Heads In Beds Show - Google Ads vs Facebook Ads For Your Vacation Rentals: What's Better?

Episode Date: July 21, 2021

In this episode, Conrad covers the most common questions that vacation rental management pros have when deciding between running Google Ads (mostly search) and Facebook/Instagram ads. Resources on BuildUp Bookings:PPC ads guideFacebook ads guide 

Hello there, welcome to another episode of the Heads and Beds show. I'm your host, Conrad O'Connell. So today we're going to be talking about the differences between Facebook ads and Google ads. And this probably is one of the most common, I would say like pre-sale or pre-client engagement questions that we get, which is that clients are spending or vacation rental managers are out there spending money on both platforms, Google and Facebook, and they're just really not sure what's working best or really which platform they should continue to invest in. It's possible too that they're dealing with two different people, someone on the paid ad side of things that wants more budget and someone on the social side of things that

wants more budget, and they have to decide, if I have $100, where do I place it? What percent into Google? What percent into Facebook? So in today's episode, we're going to break down what I feel like are the differences between these platforms, the path that you should focus on depending on kind of your goals, your availability, your budget. And we'll use some example campaigns that we've had the most success with just to inform what we suggest you spend your effort and ultimately your money on as you build out ad platforms and ad campaigns going forward. Let's dive in.

So again, Facebook and Google are the ad behemoths, right? They are the ones that have the most inventory, they have the most traffic. And when you talk about setting up a campaign, you likely are going to go to one of these sites or platforms first, you're going to go to Google, almost primarily search, we're going to talk a little bit about search ads mostly today, or you primarily go through Facebook. Now, when I say Facebook to throughout the show today, I'm really talking about both Facebook and Instagram because for the most part,

inside of the Facebook ads platform, you hit publish and that ad that you push out is typically going to go on both platforms if you build everything with this ads manager. You can customize it. You could show ads only on Instagram or only on Facebook, or you could show certain creatives only on Facebook and only on Instagram. We'll talk about that as well. But for the most part, when I say Facebook ads, I'm combining those two together, Facebook and Instagram, even though they do behave a little bit differently. When I talk about Google,

I'm primarily talking about Google search ads. So if you've never run any of these ads before, or if you're spending money on them through an agency or something like that, and you just don't quite understand what it is that they're doing, I think it's useful to spend a minute or two explaining exactly what these ads are. So Google search ads are fairly straightforward. You've probably seen them before. And honestly, because of how Google is continually making their ads harder and harder to parse and figure out the difference between ads and organic, maybe a topic for a different

day. Any search that you do, any competitive search that you do, probably has ads running within the top four slots on the search results page or the search engine results page. So if you were to do a search in the vacation rental world for Miami Beach vacation rentals,

you'll likely see four ads showing up on the top. I just did the search here a moment ago and I see booking.com, I see Vrbo, I see Airbnb, and I see a local property manager, all running ads on that specific query. So naturally, these ads attract a lot of clicks and a lot of traffic, because when people do a search like that on Google, they're specifically looking for vacation rentals in that destination, they're looking for cabin rentals, they're looking for something specific like pet friendly, and you can essentially target the keyword, the query that

user is searching for, that guest, and place your ad right up against it. So naturally these ads convert at a pretty high percentage and they typically do pretty well. So search ads from Google are probably by far the most common ads that we see people coming in and running because you can typically do well with a small budget and that's a display where they actually end up physically on Google at the top of the search results page when you do a search for a specific keyword. Now on the Facebook side of things, again, if you're a Facebook user, you've probably seen hundreds, if not thousands of Facebook

over the past few years, if you've used Facebook for some time, those are the ones that are showing up in the newsfeed, in the middle column, when you look at your post feed, ads come in typically every two to five posts, just depends on how aggressive Facebook tends to be. And you'll also see them often on the right side and you'll see them in a few other placements as well. So for example, within videos,

sometimes there'll be ads that run in the middle of a video. There'll be ads that run if you click through to certain websites or content, there'll be ads that display within that content. There'll be ads sometimes when you open Messenger. So if you use Facebook to message friends, families, etc., you'll see ads show up there. And the Facebook's goal, of course, is to show as many ads in as many places as possible within both Instagram and within the Facebook platform. So you'll see them everywhere, essentially. And both these platforms, Google and Facebook, make it very easy for anyone to run ads. Facebook has a feature called Boost Post, where you can really just click a button, hit a few options like age, location, maybe an interest

