Heads In Beds Show - Here's All Of The Google Products & Services You Use In Your Vacation Rental Business...

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul break down the (kinda scary) number of Google services, products and channels that you likely need and rely in your vacation rental business...Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 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 Head to Med Show presented by Buildup Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacation properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All right. Good morning, Mr. Conrad. I'm your co host Paul. All right. Good morning, Mr. Manzi. How's it going?

It's just, it feels like a very interesting time of the year. Kind of fun for us to just in the hospitality space, because this is when we start to think about the holiday side of things, or we should have been thinking about that for the last month. But I digress. Hopefully people have been thinking about that. And they have some plans ready to roll out for the next couple of months here. But how are you doing? How are things going in your neck of the woods?

Yeah, pretty good. The listener who's listening in the future now knows the result of the election. So I just hope you're individual one. And you know, I'll move on and get to the next thing. I think it's my kind of take on it. We'll be political here. What's the Jordan quote?

I love the Jordan quote. Republicans buy shoes too or something like that. God, that's a beauty. Jordan doesn't have an amazing amount of quotes outside of basketball that are good, but that's right there. I give Michael Jordan his flowers on that one. Cause that is a, I would agree with that. So we're in on that, but, um, yeah, all good. Um, on my, on my side of things, I'll get this neck of the woods.

My son had several soccer matches this past weekend. I'm one on Saturday, one on Sunday, the one Saturday all the way in Charleston, which for me, for those listening who know where I'm based is about two hours. So my wife had to drive all the way two hours. And then the coach played him for like eight minutes or something like that, or like in this match. And I was like, that was a little rough for him to kind of like spend four hours in the car for like 10 minutes of play time. Like that wasn't exactly the, the formula that we were looking for. And they lost six nothing, just like add in some. And then he played, we had a local game that was much closer and he played that one yesterday and he played much better and he played for you

know more time so he was much happier yesterday but came home a little grumpy which is always tough when you're you know talking to an eight-year-old about his playing time and soccer and how it's how it all fleshes out but that's just how it is sometimes some decisions are outside your control. So you know what else is outside your control sometimes? What products and services you actually use in your vacational business? So this was Paul's idea. I like this podcast idea quite a bit, which is talking about Google products, because these Google products, it's so funny when we do kickoff calls, this happened just recently, like this past week happened to me, where clients like, wait, I thought I already gave you access to that. And I'm like,

no, no, you give me access to Google Search Console, not Google Tag Manager. Oh, okay, let me get that. Oh, yeah. But then there's also Google Analytics. Oh, okay, let me actually do that. Awesome. Did you put me in your Google Ads account? Yeah, I did that. So it's like, there's a never ending list of like Google products. And we're not even doing everything for this client, like we are for some others in terms of these other deliverables and alternatives. But it also made, you know, I think your point on this

correct me if I'm wrong, Paul, was that we talk a lot about like, your business might be in some level of risk on the OTA side of things. If you list all your properties and get all your bookings on Airbnb, in theory, Airbnb can shut you down, Airbnb could have a bad year, and then your business is in a tough spot. A lot of people nod their heads and go, Yeah, I get it. I know, I know I should be getting more direct bookings. And they put some for some effort, some a lot, some a little, and they nod their heads. But you kind of brought the point of like, Google is this dominant, you know, provider of many of our services as well. And, you know, I kind of said,

we've actually considered some alternatives to some of these popular services. So it's a bit of a combo episode today, we're talking about some of these Google products, just so you're aware, maybe some people are not aware of everything that Google's articles touches, if you will. But maybe also some alternatives, if you wanted to reduce your dependence on Google, just like you might want to reduce your dependence on Airbnb, from the vacational side of things, how much risks too much if you're relied on too many Google services. So did I do a decent job explaining that? If not, add in. Oh, I think you did perfect.

And a lot of this stems from what I think we saw in the last week, now maybe middle of last week, something like that. But we started to see what kind of the fallout of Google actually invited a lot of these small independent publishers to have a summit, to kind of talk to Google, to talk to Danny Sullivan, to get, make their voices heard. Because there were, there was a lot of these small publishers that had their businesses eviscerated. I mean, this is like,

this is some of the screenshots from search consoles. It's, I mean, it's painful to look at these, the Google analytics thing. And I think the other part of it is that some of the nuance we've heard of some of the feedback that Google has is that Google doesn't really... They know about it, they acknowledge it, but they don't have a fix. There's no solution. They are going to release a new core update coming up, but that doesn't mean that it's going to fix it. I think we can point to a lot of different directions as to why that's happening. I think AI being a more of an aggregator for them now than

just being a piece of the puzzle. What is the algorithm? What is AI driven right now? I'm not sure, but it was kind of just that opportunity to pull back a little more and say, well, so how much of Google products really run our business? And are there alternatives out there? Are there areas where there really isn't a viable alternative? I'm excited to have the conversation and just kind of go down and hopefully, yeah, kind of provide some fallback

options just in case over the next year, two years, three years, who knows? Google isn't going anywhere, but there's some changes happening. So kind of positioning yourself to not be leveraging Google as hard as, as heavy as you are, maybe an Airbnb or something like that. Making sure you're equally spread and that you've got a sustainable business

