cone, right? And it's all these holes are in it. And we're pouring a bunch of traffic

on the top and very drip is making it out of the bottom to our actual page here. And there's nothing else we can do as the SEO person. I did my job. I ranked us number one in Google and it almost doesn't matter on certain keywords. And I think that that's, that's just the way he, and I think it is the way he's talking about this. It is clear that Expedia knew, like they knew what they needed to do to make things perform. And I saw it like when we were, They knew what they needed to do to make things perform. And I saw it. Like when we were, a lot of times for some of these smaller, more niche keywords, I'll tell you, resortsandlodges.com was right up there with Expedia on a lot of these keywords that we were going after.

Hotels, resorts, lodges, that type of thing. It was a lot of fun to kind of battle, I'll say. But it is. They were always, Expedia was always a step ahead. Whether it was trying to put in the timely, putting in dates in your page title, which at that point you could game the system and do that. This is your fresh content update. This is all those things that were a little more black hat in previous years. And now we see it as, okay, this is, it's a factor. It's a signal.

It's not really going to be something that's going to boost you up or bring you down a whole lot. But it is very difficult to say. It's not a competition. At that point, it's not a competition against Booking and Priceline and Expedia and TripAdvisor and all these other. TripAdvisor may be under Expedia, whatever it is, but it's not a battle. It's a battle against the search engine. And when you're battling the search engine, because Google is showing, I think probably around that same time, maybe a little later, Google, there was another great study of search results over 50,000 queries. And on average, I think you had to scroll 36% of the way down the page just to get to a non-Google placement of some kind. And then travel, I think it was even more because you do have those local packs. You do have the travel, you do have vacation rentals, you got all those things. So it's, I mean, it is, I've been screaming antitrust for a long time about Google.

And I think we all have, just because we've seen the nuts and bolts behind the scenes. If you see it and you don't really understand what's happening, like fundamentally, strategies are going to shift a little bit. But all of a sudden costs increase randomly because more people are entering the market or we're paying more and we're getting less data. I've shown you the screenshots of a search terms report where I have 40 clicks and 700 impressions and I see zero clicks. I don't know where any of those are coming from. And there's another email that, I mean, Jerry Dishler is literally saying, hey, let's just inject some more queries into Google ads because we need it because sales has

got to hit their numbers. This is going to continue to be, it is, get the popcorn, get everything, keep watching this because I don't know if we're going to get a resolution or an action here that actually feels like anybody's winning or losing. But we're going to continue to understand. And I still have a feeling at some point along the lines, there's another suit over in Europe as well. And there they were actually pushing for an independent SEO of some kind to get a look at the algorithm. Just see. I think at some point, we've seen the index now. I think we're going to see something about what goes into the algorithm and search and how it all plays. And we're already getting the peak, but I think at some point that's going to

have to be the next step. Google's really going to have to open up the top, open up the hood and show us what's happening so that it is more of a level playing field because that's another thing that that barry diller does a lot we're looking for a level playing field he said he specifically says i'm not asking for special treatment even though it sounds like he really was pretty close with the with some of the initial higher ups founding members i would say, literally the founders. Set them up with a lawyer. It sounds like if you read the whole email,

it's a great email. Worth it. Just taking five minutes to read through it and the entire thread. But I've been very interested to watch this. And I do. I think that's the ultimate resolution is that at some point,

we're going to get a closer look or a better understanding of what drives that algorithm with signals, with data points, whatever it is, we're going to have a better understanding of how we make it better. Now, what you're going to do with that, it's going to be completely up to every individual SEO and how they run their business. But yeah, what have your thoughts been as you've been following this all? Yeah, I joked when I sent it over to you that I haven't been following it as much, but this one really caught my attention, obviously. I think you make a lot of good points, and I don't disagree with many of them, except for

the fact that a monopoly, so for a monopoly to have to be abused, you have to use it to build another monopoly in another adjacent space. So Google having a search monopoly, and Google could snap their fingers tomorrow and say every link on the first page is ads, and I don't think there's anything meaningful that we could do to change that because ultimately Google can do that in the search. They can shove things down and make things as hard as they want to. And I do believe this, which is that despite the fact that we make a lot of money from SEO, our clients make a lot of money from organic traffic. They don't owe us that traffic and that traffic could disappear tomorrow. See our helpful content update episode from a few episodes back where that basically happened to our client bars. They

