Heads In Beds Show - Google Ads vs Facebook (Meta) Ads - What Is The Difference For Your Vacation Rental Business?

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul talk about the difference between Google Ads and Facebook (Meta: including Facebook and Instagram) Ads and how each one can help and grow your vacation rental business.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing🔗 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. All right, good morning, Paulul how's it going no it's uh we are recording this on national championship monday um which i think is kind of like the secondary show to national championship sunday which happened yesterday for the women's game uh i don't know if you caught any of the south carolina iowa game i i guess in theory I should watch South Carolina women's basketball, but I don't watch

much women's basketball, or I don't watch much college basketball in general. It's not a reflection of the women's versus the men's, which is not really my thing. But I think the South Carolina Gamecocks won from what I can tell, so I guess I'm quasi-affiliated with that. Not really, but... There you go. Yeah, it's... I mean, it is. I wouldn't say... See, I would say, based on

that answer, I have more affiliation in the fact that there was a, there was someone from Minnesota on the team and she was, she lit it up. So that was, we're going to take the Minnesota connection there. Cause that's what we do in Minnesota. We, we, we have to be the one of us. So one of us went and won the, won the national championship for South Carolina. So that was fun. But truly, I think it is. I think that was kind of the main show. I think they were, I don't know if you follow Joe Pampliano,

the guy who does a lot of the sports business connection, not Ravel. Oh, yes, yes, yes. I know who you're talking about. And he's been kind of tracking the record audiences that have been coming. And I think it started, like they've broken six records in six days. And that's like 6 million fourteen million i think they were expecting to see about 20 million viewers on that which would be that's crazy that's like a fifth of a super bowl which is like oh it's yeah yeah it's more than any any nba finals game in the last 20 years it's like i mean there's a lot

of things that it's that it's really going there so i'm interested to see what that final number what the final number was just from the advertising side because 2 p.m. tip or whatever, 3 p.m. Eastern tip, 2 p.m. Central tip, it's just one of those Sunday afternoon, did you get enough people off the couch to watch a little basketball? But yeah, that's fun. And now we see who wins it all tonight, UConn versus Purdue.

Okay, there you go. Yeah, I don't really have a lean there, I guess, in theory, maybe I could lean UConn if nothing else, but maybe I'll flip that one on. I don't think there's much else on right now. Um, I've been watching the Celtics games, which I hate to say this, this is going to get clipped later out of context. Um, but it's kind of boring to watch the Celtics games right now. Cause they have everything locked up. So there's just, they're not playing for anything. You know what I mean? So it's just pretty uninspiring in that respect so yeah it's um we'll see like by the time this episode should come out i think third week of april or something like that so the playoffs will have started and then we shall really see where things lay and it

could be pretty interesting so i'll say i think there's a good chance that we're gonna have the number that both number one seats i just i have oh i think that's very likely we're gonna be supporting like like it is that we've got a whole lot on denver but i'm feeling good so let's let's fingers crossed that when this is when this is when this is actually being uh published we are we're both number one seats in the first round of the playoffs having a good time yeah yeah there you go awesome um well let's dive into this topic i think this is a good one um speaking of number one seats if we were doing a bracket for facebook ads and google ads i think you and i would easily place google ads the number one seat but what does that mean so let's start into this topic. I think this is a good one. Speaking of number one seeds, if we were doing a bracket for Facebook ads and Google ads, I think you and I would easily place Google ads in number one seed. But what does that mean? So let's start all the way back to the

beginning because Google ads versus Facebook ads is the topic du jour of today's episode. And I think it's an interesting conversation because I think sometimes clients will just say, oh, we're doing advertising. Or maybe they've clicked the appealing boost post button on their own personal Facebook post that they put out on their own page for their vacational business. And they may go, well, I've done advertising before I boosted a Facebook post.

Whereas the Google, it's like a little bit more complicated. Obviously Google has tried to make it simpler over the years with like so-called smart campaigns and things like that. Those are straight trash. We'll throw that in there before we actually rip them apart a little bit further later on. But anyways,

yeah, Google and Facebook ads, these are the two advertising behemoths. And we say Facebook ads, what do we really mean? I guess now it's really meta ads. We should be naming things properly. And of course, that would encompass both Facebook and Instagram, which if you combine the user

accounts, it's really impressive. I don't have those in front of me. I'll get those as we keep going here. But maybe you could break down first, like, what are these ad platforms that you can use, both on Google and then meta, so to speak? And then what are the benefits? Maybe we'll start with Google ads and then we'll dive into what the benefits are