that can't be just turned off by one arm being shut off. So yeah, I mean, we can dive right in here. And if you want to jump into Google Analytics and talk about that, let's go. Let's do it. Yeah, I'll add one comment on that before we get to analytics here, which is this idea of that might be a few times the only time maybe in the history of SEO is where like,

someone said, I'm going to talk to Google, and they actually had a chance to actually get their rankings back on their website, right? Every other time, you know, every other client who made jokes about this before client goes, Hey, can you go Google and tell them why I'm asking them why my rankings are down? The answer is like, I can call the ads hotline, you know, and we could talk to the ads people about how much money we could spend on Google ads. But that was actually the first opportunity in my career that I've seen where it's like, no, we're actually legitimately soliciting

feedback from people. But to your point, you know, just like people, again, same exact analogy from a few minutes ago, people rely on Airbnb for their vacational business, these people who create content, or relying on Google for their vacational business. These people who create content or relying on Google for all their traffic, Google basically, I guess the most evil part about it, to be honest with you, is this idea that Google is admitting they're wrong. They know that these site owners did nothing wrong.

And to your point, they're also saying, there's also nothing you can do about it. So like we messed up, it's our fault, so to speak. We're sort of admitting that in a somewhat tepid way, but there's also nothing you can do to fix it. There's no change, there's no correction. I know you make good content, sorry, you're just off our list for the time being

and perhaps we'll figure out a way to get back to you. So it also shows you, imagine Airbnb getting quite large and Airbnb saying, yeah, your reviews are good. People enjoy staying with you. You've got good feedback. Everything looks good on paper and we're just gonna push your properties

down the search results and you're never gonna get shown up before. I mean, property managers would be livid, rightfully so. And it's kind of this weird world we live in, right? Where there's this intermediary that can be very involved in your business. And I think that's a new phenomenon. Like, you know, we can point to the lack of access and lack of availability that we used to have before. But I feel like people have gotten a little bit too one trick pony and something that Adam and I have talked about at length on the art hospitality

podcast, too, with respect to like, people have given up on marketing, or they haven't been focusing on marketing. And I think there's some negatives there. So maybe that's a future topic to unpack a little bit further. But in the meantime, we can dive back into analytics. Yeah, so analytics, I mean, so going back to like the things that we asked for, from a client perspective, or why is analytics so popular? We've done a whole series of episodes, podcast episodes a little while ago on GA4. Maybe we could do a refresher. I think we did a refresher like one year later, back in the summer too. So we've done a dozen on analytics. So it kind of is like the default analytics or web traffic measurement platform for pretty much any small business, obviously, including the

clients that we work with in the vocational world. And it's fine. Like we all have our qualms by GA4. We beat it up. I still think there's, and Universal had some things that they took out in GA4 that are really problematic. The privacy restrictions are making it really hard to sometimes understand data and stuff like that. But the truth is some of these other platforms aren't necessarily that much better, but some that come to mind that I actually have first-hand experience with, if you don't want to use Google Analytics, you could use something like Fathom Analytics. We have a client based out in the UK that we worked with for a long time, so they had to be GDPR compliant. A lot of US companies got so swept up in that language and stuff a while ago, and I was like, it doesn't really

matter. But this client legitimately had to be GDPR compliant. We found Fathom as a really solid alternative during this whole universal, hey, you need consent type of conversation. And Fathom has been excellent, but I don't, it's simpler. But in my mind, I don't think it necessarily does anything better than GA4. If anything, there's actually some reports in Fathom

that are missing that are in GA4. But Fathom comes to mind as one. We have some client using Clicky. So those are kind of the two that maybe I would pick out as ones that work well. Again, does Clicky do anything that GA4 doesn't? I don't believe so, but like the interface is a little bit simpler, easy to understand, easy to use.

You can look at dashboards, build reports a little bit easier. And it kind of almost has like a, almost like a, I don't mean this in a bad way even, but like a kid designed it. It's like more fun, like the interface. It doesn't have like, you know, the seriousness of the charts and graphs and stuff like that.

It's more just like the fonts and everything is more playful, you know, playful and stuff like that. So I don't mind using clicky, I have no problem with it. But again, it doesn't have all the same, I would say features as GA4, particularly when it comes to, you know, looking at all the data and reviewing all the metrics, particularly with things like ads that are linked up, you know, and don't have that thing. But I guess honestly, one of my main takes the reason that these alternatives like fathom and clicky are popular, but not nearly as popular is analytics. That sounds simple. But the $20 a month barrier is such a small a large barrier for a small business. Small businesses not want to pay 20, 30, 40 bucks a month for clicky or for fathom if they can get

GA for free. So it just creates this kind of standstill of like, I'll use the free version of Google Analytics. I know it's not great, but it's free, and I could use it. And I don't want to pay another yet another expense to a service like Fathom or clicky to get this data, even if there's some pros there. So you had a few that you mentioned as well are things that are kind of similar. What's your take on this kind of analytics alternative idea? Yeah, I mean, I think when it comes down to like a free solution or a free option, I do think clarity probably provides Microsoft clarity provides the best opportunity there.

And because I talk probably maybe a little more about Clarity than I should. It is what it is. I like, I like the opportunity that's there. I've actually had some of the product managers for Clarity reach out to me and kind of get some insights and talk more about what they are trying to drive. And, and it is because of this conversation that we're having right now, it's that Google analytics is having right now, it's that Google Analytics is vulnerable right now.

