Heads In Beds Show - Here's The Problems With Vacation Rental Marketing Attribution

Episode Date: March 18, 2026

In this episode Conrad and Paul talk "All About Attribution" including how ads platforms track "bookings made", limits of pixels, how to proceed when you get conflicting data, Meta vs Google and a LOT more... Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteBook A Call With Us🚀 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 of Med Show presented by Build Up Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacational 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. We're live, Paul. What's going on?

What's happening? It's almost March Madness when we're recording this. This is kind of a mini March Madness this week. We got a lot of conference tournaments going on. We got a little golf tournament going on. on the unofficial fifth major. I don't like that, but whatever it is what it is fun. It's a fun course to watch and it's it's fun to see the pros struggle a little bit, which is, I can always appreciate there a little bit. But it's kind of a fun time of year. How are you doing, sir?

Yeah. Is the snow softening? Is the weather improving it all up there? Are you still kind of in the thick of it as it were? In the last 10 days, I've had four days of snow on the ground, six days of green on the ground interspersed within that period. So it's now warm enough that it's not sticking. So I did hear a bad rumor from my brother-in-law that we are still supposed to get, you know, 13 to 14 inches over the next two weeks. So who knows? Just to party up here.

Just you don't like the weather. Wait 15 minutes and you'll see something dramatically different. So I, I don't know. I, you know, if I, in this, there's obviously like natural problems here. but like, you know, why would people spend so much time in these cold places? Like what, like, if you think back to like, let's say the first land, you know, masses that people could spend time on, right? Why did everyone not just go to warm destinations?

Like, I feel like that's someone that knows history and, you know, the migration of humans better than us needs to get us to understand that. Like, if it was freezing and I knew if I went south, it would be warmer. Like at some point you figure that out, wouldn't you just do that? I would have to say, I mean, it is. I, we're still here. I can't say. I don't know.

There's after a while, there's a brain. Warp that happens that you don't want to leave. Like you have to be able to be in about the weather or you can't live a day. So this is this is what we have because, you know, San Diego would be, I don't know, sunny every day. I can't deal with that. Yeah. It's so funny.

There was a Peter Thiel interview that I saw a clip of on Twitter the other day. And they were like, why did you spend so much time in California? And I think Peter Thiel asked the interviewer. He's like, have you been in California? And he's like, yeah. And he's like, have you lived there for like a month or two at a time? He's like, no, no, I just visited. He's like, if you live there for a month or two, you'd understand why, I spent so much time in California

because Peter Thiel presumably unlimited, you know, financial resources. He can live anywhere in the world. And he's like, well, the weather here is the best. Why would I live anywhere else? You know, it's like, yeah, that kind of makes perfect sense. Don't overthink. Yeah. You know what people often overthink, though, I think, Paul, they struggle with a lot.

Attribution, you know, and I asked you, and we did some quick digging of our archives here, which are very expansive at this point. And I don't think we've ever done necessarily a dedicated attribution episode. So here we are new topics still, you know, even though we're a few hundred into this thing, always kind of a new thing. So, all right, so the problem or the goal today is to go through some of the three, two, mostly two, but let's say call it three problems with attribution. Why attribution is so hard, why it's challenging, why we can't push a button to get it

right, dear clients slash vacation rental managers out there, if we could click the button, I promise you we would. But we'll explain a little bit more in detail today of why we can't seem to get these number to match up perfectly. And at least for you to understand what we can do about it, what we can't do about it and how to try to get it a little bit closer to, you know, reality or how to get it a little bit closer to the mean because we're told nowadays, right, that it's like, oh, we have access to all this data systems and we have AI and we have machine learning and we can put a man on the moon and we can,

you know, ask a chat bot anything in the world and it all works instantly. And yet we can't actually consistently fire an analytics tracking script when a booking is made to where it matches the BMS system 100% in time. So that's a, that's kind of the broader overall topic today. But I don't know, like what's your thought process here, I guess on like this core problem? Like, if you just kind of given up on it, do you still see, like, do you, do you like me sort of get fooled by the fact that you think you're going to be able to figure this out one day and get us work perfectly? Or what's your read on it? I mean, for me, it goes like, it's a little history. I need any history lesson of, like, remembering going back when I had to like try to write the scripts for some e-com. Like, send it over the web team.