basically lost their organic traffic. It's not all gone, but it's gone in a meaningful way. So there's some layers there that I completely agree with you on. There's also the sort of like free market libertarian point of view of like, Google can do what they want, right? They're not on the search side of things, they can do what they want. So that's that side of it. I'm surprised you didn't go to the other side. So here's my insights. We'll see where we line up here. So interestingly, we don't actually see the charts, by the way, in the email that Barry is referencing. So I don't know what he's referring to. My number one question is, does he mean organic and paid search traffic or traffic from Google,

or does he just mean paid traffic? So that's one piece that's pretty potentially interesting for us to try to figure out from Verbo's perspective. Is it that they're paying a lot more in paid search and they're not getting more paid traffic? Or is it that he's using just Google and he's looking at some generalized report that one of his underlings sent him and he doesn't actually separate between the two. And the reason I say that specifically is that I've talked about in the past and I've documented actually like years ago when HomeAway was having SEO issues. And of course the HomeAway brand has since been killed and merged into Vrbo. You would think that would have made a super site. You would think merging Homeway and Vrbo together onto one domain, Vrbo kind of being the dominant brand now,

that would lead to this unbelievable lift of organic search traffic. But I don't find that to be the case. In fact, go into Ahrefs or SEMrush, your SEO tool of choice. And if you look in 2019, let's say the fall of 2019 or the winter, when he sent that email, Ahrefs estimates that he was probably doing three and a half, four million visitors a month. Today, they're probably doing six and a half, seven million visitors a month, if Ahrefs is to be believed. They're actually getting a lot more organic

traffic during that timeframe. But again, I wonder, was he only looking at paid or was he only looking at organic or both? But you would expect more in my mind to come from that, especially if you look at top three keywords rankings. If you look at top three in December 2019, they had, let me make sure I get this accurate. According to Ahrefs, they had 150,000 keywords ranking in the top three in December 2019. Today, they have 204,000. So they've added 10,000 keywords to the top three, the ones that get the majority of the organic traffic. But again, that's after all this advertising, hundreds of million dollars of advertising, hundreds of millions of dollars of brand work into the Vrbo brand, merging HomeAway into that. That happened after that time frame that happened after the C-mail, I believe. I even think, I don't even know if vacationrentals.com

still exists. I don't even know if that is the case or does it just go to Vrbo? Yeah, I think they killed that brand as well. Granted, that was very much a third redheaded stepchild in the family of brands, but still they took three brands, vacationrentals.com, HomeAway, and Vrbo and merged them into just VRBO and merged them into Vrbo, which is now the main brand. And you don't necessarily see these huge wins from a search perspective, from a rankings perspective on the organic side of things. So that's interesting. I also did some quick math, by the way, $300 million of ad spend in 2019 when he sent this email. At that time, it appeared they had roughly 2 million listings. So that means they were spending $175 per year per listing on paid advertising. And that is global, by the way.

So it actually doesn't make it seem like that much of a budget when you really look at it in that perspective. Let's compare that to a property manager that has 100 listings. If they were going to spend $150 per year per property on their website, their annual PPC budget would be $15,000. That's not an egregious annual budget. If you divide it by 12, you're talking about maybe 500 during a slow month, two grand during a peak month. That's pretty typical for a lot of clients we have that might have a hundred listings. So looking at all those numbers, it's again, was Verbo taking advantage of very cheap traffic because there wasn't as many people competing on those keywords to your earlier point back in 2014 when he was doing comparisons like 2014 to 2019, A lot more people entered our space,

both the local manager, maybe it got bigger during that timeframe in many markets. The competition on Google PPC from that timeframe may have got more competitive as well. More people in the auction is obviously going to raise the prices. And is it just Google's fault that Verbo is not converting traffic at the same rate or the same percentage? There's a lot of layers to that that I don't know if there's an easy one to answer to it. But I think it's all stuff worth considering in the context of various complaints, his roof, his root complaint, basically being Google is screwing us over, so to speak on traffic and ad costs and things like that. I don't think he's wrong, to be clear. And I'm with you, I don't think that he's Barry's not completely wrong. And you're right in the sense of they're

making the game a lot harder to play. But my sympathy for Verbo maybe isn't as high as one might expect, given that I'm very close to these issues. I look at Vrbo, the site, the platform, the product, and I don't see something that's innovating. I don't see something that's making use of this $300 million in traffic and providing this unbelievable search experience or matching me with the right property all the time. Or do I often go on Vrbo and see really high quality homes? Like in many markets, I don't see that. In fact, we use that as a consumer a few months back during my grandfather's visit, right?