of those meta ads as well. Yeah, I mean, I think the nice thing about Google is, I think we place a lot of the value on the search side of things. Certainly that's valuable. But the nice thing about Google is that you can hit all these other platforms. You can do video, you can do display,

you can do the different variations there, the lead generation campaigns. They've got a lot of, I mean, you can do product campaigns if you've got an e-commerce shop of some kind there. And heck, I mean, at some point down the road, we'll probably keep talking about the Google hotel ads and hopefully they'll call them the case rental ads at that point when we're actually able

to do a direct meta search. But it is. I mean, there's a huge ecosystem there. Where we see the most value, I think, on our side of things is certainly on the search side. Typically, it is. It's the ad that you see at the top of the page. Now, Google is continuing to change that definition of what does the top mean? So it's not necessarily top of the organic results. But I think we've kind of

gotten used to the idea of if you're on mobile, the first two to three results that you see on a search engine results page are going to be ads. Those are the paid ads for search campaigns. They're hopefully intent-based. Hopefully you're putting together the right keyword list that is going to drive the right intent of people looking for your goods and products. You can take that in a lot of different ways. There's different levels, certainly, of match types you can do. You can let Google have a little bit of fun

and get you a lot of clicks, or you can really define the clicks that you're looking for, the keyword searches, that intent that you're looking for. Try to define. Try to define. I should say try to define. Try to define. That's true.

Yep, yep, yep. That's it. Oh, boy. I mean, ultimately, Google is the intent driver. It is people who are actively seeking those products and services, and hopefully you're giving them the right answer to that question, which is their keyword search. And that's why I love it because yes, you can, you can, sometimes there's a little bit of inference that happens when you're looking at search terms and trying to connect the dots up. Ooh, did I capture the intent right there?

But for the most part, it is, you're going to find the people who are looking for and are most interested in what you're actually trying to sell. So, I mean, what do you feel like it is? Did I do it justice on the Google side of things? Yeah. Yeah. I think that, like you said, there's so many different, I feel like an ads rep told me this a while ago, surfaces.

There's a lot of different surfaces where Google ads can show up. But when it comes down to it, the most relevant ads that any vacation manager in my mind can run are search ads show up in the search interface. When you think of Google, what do you think of? You think of search.

I mean, if I quiz you, yes, some people listening might know that Google, of course, also owns YouTube. And yes, you get video ads syndicated on YouTube, just like you can get ads put in other places.

But for the most part, when you think Google, I think search. When I think search, I think those are the best quality traffic that you can get with regards to the intent. Because ultimately, if I were to skip ahead a little bit, and we'll talk about obviously

all the benefits and pros and cons of all these different platforms here, the benefit of Google Ads, the most obvious and clear benefit of Google Ads is that someone is reaching into that search box, putting in a keyword, and they're telling you exactly what they want. So if you can offer them what they want, there's just automatically, naturally a better fit there and a better connection between oceanfront vacation rentals in Destin, Florida is always going to work better than I'm on Facebook, I'm on Instagram, I'm scrolling, and then you show me an oceanfront vacation rental in Destin, Florida. It's not that that

can't work. That can work. We'll talk about in what ways that works well in a second. But in my mind, that's always the, if someone wanted the quick explanation upfront of what's the difference between these two platforms, I always about it as like reaching in and i'm telling you what i'm after versus i'm more passively consuming and then you're interrupting me so i always call meta advertising interruption advertising which is i'm doing something else you interrupt me which to be clear a lot of advertising is interruption advertising all of your classic television advertising is interruption advertising i'm watching the content i'm watching the final four game um or the sorry the finals game for the women's.

I wanted to watch the basketball. You stopped it to show me some ads. So that's interruption advertising. You're putting ads in the middle of the content that I actually want to consume. So that's happened for, you know, centuries at this point, right? But with Google, it's not interruption advertising.

It's intent-based advertising. I'm going into a box. I'm looking for something. And if you have what I'm after, that's kind of what we were joking about a few minutes ago with respect to Google is now, the joke there is that Google is increasingly more loose with how they interpret what keywords you want to bid on.

So you say, I want to bid on only people searching oceanfront vacationals in Destin, then all of a sudden your ad ends up showing up at all these other keywords that are not as relevant. So that's the joke, by the way, for the listener who doesn't understand that context. Because what is Google trying to do from a shareholder perspective? They want to make sure that ads are showing, hopefully relevant ads, but if nothing else, ads are showing on every single search that happens on Google, of which there are, and they've talked about this before publicly, tens of millions of keywords that people search into Google that no advertiser actually wants. So a lot of Google is actually subsidized, you could argue, by so many searches happen that people don't want to bid on. The example I've always gave in the past was like free iPhone wallpaper,

or, you know, a keyword like that. I want a new wallpaper picture for my iPhone. And that there's a lot of traffic for keywords like that. But it really has no, you know, there's no financial real motivation there. If someone wants a little picture of something, they're just going to grab the first thing they find on Google Images, put it as their background. And they're like, no advertiser really wants that keyword. It's very challenging to monetize that keyword, right? Whereas in our world, right, Oceanfront, Vacation Rentals, Destin, Florida, that can be monetized by a platform, Airbnb, that can be monetized by Verbo, that can be monetized by any decent vacation manager, that can be monetized by individual owners.