And say, okay, this is what we're trying to do. This is what you need. This is what we need to pass through. These are the values, make these data later. Like, there was some different times. And looking at it from that perspective of where we were versus where we are now over the last course of the last 10-ish years, there's improvement. I mean, this is where this is where credit is due, whether it's the PMS systems, whether it's the web companies, whether everybody comes together and has tried to improve it. There are. There are very few systems that aren't going to be able to give you some type of reporting. But again, this is where the gap emerges. In some cases, it's a big gap, in some cases it's a small gap.

But really, it's a matter of ultimately the place of record, the place of truth, is still to be your property management system. But we do. We want to ensure that the numbers that we're seeing in Google Analytics, if you use a different analytic system, maybe it's an Adobe analytics, or maybe you're trying something else that's more custom. That may be one of the primary limitations is, that we're working trying to pass through information third party system third party system and

ultimately because we're enabling these through a tag manager and we're implementing a lot of middlemen along the way yeah we're not nobody's working with completely 100% high speed internet there's factors that come into this that we just can't control like this fire's here this fire's here this ad blocker over here we've got a lot of technical boundaries and physical boundaries. So knowing both of the numbers is very important. And if you are blind to these numbers, you have a big omission in your business and you're reporting that you need to fix. So that's the long-winded way of saying this is a really important discussion. We probably should have had it before this. But it's also a complex. It's not straightforward. It's not, I mean,

we know the booking process itself is not linear. We know that it's not a one-click close, it can be on the sales side of things, the biz dev side of things. This is a travel planning process at one point was probably, I think we estimated, Skift estimated, everybody was estimating, somewhere between 25 and 30 touch points, maybe 35, depending on when you were looking at. That was offline media. That was online media. That was all the different searches that you did along the way.

I think that that has streamed. That has been streamlined a little bit, but there's still a lot of touchpoints that happen. and trying to identify all the different spots. So social media ad you saw, the display ad over here, the email that you received 12 months ago, the Google search you did and saw an ad, this Google search you did and saw an organic result. All of these are potential ways that someone could interact with your business

directly, indirectly fill in the gaps. So that's what we're going to try to do. We're going to try to fill in the gaps and show you how you can at least understand and find this data and use it so that you're understanding that pathway moving forward. Yeah, I think I think it brings us to good points there. And like just to define some of the basics too as we got started here. When we're saying tracking, what, you know, Paul and I are typically referring to is data

that you're feeding from a booking made on your website back to most commonly Google Analytics or Google ads or Metapixel. Those are like the three most common ways that we feed data back. But there's other ad systems you may have explored as well. but those are kind of the ones that you're going to spend probably 90% of your time on. And you're trying to understand the amount of revenue from that booking. Now, even within that, we could have a five-minute discussion around when we say revenue, what are we tracking?

What aren't we tracking? Right. You know, if you make a booking on your website nowadays, depending on how you label and display your rates, you may actually not break down fees to the guests, but you might want to break that down in your reporting. So there's a lot of layers within that, even that you could spend a lot of time on. But I think the core of it is that the benefit of doing this in analytics, instead of saying, you know, someone listening may say, I can imagine Paul someone listening and saying,

okay, fine, I'll just go to my PMS and look there. Nothing wrong with that. Definitely look in your PMS. But the problem with that is that it does break some of the elements of what we're attempting to do with attribution tracking. So even if our data is not perfect, when we do have this tracked in analytics and ads or Metapixel, we're feeding that information back to those systems, which is in theory going to help them find more people that are going to make a booking.