Now again, that's, I think when we did the recap episode, there was like 27 million installs of Universal Analytics. But the opportunity was that at that time, it was during the transition to G4, 17 million hadn't switched over yet. So you had a huge opportunity there for Microsoft to say, hey, let's present some better information. Right now, it's looking more at the session recording, it's heat mapping. That's where they

drive a lot of the value right now, really engagement with your website. But I think that is their goal to provide more of a comprehensive engagement platform that drives the same reporting that you get in Google Analytics, but again, brings you into the Microsoft home there. So I'm interested to see how that goes. More on the paid version, amplitude is another thing that we've tried as well. Again, very similar, kind of going next level, going deeper, going, you know, you can kind of get some more detailed

information, maybe that people don't have in some cases. You can do device IDs. You can go really deep if you can leverage Google Tag Manager to put kind of some of that data layer information in. So if you're looking to do some more detailed, some more custom targeting, Amplitude is a great kind of solution to be able to group some of those audiences together there.

But it is. You're paying a premium for that. So again, is, is that ultimate, uh, granularity and targeting down the road going to pay itself off? That's, that's something you kind of got to decide on the ROI side of there. I think the, you know, we both kind of run into Adobe analytics out in the wild. Yeah. They do tend to say that they are more of a enterprise level solution. And I think maybe for Fortune 500s and stuff like that, where you're running millions

and billions of dollars in revenue through, there may be a point to be made there. I haven't ever seen it be all that effective. I think at the level that a lot of people are doing it at the hospitality level, whether that's hotels, resorts, or vacation rentals, you just don't have enough to track, maybe? I don't know if it's just missing some data points or what it is. Like, our businesses are missing some data points that Adobe can further manipulate, but it's something that I think that's a lower cost, and they may have some free tiers there. But again, it's not to say that there isn't a better option, but right now, Google still does provide the best reporting,

even though it's a downgrade from where they were with the Universal Analytics. So I wouldn't say for sure there's anything on this list where I would 100 out of 100 times take it over Google Analytics, but I would definitely want to use it in some combination as long as it's not affecting the overall performance of the site. Yeah, I think that's well said. And I mean, there's a reason so all these products we're going to talk about today, all of them are popular, some to the point where they are basically dominant, there is no alternative to it, right. And I think there's a reason

for that is like, it's really hard to compete with free and good. That's a pretty good combination. If you're, if you're trying to get a lot of people to use a product or a service or something like that, make it free and make it really good and make it available to pretty much anybody. And you'll get a lot of customers or users of that product. Maybe I should say I guess not customers necessarily. Although this next one maybe falls in that bucket. So Google ads, I mean, we've talked Yeah, we've talked about this at length. Obviously, we've done many BBC or Google ads

related episodes, obviously, on the podcast previously. So is there an alternative to Google ads? In a way? No, right? Because that's your ability to and you know, your opportunity to access the top of the Google search results, which is where the book of search traffic comes in today. And there was some commentary on LinkedIn this morning about, you know, here's what's going to happen. You know, these AI tools are going to come in and edge into Google search further. And eventually those AI tools will become a meaningful search traffic source. I think that's possible. I think that's even likely eventually that will be the case that the market share will get chewed away. I don't know if that's worth spending a lot of your

effort and energy diving into that when Google is still this dominant, not even an 800 pound gorilla, 8 million pound gorilla, right? And everything else is chipping away at one, two, three percent market share, that sort of thing. But it's not that, this is always what I tell people too, it's not that just because Google gets the bulk of the searches doesn't mean that it's not worth going to Bing ads, for example, and that is my first alternative that I have listed here, but just don't expect the same level of traffic. So it could be, you know, we have clients who have done

Bing ads because they've actually maxed out on their spending as much as they can on Google, but it's for a very low volume keywords. So like, Hey, I just got to find more searches out there. It's relevant. If it's relevant, I should be able to convert it. My area is really small, but like, if I just get more people finding me, I think I can do all of that traffic

and Bing ads has worked really well for them. It's also one of those things where we've talked about this at length to the clients that some of the clients who work with can't access all the traffic people has available to them anyways. So for example, let's say there's, you know, an area like Destin or Myrtle Beach, where there's three, four or 500,000 searches, you know, a month in the peak booking seasons, well, unless you have a massive budget, you can't access all that traffic anyway. So it

does become a little bit of an efficiency conversation. Could I be more efficient on big ads than Google ads? It's not that I'm getting all the Google traffic, but rather, again, could I be more effective if I take $1,000 a month and put it into this campaign versus this campaign? So I do think in that way, big ads can be an alternative for a small business, not because the volume is going to deliver the same way, obviously. We're talking a search engine that outperforms one in the market share by like a 90 to one ratio in terms of number of people using the platform. But it could be, hey, I'm currently, if you're not doing anything on Bing, it's like I'm showing zero times here in the ad results.