There's a lot of people who would say, I want that traffic, send it to my site, and they're willing to pay Google for the right for that traffic. They're willing to pay Google for the opportunity to get that click to come to their website. In fact, I was having this conversation with someone recently where on Google, it's not uncommon for you to have anywhere from 25 to 45 advertisers bidding on the same keyword. So a lot of people may say, oh, I have a low budget, you know, and you would think that would stop more people from doing it, but that's not the case because there might be in some competitive markets, 50 people betting on that same exact keyword. Low budget just means you don't get the same volume of traffic, by the way.

It doesn't mean your ads never show up. I think we can clear up that misconception too. But yeah, no, I think you did it justice. So I'll try to do it justice on the meta side, Facebook and Instagram. And I'm going to use all those terms interchangeably because they kind of mean the same thing. To be clear, when you're in the ads interface, building a campaign now in meta ads, so to speak, the funny part is you do it on the same thing to be clear when you're in the ads interface building a campaign out in meta ads so to speak the funny part is you do it on the facebook domain right like you're on the facebook there's not like a meta domain or a meta platform right like you log into facebook to run these ads now instagram is bolted in there where you can actually go in and like check a box to say hey make sure these ads show on instagram when you click preview it shows you what the ads will look like on facebook and instagram but i i

guess i say facebook ads in the same way that I said Google search or sorry, webmaster tools for a long time before search console, which is when I logged in and still said webmaster tools in the top. So just like that, that's how this works. When you log in, you're logging into Facebook ads, like ads, Facebook ads platform to run ads on Instagram as well. But if we want to call it meta and we want to do that, that's fine. Let's do that. So the benefit, I spent a minute or two talking about maybe why Google, I think, could be better in many ways. But what are the benefits of Facebook? Because we still run Facebook ads. There must be some opportunities. There must be some beneficial

things to do so. Well, let's zoom out for a second. The benefit of Google ads is that people are searching at that exact moment. And then we can kind of hopefully intercept their search and get them to come to our website. That's a good thing. The problem is that presupposes that enough people are searching and that we can capture them at an efficient rate for it to work for our advertising model. So the trouble with that thinking is that in some markets, first of all, not enough people are searching, right? So if you're in a small market where there's only, you know, 500, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 people a month that search for a given keywords, of which we've worked in dozens of these markets now, you know, search advertising can only take

you so far. Because even if you've run a really killer, awesome search marketing campaign, you might only get 15 to 25% of people who do a given search in a given month to come to your website. Right. So if a thousand people a month are searching and you do a really good job, if we're running your ads and we do a really good job, I would love to see 250 people on that keyword come into your website. If so, I'm celebrating, we're high-fiving. But given a 1% conversion rate from those ads, two or three bookings a month

may not be enough to really satisfy you or meet all your demand needs. So even though Google search ads are great, they are flawed in the sense that they're really only capturing existing demand and trying to funnel it into what you have to offer and get them to convert. With Facebook ads, think about it this way. I can then put my little shingle out there and say, here's what I offer. Here's why you should check me out. And you can actually interrupt people a little bit in the higher stage of the funnel. I'm thinking about going to Myrtle Beach because I live in Charlotte. You hit me with the Facebook ads. You showed me an offer that's really compelling. And I may be more drawn into working, you know, staying with you because you showed me something that's actually interesting. And I'm open to exploring more and looking at this

offer or looking at this property or whatever. And when I think about the most logical example of paid ads that have worked well, I think of these people that we've seen in our space that have done basically like built for Instagram vacation rental properties. So they've gone in and they made things specifically for Instagram and whether they're using paid ads or not is almost immaterial to my point here, which is that they're building something that's inherently very visual. So when people go and see that particular listing on Airbnb, or excuse me, see that particular listing on Instagram, they think of, see that particular listing on Instagram, they think of it as, I don't need to go to Airbnb to look for a listing. A listing found me. I