So for example, Google is one of the ways that you can tell Google to, quote, quote, optimize your ads or show your ads more often the right person is by feeding back this data to Google of this particular person clicked, this particular person then made a booking. They spent $2,424 in rent, so that's valuable information to have. And then we can send that data back to the system, and it will try to find more people like that. So there's a lot of pros and upsides to doing the tracking in those different systems, analytics, Google ads, and Metapixel. But to Paul's point there, that I think you described well, it is very messy and it's never going to be 100% accurate. You've got to live with that. And if someone has a solution that gets it

100% accurate, I'm all the years. Maybe you can make it accurate on 10 bookings a month. I don't think you have any chance of making it accurate once you get over 100, 200, 300 bookings a month. Like it just tends to be very off. But there are things you can do to improve the accuracy. I have noticed that. So, for example, like some of our clients we started doing, like I mentioned, like when a booking comes in, having a separate line item for each fee has been a valuable tool in our

tool belt, pushing in a transaction ID or something that's unique to that particular transaction, even better when you can match it up to a transaction ID in your PMS system. That's kind of a sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't type situation that I've noticed so far with some clients that we have. But if we can do that, then we can quickly refer back to like booking ID 7231-4-97, and we can go look that up in the PMS of choice no matter what that happens to be, and then get that information and say, hey, this is what tracked in analytics. This is what came through on the back end of the PMS once the credit card was approved.

That's one way where you can kind of improve these things a little bit. But to your point, I mean, there's so many reasons why I think like ad blockers, browser extensions, you know, it's been estimated at least according to some of the research that we did and, you know, some of the Googleing that we did beforehand that like it could be 20, 30%, maybe people that are actually blocking, you know, some forms of tracking scripts. Like, again, by default, like even the Metapixel for a while was basically nerfed on Safari, on iPhone, which is the most popular mobile browser that you're probably getting clicks from on Facebook and Instagram advertising.

So it's like there's so many layers to that that, you know, make it really tricky. And then even worse, there's some sites I worked on a site the other day, Paul, and it was a major PMS template website and they have a cookie consent banner. So they would click from the main website over to like the booking page on the PMS website. and then a cookie consent banner, if you didn't click, yes, nothing fired. So like no Metapixel, no analytics, no ads tag, nothing. And so we were seeing cookies come in,

but no one was clicking yes on the cookie consent banner because it was so subtle. And it just killed all of our ability to track. So we're figuring out ways to take that off right now because we don't think we need it anyways. So all these things become so messy, unfortunately, and tricky. And it's your job as the marketer and as the owner to some degree to try to get as accurate as you can,

but realize at some point your team has probably taken it as far as they can. And then there's always going to be some layerouts. their control. So my sort of thought process going forward as to kind of fold it back your way is just basically to pull both numbers now. It used to be out just looking at looks data. Now if I can, I go into the PMS of our clients and I download that data too and kind of cross check it and say, okay, where to be stand? What's the differences between these two? You know, how did the bookings actually kind of come through the process? And that's been helpful because I've seen these numbers

sometimes be off by 10% in which case it's probably a reasonable number and most commonly we're underreporting on the website side of things, generally speaking. There's some exceptions to that or you might over-report. Yeah, and then I go look at the data and I go, oh, we actually did more revenue than I thought we did. This podcast idea stem from a client who I had had time to do it before we hopped on a call because we were talking about a different issue. And we went through that issue and he said, oh, we had 88 direct bookings last month.