If I showed a little bit or like if I took my best 10 keywords and put them from Google into Bing, could I at least get that extra 5, 10, 15% traffic that might be a little bit more meaningful to my business? And to that, I think the answer is yes. So obviously, there's more complexity that comes into it. You got to have the budget for it. We. And to that, I think the answer is yes. So obviously, there's more complexity that comes into it, you got the budget for it, we've got to determine, are we taking things out of Google or just giving you know, bang, it's own sort of thing. But that's my take on being on curious your reaction there on maybe both the homeowner side, in the guest side, I was being more on the

guest side there, but homeowner, it's a little bit tricky on bank, given there's lower search volume opportunities there. I think the thing about being ads that's always kind of appealed to me is that when you're looking at the target demographic user, and I probably put this persona out there like five years ago, so it's changed, I'm sure. But I still think of those people who use Bing as a search engine as people who are kind of default people, is that they bought a Windows computer, they've got Microsoft Edge as their browser, they don't use Google Chrome, they don't do anything like that. And because they use Microsoft Edge as their default browser,

they're not going to change that. They're going to keep using Bing. So I think of these people who, let's say, skew a little older. They're not trying to go for the innovative new search engine or anything like that. These people might not be AI people, anything like that. But because of that, I was OK with at least adding it

to the mix, because those are the people that had the money that were probably really doing the searches with a little higher intent. Again, I think the people who end up doing, because so many people do searches in Google, not all of them are the highest intent, the top of funnel people that we're necessarily looking for there. So I think that was always my idea of why Bing ads is a good option. And I mean, when you looked at the actual analytics and the performance behind the scenes, they did, they performed. Now,

it was at a percentage, a smaller percentage or small fraction of the volume that Google did. But when we ran Bing ads, both on the homeowner side and the guest side of things, we saw conversions come through there. It was not the 30 to one ROI that you saw on Google, but maybe seven to one or eight to one. And on the guest side, I can take that. And we did. We actually saw more homeowner leads come through Bing organic than we did through Bing ads

typically. But I think that that's more of a product of the user experience with Bing, with that search engine. I think it's much more clear that things are ads or are not ads. And I think people actively scoot around those ads more. I think you see more, even when running Bing ads and having just Bing organic traffic come through, I saw more Bing organic traffic come through even when we did run the Bing ads. So I think that that's something that if you're not using it now,

I also think that in the future, some type of chat GPT, some type of open AI, that's where those are going to run through. So I think everybody getting more familiarity with Bing moving forward is going to be a benefit. Just there's a dead stop there, you know, it is. You look at the meta side of things as well, but Bing is going to play a role moving forward.

How big a role is yet to be determined? Well, I think it was very close to, I think we talked about this previously where Siri was very close, where Bing was going to be the default search engine for Siri. And like, we think Apple is the company that could take a biggest chunk out of the Google dominant search, you know, kind of situation. Because if you look in all like most of our clients analytics, their number or traffic source they get if you

look at a combo, it's iPhone, Safari browser. So if you took the Safari browser, and you may be in the default, or you made some Apple search, you know, reskin version of it or something that default and now I mean, and now Apple's leaning into open AI, because I think their new series like powered in part, I think by open AI, there's like an open AI component to it. So you can see these things changing. And to your point from a second ago, I think you nailed it.

Defaults are powerful. So if the default becomes a chat, you BT or search BT, maybe I should say powered search engine on iPhone by default in the next version of the iPhone, where like every single person has that or they roll it back to previous versions of the iPhone, that could be 10, 20, 30% of your traffic goes over to something like that right away. And then you'd be foolish to ignore it. You'd be foolish to ignore, you know, 30, 40, 50% of your customers coming in on your site or looking through your site through an open AI powered Bing search or something like that. So yeah, by no means do you know, you and I are talking about this too, like by no means do we think, oh, we should be arrogant and just assume that Google is going to keep this lead for a while, because that is no guarantee as you know, so I think you said it well. You touched on meta ads at the end there.

But obviously, in a way, it's alternative. In a way, it's not really. For being honest, it's not search intent. The analogy I do is this idea of interruption advertising versus intent-based advertising. Obviously, meta ads in general are interruption. You're doing something else. I'm trying to get your attention.

Come over and click it. Click my ad and come over here. All right, let's turn the page maybe to the other side of the page. And it's Google Search Organic. I put in my notes here. you like this, when we're putting this together, good luck, bro, because there is no meaningful, you know, organic alternative to Google search today, right? I mean, we just, you know, we talked about

over the last few minutes, this idea of, you know, there's the other large language model search power functions being is there certainly, but if you sum it all up, if you're trying to make progress with your business, and you only work on one channel, or you can only focus on one channel on the organic search side of things, focus on Google until you're trying to make progress with your business and you only work on one channel, or you can only focus on one channel on the organic search side of things, focus on Google until you're told otherwise, you know, by us here on the podcast, right? Like that's where I say 80 20, it's not even accurate. That's where 94% of your people are coming from today. So are these things something you should be aware of? Should you eventually figure out a plan of like, how do I make sure I rank well, quote unquote, in a large language

model? Maybe, but like, is that going to help you get more bookings in 2025? I really don't think so. I would be shocked if any client came to me next year, I look in their analytics, whatever platform they're using, and I see more than 5% of their quote unquote search traffic being referred from one of these large language models or a non, you know, standard or traditional search engine. I could be wrong, but I just, I don't think it's gonna get that kind of broad consumer