Or to be ended up booking through Evolve, which is interesting if you look at where the search behavior has gone and stuff like that. Yeah, a lot to unpack there. I encourage people to read this for themselves and follow it up on themselves and think about Verbo the channel. Some clients we have on Verbo are getting excellent results. They're happy. It's a solid 20, 30% of their bookings that get good results.

There are a lot of single property hosts that I've seen could talk online or in other venues who say I listed on Vrbo. And literally, I got five leads in the next two months that were all spam. 100% of them were spam, like scam, people reaching out and saying, Oh, I'll send you a check. And then you send me back $2,000. That scam is running through Vrbo. And people are like, Oh, yeah, that's this happens all the time on Vrbo. Don't worry about it, like just delete them. And you'll get a legit lead every once in a while. So it is not the slam dunk platform out there where Expedia is providing this phenomenal marketplace. That's obviously to the end of Barry's email, providing this perfect benefit between a consumer and a host. There's a lot of problems on their platform. And I think it's

foolish to ignore those and say that Google is the only bad guy in this scenario. Not that they're most bad guy, but just that they're not like Airbnb during that time. In fact, they've talked about this publicly has turned off their ad spend multiple times, what they call performance marketing ad spend. And they've grown like crazy since then, as far as overall revenue. And now they're a public company, you can go look up all the revenue, and they obviously are doing very well. And they're growing every quarter since they've been a public company, a seasonality adjusted year over year. So yeah, like I think there's a lot of layers to it. But the interesting part to me is that someone at Verrbo was in charge of a $300 million search budget, and they couldn't get

that to convert any of the same percentage. So that's wild to me. If I have a client that comes my way with $300 million budget, we're gonna do some damage. We can get a lot of bookings. Let's think about what we could do with that. Holy. Oh my goodness. Yeah. You and I haven't spent that collectively in our lives. At this point, we might live to be 80 running PPC ads, and we won't spend 3 million bucks. They spent it 12 months with minimal outcomes. So very interesting. No, yeah, go ahead. I was going to say, and that's the last point there is it is, I think that you hit the nail on the head is there we're seeing 500 million and we're seeing 500 million in traffic. We're seeing 30 million, 300 million in ad spend.

Right. Like what was that? I think that's a great point what was the breakdown before so 30 was that i gotta think that 30 million was it getting you 300 million clicks or what was that actually driving what was that delivering because yeah i your cost per click actually may have fluctuated some right could have gone up could have gone down it's hard to say and specifically certainly for different markets in different areas. Yeah. I think that there's no doubt about that. I think what we see is you get into some of those niche markets, done that search volume, whether that's a lot of it or whether there's not much of it. If you start adding complexity to your campaigns, you're going to see some shifts there. So yeah.

And one of our core PPC tenants that we talk about all the time is do the things that Furbo and Airbnb aren't going to do on the PPC targeting keyword perspective. So they have gaps in their way they do things. And by the way, I don't say I have a better solution because if I let's, I was joking about being in charge of this big budget, but it's fricking hard to be in charge of that because you have to build all these different landing pages. It's more of a, I would say at that scale, I haven't been at that scale before, but I would imagine it's much more of an engineering problem than it is a advertising keyword management

problem, right? You're not going in there and tweaking bids and doing different adjustments there. It's more, how do I make sure that I have all the right pages that match this intent? And how do I work with my engineering team to organize the inventory, tag things, categorize things properly across literally millions of listings to make sure that we're driving in the right traffic. And then I'm sure there's tons of adjustments that can happen or adjustments that can happen, excuse me, on the backside about targeting and things like that budget etc per market but yeah it's it's there's no doubt it's hard but i feel it's google does i believe two things can be true at the same time google deserves some blame and

there's no doubt about it their policies have made it harder for a site like verbo to exist and exist profitably that's google's right in my opinion it's also true that verbo has not been this shining star that google has unfairly kept down. The example that I gave on another call with a client recently was examine.com. Total different industry. They do like health supplement reviews and things like that by like actual medical doctors. And Google multiple times has crushed that site from an organic perspective. Go look at that site and you go, that is not fair. There's no reason that Paul's fitness blog.com should rank ahead of examine.com for information