or two, and just give Facebook your credit card information, and they'll show your post to more people. We'll talk a little bit too in a second about the differences between running ads at Ads Manager versus BoostPost. Now with Google, they've been constantly trying to make ads easier to run on their platform. In the past few years, I think they've tried to make that process as simple as possible, but it still takes a little bit of setup. You have to define a little bit about your website, what you're looking to accomplish. Within the normal build of a Google Ads campaign, you need to define what keywords you want to bid on or what keywords you want your ads to show up for. And then you can start to optimize for Google Ads. So really, anyone could learn the

process to get these ads set up. And it doesn't typically take a lot of budget. With Facebook, you can, in theory, give them a few dollars, $5, $10 to boost posts. Or even on a daily basis, if you're running an ad through Facebook and Ads Manager, you could give Facebook a few dollars a day, and they're going to reach as many people as they can with that budget. On Google, you can set, same, you could set a budget for a few dollars a day, or you can set a budget extremely high, thousands of dollars a day, if your business supports that. So there's different, you know, kind of options out there. But again, as we dive more into the differences between these platforms, just because they're both traffic, just because they're both advertising platforms, you've got to realize that they behave very differently.

So Google search, the intent behind a Google search is always going to be a lot more specific. And in my experience, always is going to convert a lot better than Facebook. And I like to explain this typically, or usually with an analogy. So the analogy that I draw is let's pretend that we're not vacation rental managers or hosts or hotels or resorts or anything like that. We're not in accommodations. And instead, we have a physical storefront. So let's say we sell engagement rings is the example I like to give. So we're in our physical storefront. And let's say people walk by every day, and they see you in our storefront, some come by, stop by, buy a ring, some don't. They check us out but they walk by. Google is like someone, a customer, walking into your store and saying,

Hi, I'm searching for a princess cut diamond engagement ring. Now they're telling you exactly what they're looking for, you show them the products that you have available, and then it's just a matter of pricing, availability, what their budget is, what their desire is, etc. And hopefully you can close that into a sale. So that's what Google is. It's a guest coming in and telling you specifically what they're looking for. I'm looking for cabin rentals in Gatlinburg, for example. Now on the flip side of that, Facebook is like customers are walking by your store, your digital storefront, if you will, and you're grabbing them on the shoulder and saying, Hey, I have engagement rings that I'd like to sell you, or I have vacation rentals that I would like to

rent to you. And it's interruption advertising. It's sort of interruption marketing, right? They're doing something else. They're scrolling on Facebook or Instagram, and you're trying to stop them and get them to come back into your website, into your platform. So naturally, you can see why a Google ad is going to convert a lot better. You're meeting their demand exactly where they are. They're looking for something specific. And people don't go to Google just to look at Google. They go to Google because it's useful, because they find websites that meet their actual needs. So when you run an ad and you're the website that meets that need of being a vacation rental host or manager within that platform, obviously you can see how that traffic would convert better than someone who's just scrolling Facebook,

and you're pulling them out of that environment. You're asking them to leave Facebook, come over to your website, and then get results, or excuse me, you're asking them to leave Facebook and then get what they're looking for on your website. Of course it can work, of course we see results from it, but it's not the same. So I don't think that equating these two things, oh we should spend money on Facebook and Google, as necessarily the only path to go down. In fact, many of our clients that we've worked with over the years have just spent on Google and have done very little or nothing on Facebook. And we worked with a client recently who actually shut down their Facebook page. During COVID, they didn't have anyone to manage their comments. They were dealing with

issues about cancellations and refunds and things like that. Shut down their Facebook page completely, just put it on hold. And during this kind of run up here, as we head into the middle and later parts of 2021, their business is better than ever. And they've done more bookings from Google than any year in the history of their company. So certainly both are not required to see success. You can do one or the other, or you can just do Google, which is what we'll talk about a little bit more as we head into the rest of the episode. So the way that I've outlined it here is Google captures demand.

You're sitting or standing on top of it or front of it, whatever analogy you want to do there. Facebook can create demand to some. The benefit of Facebook, of course, is that people may not be searching for your destination at this exact moment in time. So if you have availability, let's say you're in your shoulder season or your off season, and you have open rooms, open vacation rental properties that are not booked, Facebook can create demand for you.