adaption that you would really need, you know, adaptation, I should say, excuse me, that you would need for that to be meaningful. So yeah, my notes here, good luck. I really don't know what you had something not just on the dominance of Google search, but rather this idea of like, condensing traffic on a few pages, maybe talk through that a little bit or any other thoughts you have on Google search organic. Right. And I will, and I'll note that the timing of this is pretty good for us recording this because chat GPT has just released, I mean,

within the last, over the week, on Friday, I think they released the ChatGPT search engine. And again, from what I've seen, results pretty solid. So I did a search for us and it came back that it knew, you know, build up bookings, it knew about all the things that we're doing right now. So I think that's, that's an, it's an interesting concept. And what I really thought was interesting, and we'll see how this moves into the operational side of things, but they put a Chrome extension for ChatGPT search. What that does, because I just implemented it,

is it automatically changes your default search engine from whatever it is, and it's Google Chrome, to ChatGPT search. So I'm interested to see over the next two months as we end the year here, what that does from just what we see for usage and numbers like that. And if adoption happens because ChatGPT did what they did, and if Google comes back and says, nope,

that's an unsafe or an unsecure extension. But I think the other side of the Google search coin is you may have good traffic coming to your website and you may have pages that your homepage might perform very well or your properties page might perform very well for vacation rentals in your area. But I think the concern there is, is that again, if you're one of these small publishers and all of a sudden you go from a thousand website visits a month to 200, what happens if you only have two or three pages on your website? Maybe you have a hundred page site, but only two or three pages are

actually driving a majority of that organic traffic. That's pretty risky as well. I think that if you have a very comprehensive content strategy, if you're using a managed SEO managed service, something like that, hopefully content is being built. The technical best practices are being put into place to ensure that it isn't just one or two pages or two or three pages that are driving the bulk of the organic traffic to your site. But just the same way we're talking about these systems themselves hamstringing you from being able to do something else, if you only have two or three pages on your site that actually perform organically, what happens if the next algorithm takes you out of those

page opportunities, those placement opportunities. What is your solution? And right now for Google, there isn't a solution. Again, we're a year past the helpful content update and Google was just inviting these small publishers in to talk about things. This is your business could be in a very, very bad shape if you are overleveraged on a small number of pages on your website. So again, it's just one of those things that I think we're all really happy when we show up in the number one, number two placement for specific keywords. But what if people stop doing that search or what if Google does something to present

different results for that search that is currently driving you traffic. It's that scary, dark, dirt place behind the rock of, oh, I'm in some trouble now. And again, is it the same as Airbnb just shutting off your rentals? Kind of feels like that a little bit. So yeah, that's definitely something that I have reconsidered more recently. And I'm sure it is. It's something that the more we see traffic shifting from different channels to different channels, from different pages to different pages, we'll kind of have a better understanding of hopefully about that algorithm is work

and what answers Google Bing, chat GPT, see also, see also anybody else along the lines is actually looking for there. Yeah, I have a deep cut. I don't know if you'll recall this, but do you remember that website celebrity net worth I think it still exists and there's sort of feud with Google. Okay, so for the listener that doesn't know what we're talking about, there was this feud a while ago with this website celebrity net worth I think it was like.com yet.com I think at one point it was on.net but

it's not. So basically the premise of this website is that they try to track or they try to estimate the value, the net worth of celebrities based on publicly available information. So like, and then a player signs a contract, we can see how much he signed the contract for a movie star buys a house, we can see how much the house costs, if you try to roughly figure these things out. They've always admitted their methodology is not perfect, but they say, hey, we do a ton of research, we dig into documents deeply, we really try to figure it out. And then on every page in the website is basically, pick a celebrity, the one on the homepage right now is Bob Costas. Bob Costas is worth $50 million, according to celebritynetwork.com.

Who knows if that's accurate or not? I'm sure Bob Costas could tell us the truth, but they're trying to source it and give that information. Long story short, several years ago, Google just started scraping that out and you'd search Bob Costas net worth and it would just show on the page $50 million. When they did this, traffic to celebritynetwork.com just tanked because people just want to know the answer.

They don't really care to go to the website and see the ads and do all the other things that they don't want to go to the website. Like I'm clicking here and it's showing me other sports broadcast broadcasters. So I see I and Eagle, Joe Buck and so on and so forth. But people don't care about that. You know, they're just reading, clicking and then go to the next thing. And you know, this guy who owns a website or operates a website admitted like you guys killed my business. And there was never really a solution on that. Like if you do the search today, like these AI, now it's AI overviews, I think are popping up, but it's like the same exact problem set for me had from a while ago. And it's kind of tricky for this guy to like want to continue

doing it. If it's like, Hey, I'm spending all this time. And then at the end of the day, Google is just kind of like show, you know, that individual, you know, amount there on the homepage or something like that, or on the search results page, it kind of screws over, you know, this guy, so who's doing all the work to make it. So I think if you're in the content business, it's particularly problematic. I think for, you know, our clients, and I think we said this when it happened,

these AI overviews, if you dig back in the podcast feed, I think if you were to go listen to that, you would see that my opinion on it hasn't changed, which is like, I think these things to do in keywords or restaurant keywords are probably worse opportunities than they were a while ago, but I'm not stopping doing them because I know that they're part of this like