about creatine because examine.com gives incredibly detailed information with studies and links everything that is a masterclass in creating useful content for the internet. And Google just has at various times hated that site for some reason. If that was the situation, I would say and I would say, hey, it's not fair. Verbo deserves this and that and stuff. I just don't think it's that black and white for me. I think there's a lot of layers of gray in there that ultimately lead to the results they've gotten. And yeah, if you're a property manager relying a lot of Ver verbal bookings, look at where they're headed or the head in the right direction or the wrong direction and make sure you're building your own platform. It's just another lesson in the other feather in the cap of make sure you're building your own lead source,

because who knows, Barry could just get upset and turn off all the ads for Verbo and then half your bookings go because there were a lot of bookings coming from that system. You just don't know. Yeah. And on that note, I mean, it is that was around the time. I mean, it is during pandemic. They did shut things things that was something where it was weird to see those auction insights reports and see oh no more homeboy oh no more verbal oh more airbnb and you were just going at it and it's not like we were spending extravagant budgets at that point but just a little drive to and doing stuff like that but it it was gone. And it is. And I think there's certainly some efficiencies, the way we would do things and the way they would do things. But I think the cost of evolves all these listing travels with the travel sites, they do have the

benefit, if they have a good flywheel, you don't even necessarily need the custom it is you can just do Airbnbs, or you can just do vacation rentals. You can just do location. Now, obviously, we know you're going to improve as you get down to the right level where people are actually searching. But sometimes you just got to get to the site and let the search happen from there. And I think Verbal probably has a good enough flywheel and a good enough user experience. That's what Barry is certainly trying to put out there, that they have a very consumer friendly site, ecosystem, whatever it is there. And I don't know, that's something I can get in on resource and launch.

We run about a thousand campaigns and it was none too enjoyable to when something small goes down and all of a sudden you got to go through and systematically try to figure out, okay, a thousand, okay, 500 were affected or 300 are affected i can't imagine doing it on the scale of i can't think verbose was like running like five campaigns and then just putting 10 000 50 000 something like 100 000 but i would be as with everything i would be interested to peek behind the curtains and see where what how the actual build is because i can reverse engineer it a little bit i want to know i want to know how these people are setting it up because it just doesn't look like it's that efficient or effective it would be an interesting if we ever

could like this is an idea for the podcast we like find like a former ppc manager like we like disguise their voice we give them like a voice changer like their voice is batman and we're like all right tell us the truth Like what really went on during this timeframe? Because I think there's I think there's more to that story as well as what I'm getting at just Barry sitting in his ivory tower somewhere emailing about Google. I'm like, there's a lot of other layers to that we don't quite fully understand. There we go. So that is the summary and kind of our thoughts on something that we didn't have on our outline at all. But it was interesting. I saw that yesterday, I believe. Yeah, I saw it yesterday afternoon. And I was

just like, that's interesting. So internal tech emails, I'll put a link in the show notes over to that. Or you can go to at tech emails on Twitter and find this email or this tweet, excuse me, or not. It's on tweet anymore. Is that this post dated November 12, 2023 at 1 15pm Eastern time. So there you go. And it already has a million views on Twitter. So it are X. So it goes to show you that people are pretty interested in this topic. It's obviously far leaked outside of the vacation rental slash vacation market, travel OTA market. There's people just commenting on the email itself and Google and all that kind of stuff. We have an interesting topic today, though. So that was part one. Hey there, Conrad here. That is going to go ahead and wrap up part one. We actually ended up doing a little bit longer

intro there than we thought. So we're going to go ahead and make this a part two. Part two next week, we're going to talk about mini sites and how mini sites kind of tie into a little bit of what we just discussed. But this episode was a reaction to Barry Diller versus Google to showdown, so to speak. So that will go ahead and put a wrap on part one. If you appreciated it, go ahead and leave a review in your podcast app of choice. We'd appreciate that. Also check out the link in the show notes to the book, Mastering Vacational Marketing.

I would appreciate that you picked up a copy of that. Send me a receipt of your email. Send me an email receipt of what you picked up there and we'll be more than happy to maybe send you something as well. So that's it for part one. We're going to go ahead and come back with part two next week on mini sites.