A user is scrolling Facebook, they're looking at pictures of their friends and their family, and you put a special in front of them. You put an offer in front of them for one of your vacation rental properties, and you can essentially create demand out of thin air, or maybe create demand out of a Zuckerberg's wallet, if you will, as you feed the Facebook ads machine. But that's the difference, right? That interruption advertising and marketing has its place when you need to put a specific offer out there, promote a specific spec. We have a client that focuses a lot on packaging. So it's a vacation rental plus other things that you get alongside of it. So that Google ad isn't going to do you any good if people aren't looking for that particular offering that you have, that particular property, that particular package, that particular cabin, whatever the case may be. So this is where you can see how both can interplay together. Google can capture that demand. You're just standing in front of it and you're funneling

people over to your website, obviously. Facebook can create demand to some degree, or it can take an interest that people have and get them over to your website and see what you have to offer. So Facebook is great to promote something specific or to be this gap between initial kind of website visit from a guest and the booking. So some of our most successful Facebook campaigns, as you might imagine, just sit in this retargeting area. So for people who have visited your website, you can go into Facebook and set up a campaign only to target people who have been on your website. So we're not targeting all the Facebook users. We're not targeting everyone in Ohio or everyone in Florida or something like that. But instead, we're just specifically targeting people who have been on our website.

So this is where Facebook can do a good job because you're staying in front of that guest as they go through. And let's be honest, probably shop you. They may look at a property at your website, think it's fantastic, but most people don't come on a website and book a vacation rental on the first visit. Our data indicates that rarely happens. Instead, what happens is people go on your website. They may also check out multiple properties on your website, by the way. So even within your own sort of environment, you may have some level of competition or

people looking at different properties on your website. But when they actually do go to your website, it's likely they're still going to go to a listing site, they're still going to check out Vrbo, they're still going to check out Airbnb, they're going to check out your competition. And this process can take based on the data that we typically look at and recover anywhere from seven days to 21 days is a very common path of initial visit to later converting via your website as direct booking. So Facebook can obviously slot into this sort of environment and capture that person, continually show property information, videos, content, information about your destination to that guest as they're going through this process. And naturally, when they think of

your destination, you want them to think of you and think of the ability that you can provide them to get a booking or to provide a booking, I should say, to provide a vacation rental. And they're going to want to book with you when they actually go if you keep in front of them and keep that brand. This is obviously critical. Now you can do the same things on the Google side of things. We've talked mostly so far about Google search ads, which are where most people spend their budget. But Google has a massive display network, the biggest one on the internet. So if people have visited your website, you can run a Google display campaign and show an ad to those folks who have been on your website.

Typically, these ads are going to show on news websites, content websites. If your guests are reading a specific website, they may see those little banner ads on the right side or embedded within news articles. You can run ads where that guest will see those display ads through Google. There's also other ad networks out there like AdRoll that can do this same sort of thing too. So Google can play a role in the retargeting side of things. And of course, the approach, if you want it to be everywhere, is to run retargeting ads as many places as you can. So you might have a Facebook remarketing ad set. You might also have one on Google. You could also build out one on the Facebook side, of course, that serves on both

Facebook and Instagram. You could build out one emerging ad networks. You could run them on Snapchat, TikTok, et cetera. So you can take this to the nth degree when they're in that 7 to 14 or 21 day booking period. But the goal is the same, right? When we take these digital ads and we're getting someone to come back, we want them to come back and book and make that reservation. So the ad formats that we see the most success with on Google, we talked about a little bit

already, are search ads, number one, by far. So when we look at which ads convert, search ads is head and shoulders above every other ad format that we've talked about, relative from click to conversion. But you can also run general display retargeting and also video retargeting on YouTube because like the relationship we talked about earlier

between Facebook and Instagram, we haven't talked too much so far today about the relationship between Google and YouTube, but obviously within your Google Ads account, within their Google ads dashboard, you can run YouTube ads. Now, of course you need to have a video creative that really works well for this particular audience, but just running like a remarketing ad for people who have been on your website as a pre-roll ad, that five second ad that shows up before the next video that our guests

may be watching on YouTube can be a great way. Put your brand, put your logo, put something early on in that video, and have just a scenic drone shot, a scenic photo of your destination on a short YouTube ad, and those can help build brand awareness as well. So those are the most popular for Google. Search ads, general display retargeting, video retargeting on YouTube. Now on Facebook or Instagram or both, we've talked a little bit about retargeting, but there's a lot of other ways that you can target ads on Facebook. So for example, you could set up interest-based ads.