wouldn't have gone in and searched for this particular property. It found me. Now I see it. I like it. I want to stay there. Let me click through it. Let me learn more about it. And then of course they can get bookings that way. So that's one way to think. I think one way to learn from it, even if you don't have these really unique, visually appealing properties that you can market, maybe you do have something that's kind of similar where you can make your properties more visually interesting, you can make your content more likely to consume, and then you're actually building a little bit of awareness and loyalty directly. So people are more likely to come to you directly as opposed to going out to Google and searching

where they're kind of open-minded. They may want to click on any of those links that might come up when they do a search on Google. I always, you know, I've said this before, we talked about this before in different episodes of the show, the best thing to happen to you is that people search for the name of your company on Google. That's the best thing. Because then we're, you know, people are already considered all the options, they're choosing us. That's so much easier of a sell than, hey, I don't know where I'm going. And that's where those generic searches come from on Google. So those branded

searches can often come from Facebook influence and Instagram influence. And ads are one way that you can get your properties and what you do in front of a lot of people. So that's like holistically, strategically why I think those make sense on the guest side. But this actually has been very guest focused so far. Maybe you could react to anything I just said there on the guest side, and maybe you could dive into the owner side of it as well, because I think it's particularly relevant in this case. It is. And I think that, I mean, and you captured kind of the best example of why we need to work these additional channels the more you know uh we'll say the interest-based and and connection-based um channels on the owner side is because it is we don't have the searches you're

talking about you're gonna have some markets that have two through two thousand three thousand searches man if i had two three thousand searches on the owner's side within 10, my job would be so much easier. I could make the joke that I would have more hair on my head. But that's just it really is. It's more like 20 to 30. Oh, my goodness. In most markets, it is 20 to 30. So it really is about recapturing that. So, so the, I'm going to say the golden

pixel is the meta pixel for us to be able to retarget and get back in front of those people, because it is, if you're only driving, let's say on the, on the paid search side of things, 20 to 30 website visits a month. Okay. That's something, hopefully you're getting some referral traffic from your primary website for those people hitting the list, your list, your home, or learn more about our services, whatever that call is action is on your, on your website. Hopefully that's directing them to that landing page as well. So maybe that's another 50 users a month. So we're almost up to a hundred. It is, we have to stay in front of these people because while the conversion rate of 1% on that booking and maybe you'll get $1,500 off of that and that's great.

You can get that consistent ROI. I mean, that is you hopefully for any of your paid efforts on the guest side, putting money in, you're getting that money back out. That direct ROI should certainly be there if you're managing it properly there. On our side of things, that direct ROI maybe doesn't feel like direct ROI from the start, but that home that maybe cost you $15 a click for that initial property management in-city keyword, then it's maybe going to take us another dollar or two to get a remarketing click in there as well. But leading them down the funnel and then being able to do outreach from the Venturi CRM on our side of things, certainly, that's something that may gross you down the road. You know, gross booking revenue of 50 grand a year or 100 grand a year, 150 grand a year, whatever that looks like there. Now, making sure you get your margins in there and all that.

there. Now, making sure you get your margins in there and all that, it makes it so much more important to get in front of these people because we do see the long-term value of any of these homeowners that are coming in with that initial intent-based targeting. And then it is, I mean, certainly we're trying to put together the pieces on the Facebook side of things and use the data behind the scenes that is as enriched as we can make it. So, you know, we're trying to look for those absentee homeowners. We're trying to connect the dots of people who are living in this area or living in this area, but owning a home in this area. And hopefully we have their email or we have their phone number or we have all this specific information in our CRM, whether that's a guest site or an owner side CRM for that matter. And we're able to upload that and target those people specifically. I think

that is one of the, while it's not that intent based and they're not actively looking, you're going to have to interrupt them in their social media experience. Now, I think that's one thing that's probably changed from when we initially were on these social media channels is that it was more social. You were actually interacting with people more. And I would argue that if you looked down your timeline now or anything like that, and admittedly, I don't because it is so overwhelming with ads. I interact more with companies on my timeline, on my social timeline that I do with actual individuals. And that's, yeah, I think it's harder to, then it becomes even harder to do that interruption because everybody's interrupting.