And this is like a relatively new client for us. And I was like fantastic. Like, I love to hear that, you know, given that we're starting from a much lower level than that. And I go and analytics pop up in really quickly and I see like 54 or something like that. I'm like, whoa, like we're way off here. So I did some more digging and maybe there's ways we can improve that a little bit with some of the things that we found.

but for the most part, that's not an uncommon story. Unfortunately, so I think that's the key part of the puzzle. But yeah, you know, picking it the problem and saying, what can we do about it? You know, what are kind of some other things you've employed or tools and tactics that you've used in the past to try to get this data as accurate as possible? What are your thoughts? While it's silly sometimes, being making sure that you're fully building out a UTM tag, a manual UTM tag, I think that that's something that I think we overlook that often.

because in a lot of cases, Google's smart enough to understand where a lot of traffic is coming from now, having referral sites and having some peck, some of the tools you're using are automatically generating those UTM tags for you. But that's really what's feeding at least that data through. If you're not feeding the correct, accurate data that you want to be seeing and capturing on the back end of Google Analytics coming through, they were missing a big part there. So I do think that going down to that campaign level, going down to the content level, in some cases, if you can go and find that and harvest that in the back end, it's valuable. I think that something that Google continues to improve on is that you can see keyword search query information on some of the strings that are happening. So being able to tie that back to obviously the individual clicks and the conversions that are coming through, that's huge.

I do. I think that the attribution path report in Google Analytics is one of the best spots to find. You know, closing the gap, what we have in the notes is one of the big pain points is Google is big on last click attribution. They say it's data driven, and I will grant that they have started to try to give credit to other sources. The Conrad is absolutely not agreeing with this right now. I'm not going to let them talk about it yet. I'll get them get there. But truly, last click attribution, I just talked about why that's not a really important attribution factor for our space

is because there are so many touches. And we're not even capturing all of them in a lot of cases. While we can still see that report and see the touch points along the way, I remember a time where those were significantly longer and consistently consistent. I mean, consistently longer. Now, you may see five, six touch points on an individual conversion that comes through maybe maybe 10 if you're lucky. And you got you're really lucky that they haven't blocked you off at some point along the way.

Again, at any of those channels when they could have interacted with your brand. But being able to see, I mean, I talked about it on your LinkedIn post showing that email that the conversion that came in, the booking that came in in in February of 2026 from an email that went out in 2023 and was followed up with a touchpoint from an email from 2025, a little closer, but then another one from 2023. This is the type of stuff where when you have that tracking in place, you do get a better understanding of what are those touch points. And another thing on that report is the time to the ultimate conversion, because how,

having a better understanding that the first time they see that between, you know, you could have one day commence, you could have 22 days commence and really understanding what that booking window is looking like. You know, we can do a lot of measurement with Google ads and understanding some of those audiences when they're doing some of those searches, you know, based on the intent and this month versus that month. But it does. It gives you a much better window into.

that process. Yeah, yeah. The one, the one, one stop shop is, it's cool to see and you get that, those insights. But seeing two visits, three visits, six visits come through from organic, two visits come through direct. And then like seeing how people are touching your brand, uh, it does. I think it helps you ultimately build a better experience, build better answers into the system that are going to allow you to say, okay, there's, this is a week long process. I need to nurture them with a little more email marketing. You know, do having that, when you capture that email, making sure you are making some of those initial touch points a little closer, knowing that that booking window maybe or seven to ten days from their initial interaction with your brand.

It's not the report it used to be, but it's still giving you insights and telling you the touch points. And is it giving you the right breakdown of, oh, this many conversions came from this source and this. No, it's not because it's giving you 20% came from social and 16% came from organic and are those really good numbers? No, they're not. But I want to see the path. I want to understand. I want to know what's happening.

And if we're not tagging things appropriately, we don't get that visibility regardless. So kind of, you know, I think that's one step. And then working as directly as you can with those booking engines and website companies and PMSs and doing everything you can through a tag manager container, data layer values, those are ways you can try to extract as much of this data out as possible. It's kind of like the thought process I would have or encourage people to think with is like use, get all the best data you can and then use it like a giant grain of salt. Like it's not a grain of salt, you know, or whatever that data expression is.