overall balanced diet, if you will, of getting the right traffic to the website and making sure that people are like Google sees our website as an expert. So when someone goes and does a vacation search, they find us. So that's my take on it. But yeah, my whole business was ranking for the best restaurants in city, my whole website was based on that premise. And I wasn't offering actually something of like, real tangible value, like booking a vacation rental, and Google comes and stops on my traffic, like I'm not gonna be thrilled about it. So I totally understand where you're coming from. And I think that's a fair thing to point out. It's not something that we put on a of our reports necessarily directly, but it's like in our search console

summary like impressions, clicks by page, sorted descending, you know, highest click to lowest click. So you kind of forget that I'll go from there. All right, being aware of time here, we'll skip over to some other things here. YouTube. So yeah, same kind of comment or same joke as I made from before. Is there a meaningful alternative in terms of reach on YouTube? I don't believe there is. I don't think there's another video platform today that can give you the same kind of reach where you could publish a video on YouTube about your vacation properties, about your business, and you get all this essentially what amounts to almost organic traffic coming

in because people can find you on YouTube. There's like recommended, you know, I'm a big YouTube consumer. I watch a lot of stuff. I get as close to new stuff all the time, new music, you know, new videos, topics I'm interested in, et cetera you on YouTube. There's like recommended, I'm a big YouTube consumer. I watch a lot of stuff. I get exposed to new stuff all the time, new music, new videos, topics I'm interested in, et cetera, from YouTube. So it kind of is its own platform or channel in a way. It's not just video hosting, but if you're looking for other video hosting alternatives, Vimeo and Misty are the ones that we kind of came to mind or maybe could be good alternatives. If you don't just host like videos that you just have on your website for whatever reason on YouTube,

I think there's legit alternatives for that. But what's kind of your experience here on this video hosting marketing side of things? Yeah, I mean, I think you hit it on the head there. It's just TikTok isn't the same thing. Instagram isn't the same. You can make the argument that those are in the same discussion, but I think the difference on YouTube is

there is more long form content. There is more, more, more. That's it. So, so it is. So yeah, you can probably get by with TikTok. You can probably get by with Instagram. But truly, I mean, for talking about reach and the total package that YouTube is offering, it is a good luck roll. I mean, there just isn't anything else that's really going to give you the same end product from a delivery perspective, from the hosting perspective.

I mean, heck, you can edit your videos right within the platform too. I'm sure Instagram and then TikTok, you've got some capability there, but it is. There's a whole lot of functionality there. So I think it's going to be hard to decouple yourself from the YouTube side of things. Same thing, Google Maps and Google Business Profile. I think that that's one of those things that we did. We referenced probably a couple months ago now the Apple Maps side of things and getting some of those free listings and things like that. Bing has maps. They have kind of business profiles as well, but they're still not stuck, but they provide kind of 10 results. They provide still that more standard SERP with a little local pack there as well.

So I don't know. I do hope that there are some other opportunities because that's where you kind of have the most liability out there is that there's nobody stopping any, there's nothing stopping anybody from starting to just put bad reviews on your Google business profile.

And that doesn't just impact you on a business level, like, okay, I have three stars. That is a factor in your local SEO. And I think that that's something that it is, it does play such a large role, especially on Google, because in a lot of those AIO reviews, Google has reverted back to sending people to your Google business profile, not necessarily your branded website or anything like that. So I think that while I do hope there's an emergence of some other local business profile options

that are viable, on TripAdvisor, OnePoint, Yelp, things like that, they're just not there right now. So that is one of those on this list that that really scares me quite a bit. Yeah, yeah. I think your TikTok callout is probably the best, you know, alternative if we're being honest, you can get reach on TikTok, just like get reach on YouTube. I think that's fair.

But yeah, with you that, you know, there really is not necessarily a clear one there, the YouTube side of things. Yeah, maps and Google Business Profile. Yeah, you're kind of folding that in together. I think ultimately, I'm with you, there really is no alternative there. And I think, again, speaking of companies or businesses that have been pushed out, or they've complained about this Yelp, I think kind of leads the cause there. Yeah, on Google Maps, hey, we had a legit, you know, third party

review system, you've come in, and you push down the Yelp search results with Google, you know, Google restaurant ratings, reviews, things like that. But to be honest with you, I find Google ratings reviews to be better than Yelp reviews, where Yelp was, was a little bit more friendly, quote unquote, to like critical feedback. But it was one of those things where ultimately, I didn't find the best the quantity of reviews on Yelp is always lower than on Google's like there was so they lower that friction a little bit. And it's hard for

me to criticize Google when they're actually I think, helping the small business. Generally speaking, you're right, though, like if you get bad, quote unquote, bad, you know, reviews on Google, there really is no recourse for it. I mean, you can try to fill out a form and say, hey, it's not legitimate, but, you know, your chances of getting that actually removed is pretty low. So my take on this, the whole thing with legal my business or Google reviews in general, I think we've said this before, bad reviews are going to happen inevitably because you're dealing with a general public and the general public is full of a distribution of people.