So like, you're just under a constant barrage of, oh my gosh, this is, yeah, this is not the experience that I originally intended. So, but again, when you're working with that limited audience, how do you get in front of these people? Yeah, but again, when you're, when you're working with that limited audience, how do you get in front of these people? Yeah. You try to determine that intent, but then you do, you target that custom audience or you retarget the people that are coming through because it may only be, you know, dozens, maybe hundreds of people that you're actually trying to connect with there. And timing obviously is key there as well. So I don't know. It's the homeowner

side. It's an absolute necessary evil. And I will continue to call Facebook that to a certain extent, but you really still need to be able to try to leverage that to reconnect with people. It might not be your initial connection. And I think if you are driving a lot of your initial traffic from Instagram, from like a custom audience or something like that, it is, it's going to take some time to really find the right niche of users that are actually going to come down the sales pipeline, come down the funnel, come down to the actual conversion side of things. So I would argue that you look outside of those on the owner's side, because it's not just about Google. It's not just about Facebook. We need to find other channels to, to look there as well, whether that's the

direct marketing or, or even some other video efforts or, you know, a DSP network or something like that. I think the last few examples you give there are awesome, you know, things to explore because you're ultimately you're limited by the number of fish that know about you. Like if this was a fishing analogy with guests, it's like we can kind of determine how many fish you want to catch just by the size of our net. And the more nets are bigger, like more clicks basically, right? Like we can go out there and we can kind of grab whatever we want traffic wise for the most part.

I mean, there's some markets where it's pretty small, but typically like very few clients are willing to spend more than their market actually supports. I can count on one hand the number of times that occurs. And usually it's in these very, very, very tiny markets. So if you're in a Destin, you're in a San Diego, et cetera, your budget is always going to outstrip or your budget is always going to be too small to satisfy your demand. It's just a question of mechanics at that point. How well can you convert it? Now with owners though, you may spend 20 bucks a day and actually find all the searches that you can. In other words, the same analogy as my nets out there i've got a big net but the fish are just swimming by super rarely super infrequently

whereas the guest fish are swimming by 100 times a day the owner fish might swim by one a day like the ratio is like you're alluding to a minute ago it's not crazy to think that there might be a hundred or five hundred or a thousand to one guest searches versus owner searches whether that's on google so yeah you bring up a good point there. Now go ahead. I was going to say, and that's where it pains me to have someone who says, I want to spend a hundred bucks a day on management terms. And I can tell them that, hey, that's great.

I would love for us to be able to do that. The problem is, is that Google can't spend a hundred dollars. Google can't make more people do the searches. And I think that's kind of the one limitation of Google searches that like at some point you're going to have diminishing returns. Google's going to inflate the cost of your click and because they can't make more people do the searches, they're going to try to give you qualified searches. That's where on the broad match side of things, you won't see it as much if you're trying to over budget because Google can pull in some lower cost keywords and kind of spread that budget around so that they're going to make sure they spend the entire hundred. If you're actually going for the targeted traffic on a phrase match or an exact match basis, then absolutely. You're going to run into an area where no more people are

doing that search for the day so and right google's not gonna really give that money back if they can help but they're just gonna try to charge you 30 bucks for the click that cost you 10 bucks for the the week before something like that so right just so i think you no no i think you bring up the problem well which is that like you would like you're saying you desire the search volume out there. It's just not out there. So instead of complaining about it, you can turn to Facebook and you can turn to Instagram and say, okay, people, people are out there that want my service. The problem is a limited amount of people search for them on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. So if I let them know about what I offer and how I offer it to them, one of two things is going to happen. Hopefully they're going to see it and they're

going to remember it or click on it, right? Like I'm putting those in the same bucket, even though they're very different activities. Because again, like you were saying on the owner side, there's this long activity train that's going to have to occur typically before people make that, you know, listing. It's like, I've worked with real estate agents in the past and people seem to think real estate agents can just grab a listing on the sell side, you know, commonly. And like the truth is the best agents continually get more listings coming to them because they built up this machine over time, this right awareness over time

so that the infrequent opportunity you have to sell a home, maybe it's in our case, once every 10 years, maybe something like that. You're going to think, who do I know that's a real estate agent? Who have I seen do a transaction before? Maybe I just go back and talk to my old realtor

that helped me buy this house. We considered that when we were selling our home. And we get, in our case, we chose more of like a family friend type things. We just knew this person and we had seen that they were competent, active, and did a good job. So it's kind of like, there's these little moments, but on the buy side for real estate, right? There's just new people coming in all the time. I want to buy in the area. I don't have a real estate agent in the area. So you can do a lot more quote unquote damage, you know, getting more

customers in the buy side. Same logic applies here when you compare guest marketing to the, you know, listing side of it. Like we've talked about this at length before, so we don't need to beat it up, but you ultimately have to build trust with that potential homeowner to get them interested in the possibility of potentially listing with you. Facebook and doing advertising on Facebook and Instagram and things like that, showing content, showing information, reinforcing your marketing messages is a way to at least see the thoughts, the potential for trust can be seeded through advertising, right? Like it doesn't guarantee that they're going to believe it once they click over to that landing page. Again, 95% of them are going to bounce off that page without having done much on it, but at least seeds, okay, I'm aware now that there's a

company called XYZ Vacation Rentals and they manage vacation rentals in XYZ area. Okay, I'm aware of that. It doesn't guarantee anything, but at least gives you, again, you plant the seed in their mind of the customer, of the homeowner, I should say, maybe in this case, and you're hoping for that to potentially work. So flipping that over to the guest side, not to beat up on the owner stuff too much, you know, the same logic I think applies, right? Like I'm seeing something on Instagram. I'm seeing a feature at home. I'm seeing an example property. I have a call later today with someone who we're swapping out new carousels for this week for new feature properties, or excuse me, this month for new feature properties. And this person, you know, was like,