But it's like use it to help guide you, you know, into making good decisions and then understand the limitations of what you're looking at. I think the trouble that most people have when they kind of get into this is that it's even too problematic. Like you mentioned analytics. When you log into an analytics dashboard now, GA4 dashboard now and just load up acquisition traffic, let's say, by channel. That's first report you load. There's like 85 numbers in there, right? At least, if not 100 numbers, right? And it's giving you stuff that just doesn't really often help you make a better decision. Like, oh, time on site load, that automatically means bad. Well, it's like not really, like necessarily. Like, for example,

mobile traffic coming in from Facebook and Instagram, author has very low time on site. that doesn't mean that there's no influence happening from that time on site. You know what I mean? And then people say, oh, the time on site's 30 seconds. That's a bad thing. And it's like, well, have you actually used a website for 30 seconds? Like, you can do a lot 30 seconds. People don't feel that way.

Like, you can read an entire property description. You can put a dates. You can look at a photo calendar. Like, I bet if I put someone on one of their vocational websites, clicked a stopwatch and said, okay, stop after 30 seconds. Use your website like a user. I bet they would go like 20 seconds and then be like, yeah, okay, that was 30 seconds. And I'd be like, no, that wasn't even close.

So that's the thing, too, right? like because of the way that a lot of this tracking works, you log in analytics and you get overwhelmed numbers very quickly, and then you need someone to kind of go in there and help you understand it and explain it. I also wonder, like, you know, we talk about these AI use cases. I feel like AI has,

someone has got to solve that a little bit where like you get a report from analytics that's like a written report of like, here's what we saw going on, here's what makes sense, here's what happens. And I think most business owners, most, even marketing managers and most vacational companies,

they want like maybe seven to 10 numbers at most, right, of like number bookings made revenue, traffic sources, like you said, maybe top campaigns that did have higher levels of engagement, doing event tracking around like photo gallery clicks or starting checkout is helpful too, by the way. Like those are good indicators of you're on the right track, even if those aren't leading to bookings. The booking is the last step, you know, so that there's a lot of steps before that that you can look at and try to evaluate its performance from. And it also depends on like, what are you going to do once you know that information? I think because there's people that

can spend all day in analytics, they think, oh, I know everything happening in my website from analytics standpoint. Let's assume for a second that it's measuring everything properly. But at the end of the day, you have to go back into the real world and do marketing with that information. So I think you've got to like have this thing like a barbell, man. Like I think you just don't want all the weight on one side. I'm going to analyze every single point of data here. I think you've got to take what you can get from attribution from analytics from all these things and then use some level of your intuition and some level of, you know, what you see working well where you're seeing real engagement come from, real

guess come from. And then double down on those things and then kind of readjust every, you know, two to four months basically based on additional information you get because it's often common that we'll start with a client on one path and then we change our approach after we gather new information that is a mix of our chats or interviews are sort of like psychographic conversations with the client and the data that we see in the back end. So like to give one example, then I'll kick it back over your way with some of the other elements here. We have a client who we just launched this campaign like yesterday or the day before and it was a proposal campaign. The premise was that people were booking this particular property to do proposals, you know, for their partner.

You know, so we had this, this man come in a book this like three nights stay. And it's like a, it's like a very unique stay style property that we're marketing. And they did a proposal. And what would trigger this in the conversation is that he bought every upsell. So like he went to check out and he bought like the romance package upsell. He bought like the extra boat upsell. It's like in a water destination. He bought all these upsells. And then, you know, he told the story after he checked out, oh, this was such a great stay. I left the five-star review. I proposed to my now fiance here at this particular vacation rental spot and it was amazing and so we're building a whole campaign around do your proposal here at this spot but it came from yes one booking

so on paper it's like hey that's one booking out of 25 they did that month direct it's not it's not a massive thing but we think there's something there and we're going to pull on that thread and see what we can learn from it and that would have been missed if you just looked at analytics you would have said oh one person took an upsell that's not massively uncommon that people take an upsell that's kind of why the upsells exist

only by digging deeper under the surface past just the attribution layer, the data layer of Google Analytics in a Metapixel, that we figure out that there's something, we think there might be something there. And we're going to uncover it and do all campaign around it on Facebook. We have creative now running proposed here, you know, person here, that sort of thing. You're a special stay for your special day, like all this kind of fun stuff that we did with it. And, you know, TBD on this, if this will work or not. But I think that's kind of where the data has to help you guide you a little bit.