Some of them are just going to leave bad reviews no matter what you do. You could, I think there was, I saw funny, it was actually a VRMA, I forget the name of the keyboard speaker, but she did the slide, she showed a slide, it's like a popular meme, where it's like, Dr. Lewis saved my life, four stars, there was like this review, and then Dr. Lewis like, quote tweeted it and was like, what else am I supposed to do? You know what I mean? Like, how in the world do I get that fifth star? Which was very funny. I'll give them some credit on that one. But you just got to beat it through a lot of good reviews, right? So like, if 90% of people come and deal with you are super happy to leave five

stars, you just got to get more of them to leave you five stars. And that's the way that you throttle that. So when you've inevitably get the three, four, five, six, one star views in a row, you can just tolerate it. It just you know, it's a little pebble thrown into an ocean of good reviews, not a boulder thrown into a little tiny kid swimming pool of good reviews, you know, that's kind of my take on it. Google vacation rentals. So this is kind of the last, I would say like more direct one

in some respect there. Google vacation rentals. I would say, what is the alternative? The alternative is you don't focus on this because I had a clip the other day on LinkedIn that did pretty well and a lot of people commented on it because I was like, this isn't meaningful despite the fact that Google search I think is very

meaningful, Google vacation rentals is not really meaningful right now. So what is the alternative here? I think the alternative is Google needs to get that product in better shape. We need to see more traction from that we need to see more results from that before we spend a lot of time talking about alternatives. And maybe that'll happen. Maybe it won't. But like, they've had a

while on this, and they haven't made a lot of progress from my inclination or from my data study. And there's no one like that's one thing to like you would think the year may just happened a few weeks ago, shouldn't Google be there and be like, we have Google vacation rentals or the biggest search platform in the world. Here's our making it better. And like, MIA, like, I haven't seen anyone from their company or anyone from Google actually talk about it. Maybe they just have too many other

fish to fry. And we're just not anywhere on their list. Maybe that's the issue. But yeah, any any thoughts on that one? Probably before we wrap up with a few two more here. I would agree. It's right now I want it's I think we both want it to be more traffic and booking source. I think anytime we can it to be more of a traffic and booking source. I think anytime we can add more channels to where we're bringing in traffic, that's a positive. Again, I think Bing and their recent, I think they just announced another partnership with

Expedia. Google's had that opportunity. That's the thing. I think the reason Google hasn't wanted more to happen in travel or Just vacation on so specifically is they got too much money tied in with their advertisers. So Until you're right until it's a meaningful traffic or booking source and we're seeing more Better, you know channel distribution for whatever you're doing there. Yeah I don't think there's, I think you

can optimize for other things. And when that is more of a actual driver of traffic and conversions, then shift the focus over there. But I think you nailed it on the head. There's that, it's just not there yet. Google has work to do. And I don't know if this is the area where they're focused. If Bing is going somewhere else with the search, I think that all of a sudden the search shift is going to happen. And again, we're going to kind of get left behind on the travel side of things in Google, which missed opportunity. Yeah, yeah. I'm with you on that one. Awesome. So two more things here that I think we can put about in this one. The last one or second last one is Google Workspace. A lot of our clients use Google Workspace. We use Google Workspace now. And boy, this service is good, but it has gotten expensive. I got my bill.

We're recording this year at the beginning of the month. And I got my bill a few days ago and we're up to several hundred dollars a month for what was supposed to be just email hosting. I remember it started at five bucks a month. And then over the years, they just keep sliding their price up. So it's had me, you know, my eyes wandered to other options out there. I previously used fast mail. So fast mail is I think a legitimate, you know, alternative to using Google Workspace. So this mail is, I think, a legitimate alternative to using Google Workspace. So this is like your email docs, your G Suite, all those kind of different platforms inside of there, Google Sheets, et cetera. But at the end of the day, it's hard to

swap, not because I don't want to, but just because it's adding so much friction to the process that it would be challenging for me to switch. So I think they got me. I think they know they got me. And I think they're charging appropriately. So I've gone and sort of optimized my Google workspace, but recently getting rid of old people that are not really working on our team are not working enough. And I'm a little more careful about who I hand out Google workspace or like branded emails to nowadays, it used to be like, Oh, anyone doing like any project work for me here, you get a branded email, that way we keep everything on brand now I'm like

a little bit more cautious and guarded with that because the cost has gone so much but fast mail is what I use obviously a lot of our clients use like the Microsoft branded products. I just don't really have an experience with that. I'm just not like quote unquote, a Microsoft guy. So I just can't really tell you like the quality of those different other outlook or other similar alternatives there. Maybe you have more knowledge there on that side of things, Paul, because I'm pretty ignorant. I've been on that side. It's that I mean, as I right now I use Outlook and it works fine. But I think the true benefit and where Google saw

the opportunity is that they tied on all of these additional services for free to a certain extent. I mean, it's not a lot. It allows you to kind of get down the rabbit hole. But I think, you know, if you're looking at making the transition away from this, the problem is if all your documentation is in, you know, Google Drive, you got to resave documents and do things like that, import and export and do all that. Google's got a really nice business system in place

there when you think of it that way. So I mean, maybe switching over email, I think that definitely makes sense. But the whole G Suite, doing Google Meet and doing all these other things, yeah, you can use Zoom. I think there's like four or five different areas though or four or five different probably technology solutions that you would have to fasten together to End up with something that you're gonna pay for again, maybe maybe it is gonna wash out when you're when you're looking at the ultimate cost there, but it's I think Google's kind of they've got a good thing here and I I just I wouldn't want to have to make that transition with thousands and thousands of documents and spreadsheets.