I'm like, yeah, like they see those properties all the time. Again, two, three, 4% of people who see that had clicked on it. It's not a huge rate, but they're seeing new properties that we refresh frequently. And our visitor account is up from Facebook since then, you know, since we implemented this change.

Is our conversion ups? Not really, because people don't, we talked about this at length before in previous episodes, people don't come from Facebook and come from Instagram and make a booking in that same session. So then vacation managers think it's not working, or they might even think their advertising isn't doing anything, when the truth is they're having to make this uncomfortable investment that a lot of small businesses have to make, which is into this idea of awareness and

this idea of brand. And it's hard to quantify it. Believe me, I wish I could quantify it. It would make my job a lot easier. Our monthly calls would be a lot shorter because we get to the point really quickly and then just hop right off after. But unfortunately, we don't live in that world. We live in this world of making our best judgment on paid advertising based on limited sets of data and limited sets of information. But I know this to be true, having done this now for quite a long time, seven years, which is that people are not going to just come book direct with you off of one individual interaction. It's not just seeing your property on Airbnb and then making that direct booking usually is the case. If you have the ability to drive a lot

of direct bookings, it's always going to be like a portfolio. You're going to have to invest in different things to kind of build that awareness and bring people to your door, which is ultimately what's going to lead to the most success. I think it's the fallacy of me saying Google ads are good. And then someone would say, well, I'm just going to do Google ads, nothing else. That'll get you somewhere. It really will. It'll get you actually pretty far, but it won't get you all the way there because you're always going to be missing this opportunity of people who you're not introducing your brand and company to do less new individuals on the homeowner or the guest side, right? And Facebook and Instagram meta for better or for worse. And we often complain about maybe some of the issues we have with them, but for better or for worse. And we often complain about some of the issues we have with them.

But for better or for worse, they give you the opportunity to pretty inexpensively, or you can control your own budget, show your message out there to potential guests and to potential owners at a pretty reasonable scale for a pretty low cost. And it's hard to beat that anywhere else. And there's a reason that they play an important mix in your overall marketing strategy. And I think that, I mean, it just, I think the one thing and kind of goes into the key differences between the two as well is it's someone asked me this weekend is what's a good report social reporting software. I just had to think about them like, you know, because I was the data studio being able to kind of put some together some nice reports in Google. I always think of Data Studio being able to kind of put together some nice reports in Google.

But when you look at like true social reporting, I mean, maybe like a Buffer or a Sprout Social or a Hootsuite or something like that, but those are publishing platforms. So, and then kind of pulled it back further and got lost in my own thoughts there a little bit. But what are the metrics we really want to be, you know, are they the same metrics that we want to be measuring in Google or something, or maybe even in some of our other marketing efforts? I think we have a real struggle with saying what a good reporting software is because we don't really know what the most important reports are for social, don't really know what the most important reports are for social what the true leading indicators are of success or you know a strong performing campaign versus a weak performing campaign and i think it a lot of it drives back to going back to the story of the conversation intent driven versus like interest driven so like i i do that well yeah go quick story on that no no sorry sorry

interrupt you but a quick story on that that I think will hopefully hammer that point home and give an example. It used to be we were taught this a long time ago. This would have been like 2014, 15 when I was doing this kind of stuff. But to be fair, it worked, which is the idea of seeding a Facebook dark post before you push it out as an ad. So you'd actually do a quote unquote dark post, which used to be like you could only promote ads that were on your page organically, but you might want to try 20 different ad creatives. So how do you do that? Well,

you create this dark post, you don't publish it, and then you'd be able to run as an ad. Anyways, it was this whole tactic. But long story short, you would run a Facebook ad, and then you would seed it with engagement. So how we seeded our ads with engagement on Facebook is we would target people who are based in India, based in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and so on and so forth. We target them in those frontier countries. We would show our ad to people in that, in those areas, in those countries. We'd get some likes, some comments, some shares, et cetera, on it. Even though in this case, this was before my time at vacation rentals. So this wasn't tied to vacation rentals, but even though they had no interest in, let's say a five bedroom oceanfront vacation rental in Destin, sorry,

like very few people are ever going to book from Bangladesh and come stay in Destin. Like it's just not going to happen very often. Right. So on paper, that makes no sense. There should be no logic towards advertising, you know, and spending 10 bucks advertising a post to Bangladesh. And yet when we did that, and then the comment, or excuse me, the ad had a bunch of comments,

likes, shares, et cetera on it. Then we turned it onto the actual audience that we cared about, that we did want to show to, all of a sudden the ad performed better. So anyways, I give it back to you with that story in mind. This doesn't work anymore.