Then you pulp that book and look at it. And then you have a conversation about what happened. And then you come up with this kind of like what actually matters at the end of the day, which is like a creative marketing campaign that can drive results and drive bookings. I still think that the worst thing that Google did with analytics, with G4 analytics, and I get event-based versus user,

that's the key, but what they did by creating all these manual events or these superfluous, let's use a big word, superfluous events, I mean, it's junk. Well, it's clutter too in the dashboard. Roll, yeah, right, correct, correct. It's not junk, it's clutter. It's items that all of a sudden your website went from whatever.

This average session duration to now you have 17,000 total events on 1,300 sessions. Well, okay, so it's a lot going on. But what is actually happening to move the need? What's happening on the key pages? What should I actually be measuring? And I do. I think that that's where, old man yelling at clouds for lack of a better thing because Google's not going to move the needle because of me. But if they started with more of a bland system where you're not getting anything, then you're actually doing your own custom events.

You don't want events. Don't do events. Like, that's fine. I think that that's something. I kind of dig that idea. For how many people actually do any type of customization, they're very few, very few times to actually see customization. The most common event I see is purchases. maybe lead forms, something like that.

As far as actually engagement tactics, you know, add to car. We know funnel steps, let's say. Building out that funnel and really getting a visibility, I don't see a lot of people doing that. And I don't think our industry is unique in that because if there's an industry that was built for it,

I think we have some sites that really should be built to get that customization in place. So if we don't need it, what's the likelihood anybody else is really going to need all of those those puffy little stats that really aren't helping you move neal you want to know how many people are hitting the site you want to know how many people are hitting your most important pages what actions they're taking on those pages that's it you want to customize those let's do it let's have some fun there because then we do we get into being able to track and fill in some of these gaps you know we'll talk about the next

one on the list of your phone calls yeah the telephony Well, the telephony business is not the same as it once was in our space. It still drives a lot. It drives a lot of business. And I think, obviously, the ease at which, and again, let's give the agencies some, the web companies some credit here, they're building better, more easy to use websites on your mobile so that you don't necessarily have to call. You can click, click, click, and for millennials, we love it.

We don't want to have to talk to people on the phone. It's phenomenal. But there are still a whole lot of people who are a booking aid. and have a whole lot of resources to be able to say, hello, I'd like to book X, Y, Z, whatever it is. How are we tracking that? There's some systems in place. There's CRMs. You want dedicated numbers, dynamic numbers.

Those are nice. But ultimately, it's still just the same attribution, high wire act we're trying to perform everywhere else is trying to figure out and balance and say, okay, well, we saw a call come over here, but how are we attaching it to this user? who took out cookies over, okay. So I think that that's really tough. And the reality is that most people use a phone system as a phone system. It's not a true CRM where they're doing all the tracking

and really putting the insights into understanding the attribution trail, even through that way and using it as a marketing tool moving forward. It's the system. So I do. I think that that's a huge blind spot. that I hope everybody out there has visibility into that. But that is. That's going to impact what we are able to report and attribute to the digital side

because how do we account for those touchpoints that undoubtedly happen? Well, and the phone call thing is interesting because like when I think back to the start of my career, you know, I had this client that I still work with today, who I remember told me this. You know, I think there was a month where he spent like $2,000 in Google Ads and I tracked like $12,000 of revenue on his website. And this was an online booking was like we started getting tracking working, the good old universal analytics days like you opined on earlier, you know, where data was just a little bit