And again, if you're running your business through that system, I think they got you. Yeah. I just did a quick Google. So I didn't verify this information, but this is according to a thrive agency.com. They say that Google did $16 billion last year in total top line revenue on Google workspace and related cloud products and services. So that's a pretty damn impressive business. We would be if any company said, Hey, I'm doing 16 billion a year and top line revenue across anything, we'd be like, that's a meaningful business. And that's just what their Google, you know, like almost like throw on thing that they did later on after search was making, you

know, how many billions and billions of dollars that it made. So yeah, that's a pretty solid product they've got in there. And like you, I mean, if they raise the price at some point, I would deal with the pain of what you're describing, but it'd have to be a little bit further. You know, so I think they know that I think they're optimizing for that. And they've got me by the throat there, so to speak on that one. So last one, I mean, we could do a whole episode on this sort of thing. Couldn't we write Google Gemini and we'd done previous ones actually already on like AI tools or these different ones out there, maybe we'll could do a whole episode on this sort of thing, couldn't we, right? Google Gemini. And we've done previous ones actually already on AI tools

or these different ones out there. Maybe we'll just do a quick shout out here. So Gemini is Google's large language model product. ChatGPT, I think, kind of popularized these, if you want to say that way. But Gemini, obviously, is their version of it. I think you've used it a little bit more than I have. I've been more of a ChatGPT fan.

It feels like we often end up on the wrong site. We don't seem to always do the same thing, Paul. It's interesting. We have many shared interests. But when picking software, different platforms, they seem to always end up like you're an SEM Rush guy, I'm an Ahrefs guy. You know, you like Android, I like iPhone.

So it's interesting. You know, keeps the variety, the spice there very high, but anyways, I digress. Claude and Perplexe are two other ones that comes to mind. I have used Claude. I found it to be solid. It didn't seem to do anything different than ChatDBT for me. Maybe it's because I wasn't using all the latest models

and things like that. I've been told by people who are like on my team on the programming side of things, that Claude's programming knowledge and capabilities better, but I can't speak to that because it's not something that I do. And perplexity I think actually was earlier to this whole search GPT idea

where it's like going out and indexing the web and pulling that information back into a large language model. So check those things out. I mean, I don't really have any strong reaction right there right now. I would say if anything, chat GPT is in the lead here. I would assume Gemini is number two.

Then I think Cloud Perplexity and all these other LLMs are really taking up the rear at this moment in time. But anything can happen. I mean, this is such a rapid dynamic space. I saw a Google Trends chart the other day where it was showing all these different search criteria, like large language models. Then it was comparing it to someone searching

for chocolate chip recipe. And it was like, the demand is so much higher higher for these other things than or so much lower, excuse me, for the other things than chocolate chip recipes. So we think that's like, if we're in the world of like marketing or tech or business, we like, oh yeah, these things are changing the game. But like your average person who just does whatever for a living as a firefighter has no idea what AI is and chat GPT is and all these sorts of things. So this is still very, very early on. I think a lot of things are going to change and evolve over the next few years. And we'll see where it all ends

up. But I don't think Gemini is any risk of like being a monopoly anytime soon, because I don't even think they have the bulk of the market share right now. No, no. And I mean, the moves that Google's made, I think they signal that they were behind, they felt behind. And then there's, I mean, there's a whole bunch of stuff. Again, this is a whole episode in and of itself here. You'd be silly to say that chat GPT isn't taking the lead and especially probably took it a little further with the search side of things. And notably timing-wise,

when Google is really struggling to come together and verbalize, conceptualize, what is it that is making them stand out right now? I mean, AI is driving results. So AI drives results on Google, AI drives results on ChatGPT, it drives it on all of these. So where are we getting better results? And right now I get value out of Gemini still, I'm not gonna say that I don't,

but the better answers still come from ChatGPT and the better output, again, depending on what you're using it for, still comes from ChatGPT. So I do. I think that this is one of those where we might have four different names there in a year. Then what do we look like next? I don't think so, but this is the fun part. This is where you want to know how to leverage all these, not just, you know, leveraging one against the other against the other. So, yeah, I don't I don't think Google Gemini is going to run away and be the be all end all or be something that's a non negotiable moving forward. Chat GPT might be the case if they're using the Bing Webmaster tools and stuff like that.

We will see with that one. It's fun. We get to deal with some fun stuff here is all I got to say. **Jadeg Lyle** Yeah. Well, I think it's one of those things we talked about this idea before, too, of the fundamentals don't change, but the layers on top change quite a bit. So the tools we use today are different than the tools we used five or 10 years ago. But the fundamentals of marketing your business getting brighter. speaking of the LinkedIn commentary today, like someone was saying, like, I don't think using these tools are using these understand these market channels as a replacement for brand awareness. And I'm like, No, of course not, you know, like, of course, it's not a replacement for that. There's not there's no replacement for people wanting to

do business with you. There's no replacement for desire. Like, if you tap into what people are actually after, and they seek you out, then your marketing is done. That's all you need to do. Then the only question is, how can I tell more people about it? How can I get more people into my world? So that's kind of my take on it. But yeah, Google is this large, like I said, it's not an 800 pound gorilla, it's an 8,000 pound gorilla. It's in the room. It's got all these little tentacles in your business. Maybe you could consider or understand like here's our alternatives out there. Maybe you can find something that's better for your business. One thing that'd be good for us that hopefully is good for you

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