We don't do this anymore. But it's a good example of, I can go into reporting software and boost those numbers, juice those numbers tremendously. If reach was the metric, I can get all the reach you want for 10 bucks a day, right? Let's go ahead and target Bangladesh, for example, right? Now, the intent of people in Bangladesh is almost never going to be, I'm sure we could find one example maybe. But if I look at 10 years of history with our clients who are in a lot of beach markets across the Southeast, I mean, let's lump North America together, Canada and the US. I mean, it's extremely rare that we get any bookings outside of there. Extremely rare on the website. I'm not saying it doesn't ever happen, but it's very rare. So for me to go spend money getting you a bunch of reach, I can do it,

but it's not going to get you any closer to your actual goal or just reaching people that matter. And I think that's what you were hitting. That's, that's the key. I think that with, especially, you know, looking at when I'm looking at Google ads, I am, and we're looking at search impression share. We're looking at some of those absolute top, you know, the absolute top of the search impression share. We're looking at the cost per conversion on the, on the Facebook side of things. When we're looking at campaign objectives and goals, I'm looking for reach. I'm looking for frequency.

I'm looking for how frequently are the ads getting out there. If there's any boosted awareness, if Facebook and Meta are trying to measure what does that actually mean, that impression or the frequency, what are those actually meaning? What kind of boost does that provide to your actual brand? Or the direct lead numbers? I think those are important too. But we do. We just anecdotally telling the story is we see more conversions come through this.

So I think you want to tell more of a quantitative story through the Google side of things. And you can tell more of a qualitative story of, okay, this is how much brand exposure, well, brand awareness I've increased. This is how much, much additional reach I have. This is how much additional lift I have every time I come now back to the organic side of things. And I post over there because I think more so on the Facebook side of things than the Instagram side, you do have a little bit of carryover. Anybody who tells me that someone who does paid search sees an improvement on the SEO side of things, I'm sorry, you're putting, you know, you're, you're, you're creating a story that works. However, the Facebook side of things that is, I mean, more engagement or lift on that on the

Facebook side does improve your awareness on the organic side for social. So yeah, there's a little bit of a soapbox there, but that may be another discussion for another time overall on the Google side of things. SEO, does it contribute to paid search? We got to put that down as an idea because now I really want to go off on that one for a little bit. But yeah, I mean, what are some of the ways that you're measuring the performance of these that's that's difference between google and google and facebook there yeah well you bring up a lot of good points here that i actually hadn't thought about and i feel like i got the same text about reporting software and i just answered back quickly with here's the software that i would use but i think you bring a good point which is that the person reading that report what's their mindset

how are they thinking about these numbers because like we do show numbers all day long right all these i mean if you actually the funny part is if you go into the tool that i ended up recommending to this person who text me agency analytics and you click on the advanced mode you can see every metric that they could pull and i mean the number of metrics i mean it's in the hundreds i don't know exactly you know the exact number but it's in the hundreds and some of them are like you know what percent of people watch three seconds of the video versus 10 seconds of the video versus 50 of a video so some of these are like really granular metrics but the point is you can kind of juice almost anything. If you were given, you know, the wrong measurement system, you could easily kind of find a way to be like, yeah, let me increase the reach.

Again, I get my story of second ago by Bangladesh, or if it's increasing engagement, well, let's say, you know, like this post, if you support, you know, the troops, right? Like you'll get a bunch of likes on the post. Does that have anything to do with booking a vacation rental in Dustin, Florida? No, not at all. But like we can get a lot of engagement on the post is that does that have anything to do with booking a vacation rental in dustin florida no not at all but like we can get a lot of engagement from that right so i think that it's it's so easy to conflate these things and to be fair like we like big numbers when you're a small business seeing big numbers feels validating because we feel like you've done something if you see a big number right on you know a spreadsheet or report somewhere again does that really you know is that really what you're after so to answer your question

more directly i wonder how much credit Google has sopped up over the years. And I've been part of the problem here, I admit, for stuff that was about to convert anyways, and all they used Google for was a quick navigational tool to get them where they were trying to go. And I think that is why when we pull numbers and we look at direct bookings, non-direct, so when I say direct, I mean they didn't directly go to the website. So we chop those out.