more accurate than it was today, which is funny when you think about it. You know, and I'm doing the math and I'm thinking, okay, 2K to make 12K, right? He only keeps 20% of that. So he only keeps, what do he keep $2,200, $2,200 or something like that, that he's got all his expenses on. I'm like, this math, you know, not really knowing much about the business at that time. It was different from industries that worked in previously, you know, and I was like, I don't know about this. You know, once I kind of dug in the hood and he goes, he looked to me and he said, you got to double that number right there, you know, because whatever you see on the website, I did about double on phone reservations from Google ads. So he's like, if you measure 20 grand of the website, I bet I did

another 40K and phone call. Like that was kind of his ratio at the time. And then as we kind of went along, it was funny. Like at one point it became to be, it was like 100% more. So if he did 20k in the website, he might have done 20K in phone calls. And now it's like 80K in the website, maybe 5K in phone calls, right? Like it's, you know, it's just such a shift over time. So it's not that they're not there. And I think if you're fighting to understand, is this marketing actually working, you know, direct book, direct booking marketing working is, am I profitable? You've got to look at every reasonable explanation. And I think you do have to get out of this mindset of like, every single ad dollar has to be, quote unquote, proving that it's profitable. Because like I said,

I think you're a cat chasing your tail if you do that more often than not. And the chances that you're going to get the response that you think that you're going to get out of that are probably again lower than you think because the nature of how these platforms work. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't account for and demand better results from advertising. We should as both advertisers and as agency runners like you and I are. We run ads. But it also doesn't mean that like, you know, you're going to get to some utopia where everything works properly. But yeah, the phone call thing's huge, as well as just like quotes in general, I would say, just to put a close to that. And I'm curious your thoughts. A lot of our clients will get not necessarily phone call, but they'll

get like a message or something that eventually gets turned into a quote. The quote gets a, you know, a link sent over, you know, to that guest and they're booking through some portal link on a PMS platform or something, you know, in communication. So it's technically an online booking, but it's not like a booking that starts and finished on the website. It's kind of, there was like some meandering that happened during that process, which is very common. I think that the property managers, and more general, the people who are looking to chase down every dollar are more interested in turning channels off than opening things up. And that's, again, it's, I think it's a mindset shift that people have to get. I think understanding

is it's key. This is why we're talking about having the conversation. We wouldn't be having the conversation if it wasn't important. But I do. I think that that's when it is that important that you were seeing X amount attributed to each channel. And that is the focus where we're not focusing on just understanding where it's coming from.

It's really making sure everything is proving on its value than we are. We're more interested in keeping that front of mind as opposed to overall user experience. What is generating more downstream as opposed to? to just where we can cut things off maybe midstream there. And that's something that you have your own business. You have business priorities. We all have business priorities. We get that.

But allowing your focus to get more to that, the experience that that's helping people drive as opposed to this has to be 4 to 1. This has to be 7 to 1. This has to be 9 to 1. And if it's not, then we turn it off because it's contributing to 12 to 1 over here or 15 to 1 over here or 7 to 1 over here. I think, again, to think that these are all stand-alone numbers

and that one channel does not impact the other is short-sighted, a little naive and little silly. So here's that. But I think if I could, I agree with you, but obviously if I could steal man the property ventures angle, it would be if I can't see it and if you can't prove it to me, then they might have the opinion in a low-margin, tough year of I need to turn things off and kind of see what happens. So that's a tricky part about it,

right? Like if you don't have the right mindset on your marketing and your advertising, it's so easy to like shoot yourself in the foot. At least with the BB gun, maybe not like a shotgun, right? But at least like harm yourself in ways that you're probably not seen. And so that's the piece of the puzzle that I think some people just don't always understand. And that's why like getting to be a good size property manager I think is so critical if you want to get some success on direct bookings. I'll refer back, excuse me, to the key data dashboard data that was presented at Darm back in December. And I've referred that to that day. data point now, probably two or three dozen times. And it's the fact that the biggest jump in