So within Facebook, there's, I don't even know the number, thousands of different interest targeting ad sets that you can build or ad targeting options that you can build. And many of them have just names of destinations. So if you're in Ocean City, Maryland, there's an interest target set within Facebook just for people who like to travel to Ocean City, Maryland. There's an interest target set within Facebook just for people who like to travel to Ocean City, Maryland. So instead of taking the 280 million people on Facebook and Instagram, we're narrowing it way down to maybe a million or a few million people who have expressed interest or who have liked pages about Ocean City, Maryland or Steamboat Springs, Colorado or wherever you happen to be located. So the interest-based targeting can be very effective because, again, you're getting in front of that person before the demand actually occurs. Before the search occurs, they may not be looking for vacation rentals right now, but that Facebook ad can say, oh, yeah, I actually do want to go back. I need to plan my visit for later this year or for next year or hopefully for next week when you're promoting a last-minute special.

So those types of targeting is really unique to Facebook, and not only is the targeting there, it typically works very well. and not only is the targeting there, it typically works very well. Google has some of this targeting as well, but in our experience, it does not deliver the same results in terms of engaged traffic, people that are clicking around and viewing, things like that.

So with Facebook, intraspace ads, retargeting ads, and even one feature that Facebook has that performs very well additionally beyond those two is lookalike targeting. So you can target based on, for example, your past guest list, people that have stayed with you before, you can upload that list and target them in the ads, of course. And you can target people like them or similar to them.

So we talk all the time about some of the best ways to get more bookings is to get referrals, right? People who have stayed with you before, they recommend you to their friends and family. This is like getting that recommendation. Not quite, of course, because they're not actually endorsing you directly. But we are reaching out to people who are similar to our target guest list, people who have stayed with us before, using lookalike targeting on Facebook. You can also target based on people engaging with your page on Facebook. So if you run a page and you run a lot of organic content on that page that gets good engagement,

definitely check out some of the audience sets within Facebook and Instagram for page engagement, people who have looked at videos or images or content that you posted on your Facebook page, you can target that audience set with ads as well. So that's where organic and ads on Facebook and Instagram can tie together. Because if you're posting high value, high engagement content, like great photos and videos of your destination, and your guests are engaging with that, they're looking forward to coming back, boom, you can have an ad set that targets that specific person, people who are engaging with you, and gets them to go to your website or gets them to see your ad or your special offer or whatever you aim to promote through Facebook. Again, not something that's really possible on the Google side of things.

So with Facebook, a lot that you can do, again, on interest targeting, lookalike targeting, page engagement, retargeting people open on your website, and the options there are vast. We typically see the best results from what we talked about a few minutes ago. Retargeting people who have engaged with you, people who know you and know your brand. Obviously, those people are a lot closer to converting than someone that's never heard of you, you may need to do a little more work to get that person who's never heard of you to consider going to your website to consider converting. Maybe you just want them to engage with a specific post, a video or an image or something like that of your destination. Then once they do that, maybe then you want them to go to your website. Then you want to have another ad that actually encourages them to book or gives them a promotion or a discount, something

like that. So with Facebook, you may need to consider a small, you know, funnel setup where you're creating that awareness, right, about you, about your destination. You're creating some interest, getting them to go to your website to check out a specific property. And then you've got to really channel the desire and the action, right? What's the property? What's the special? What's the deal that you're offering? Or what's the availability that you have in that rental? And what's the, how can I get them to click over and actually book? That's all possible within Facebook when you set up your campaigns the right way. So the golden question, as we wrap up here, what should you allocate your budget for? If you have a thousand dollars to spend a month,

$10,000 to spend a month, what should you be doing on Facebook? What should you be doing budget for? If you have a thousand dollars to spend a month, ten thousand dollars to spend a month, what should you be doing on Facebook? What should you be doing on Google? Most of the clients we work with put anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of their budget into Google ads and mostly into search ads. So that's where we see again the best conversion rate, that's where we deliver the best results consistently, and the data that we've researched over the past few years across 60, 70 plus vacation rental websites tells us Google is king. Google is king in terms of conversions. While you're typically going to pay more for visitor, it works out much better for you in the end from an ROI standpoint. However, you know, that other maybe 30% of your budget, 20% of your budget that you put into

other channels like Facebook, Instagram, or some of the other emerging social channels can still work very well. It can still drive a lot of results, but it's typically to help a guest go from interest to conversion. So think about that when you're setting up your campaigns, think about your long-term goals. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Email me if you have any questions or feedback. Love to hear that. Conrad at buildupbookings.com. Thanks so much for listening and we'll catch you on the next episode.