Google and search is always number one by almost the know the widest margin even for these brands that are very social focused they still get a lot of referrals from google email you know kind of usually number two you know then you might see social and some other channels down at the bottom referral we actually see a lot of um people who make a lot of reservations through these like uh what's the word i'm looking for kind of like these chamber type sites like advertising media partnerships you know like we have clients now where that's like the call I had later that I was referencing.

I think that's our third or fourth source is like search is number one, paid and organic. They have, I think, maybe direct is number two, but like past that, it would be like email. And then I think like these other sources

are three or four and it's not insignificant. I mean, it's like $100,000 a month that are coming through on these platforms, which is excellent. And then social is down at the bottom, even though I would argue we don't do their social but i think

they have a really good social presence so it's it's it's so tricky i think to find the right kpis because you're going to end up down in the rabbit hole of attribution naturally very quickly and then you're going to get to the point where you're just frustrated because you're like well my attribution makes sense that you know everyone's coming from google i should just be doubling down on google and again like 80 of my brain agrees with you the% that doesn't agree is how are new people going to find out about you? How are you going to introduce your properties out there to new guests? Or as you were highlighting earlier, connect them out to new owners. So I think there has to be always a portion of the budget, a portion of your reporting that's indicating how many new people found it

this month. And then even I would argue some qualitative reporting should be folded into the mix. We had a long conversation with a client a while ago about, you know, someone who's very active on social and wants to better quantify how much that's helping her business. And like, I get it. She's spending on a contractor to work on her social media, paying them thousands of dollars a month. Is it worth it? It's a very valid question for this individual to have. The truth is it's hard to measure, but I said, well, why don't you just ask people how they heard about you? You know, like go like, like here's your door code, blah, blah, blah. By the way, you know, I'm just, you know, I just wanted to confirm, we got your reservation, everything's all good, Paul, how'd you hear about us? I'm just curious, like, why not ask 20, 30,

40 of your next guests qualitatively, and just see what they say, and just, you know, zip the mouth and listen to hear what they say. And even though the campaign will say Google, like it says they book from Google, they may say, Oh, yeah, I saw this post on Facebook, or Oh, I got an email or Oh, a friend, you know, stay with you before. That's often how these things go, which is that it's hard to put that information into a spreadsheet, into a report, but it's often how people actually behave in the real world, right? There's all these other contributing factors that play into where their bookings actually come from.

And that's where Facebook and Instagram, I think, plays a huge role for sure. Well, and I think to kind of wrap it up on my side, I think there is, there's that point of like, okay, i think the people who keep pushing back and say well facebook and instagram aren't helping me facebook and instagram aren't helping me and then they they learn the lesson by turning it off and then all of a sudden they do see a little they're a little you know reduction in leads or reduction in traffic and and they can't quite put the pieces together but that was an important part of the story and it is it may not show up in your attribution part it may not

exactly look like it's happening and i hate that after having to go back to anecdotal stuff but at the same time if you turn something off and all of a sudden the the engine is not working as effectively then you probably turned a more important channel off than you realized or you know just because the numbers didn't exactly support it doesn't mean that it's not contributing there somehow as well so just makes i mean when you're evaluating that and we'll be the strictest evaluators that that is we're gonna we're gonna tell you when it looks a little funky. But at the same time, if it is effective, you can turn it off and you'll find out right away

the effectiveness of that specific campaign and driving more overall funnel strength and funnel growth, I think, there. Awesome. Well, we're out of time here. You may have heard the little ding background noise. So we always try to bring you, listener, all the way to the limit of what time we have available.

And we definitely did that today. So appreciate you listening. If you got some value out of today's episode, something that doesn't cost you anything, unlike advertising on Google and Facebook, which costs you a lot of money, something costs you nothing, you go to your podcast app of choice,

leave us five stars. We appreciate that a ton. And then more people can listen to the show. Thank you, Paul, for your time and attention. I got to jet off to another one. But listener, we will be back next week with some new interesting stuff. Perhaps at this point, the result of the show. Thank you, Paul, for your time and attention. I got to jet off to another one, but listener, we will be back next week with some new interesting stuff. Perhaps at this point, you know, the result of the

first playoff game Celtics are looking awesome. The timber rolls, maybe a little shaky and maybe we feel confident that, you know, things will be going the wrong direction. So I kid, but all good. We appreciate the listener and we'll catch you on the next episode of the heads in bed show. Thanks so much.