direct bookings is when someone goes from, it's like 99 to, or sorry, it's like 49 to 99 to the 100 to 199 bucket in key data dashboard data sets. That's when you go from like maybe averaging around 20% direct bookings, 23, 24% I think is what it is, all the way as high as like 35, 45%, there's people in that data set. So getting a little bit bigger, getting to be a bigger property manager creates a little bit more room to kind of experiment. And then your site starts to convert better. like there's kind of these like multiple benefits that you see and then you're not as worried about it you know i would say too on the attribution side where you need to justify every dollar because it's like you've actually built you know yourself ready for it and i've had learned this hard way you know i'd call with a client the

other day who made me listen to this podcast i'm not sure i think you might have found us this way and he said to me and he said to me it's something interesting and it's like i might not be ready for direct bookings yet that's what he said to me and we'd send traffic on the website and it wasn't converting well enough to really justify it there's a few reasons why i think on the website itself and he's got rare properties, but it's not like a typical vacation market. So as I kind of stack up the reasons of maybe where it's there, but it's not as profitable as it could be. I thought it was an interesting comment. And I never heard anyone say that way, say that before. But it makes some sense when I think about some of the nature of how many properties he has his location, you know, how many

surges are actually occurring those sorts of things. But it doesn't mean that like there's nothing that he can do. It just means that maybe he wasn't ready for running ads at that scale. But we did run them for a while. We gave plenty of, you know, attribution tracking data to the two Google ads to figure out what was working. We're getting bookings off it. It's just the math isn't working. even if we're giving it the most optimistic projections the mask not working. So I'm not saying like ignore all the data. Neither of us are saying that, of course. We're saying you have to take the data, contextualize it within your business,

and realize that there's not a number that you're shown in dashboard on Google Ads or analytics is not a perfect representation of what's going on because of all these reasons. And do your best, you know, due diligence, et cetera, to kind of fire up a system to say, all right, what are some reasons why this would be different? What are some things that we can change to try to measure it? And I think that all these platforms are, well, not perfect, directionally accurate. it to some degree. So if you're turning, your advertising spent off and you see a big decrease in direct bookings, right? It's like, okay, we knew, we know why that's the case, right?

And then over time, as you add more inventory, it's like, we have clients who have added a lot of inventory and not change their ad spend. And we almost have to like a little bit of a sit down with them of like, hey, this site's converting a lot better, good news. But like, you're probably not really getting all the benefit you can now because you've added 25 homes to this website and you're still spending $2,500 a month on ads or $3,500 a month on ads. And you're almost doing yourself a disservice of just, you know, not your owner's not enough of a great service on advertising because we're under investing. Like, that's not an uncommon thing for us to find.

So, yeah, I think between, you know, like, to kind of wrap up where we, where we've talked about, the data will be imperfect for a lot of reasons. Ad blockers, browser extensions, people just, codes not firing properly, etc. Pull down your PMS data for direct bookings. Also pull down your analytics data. Try to see what the difference is. Try to measure that too over like maybe a few months. Go pull November, December, January, February, you know, that sort of thing.

And then kind of look at it and say, okay, how are things kind of shifting around? Fix what you can. if there's cookie banners you can get rid of, if there's things that you can improve with your web developer, do so. You know, no, that's not perfect, but try to get it as accurate as possible. Last Girk attribution as kind of a secondary thought here is always going to lead you down a path of the last thing they do. That is, again, not often how discovery happens.

Like, that's the problem with brand search on Google. Brand search on Google gets all the credit for a half dozen, maybe even a dozen different marketing channels that are leading people to that, you know, that step, that process. But again, you don't know that until you've actually kind of seen how these things work. Look at your Metapixel data. look at Google ads, you know, tag traffic data, look at analytics to kind of form a more complete picture. And then, yeah, like do your best to kind of figure these things out for any bookings that are happening outside your system that are direct. So phone reservations,

online quotes, et cetera, those kind of all, you know, fall into that metric. Put those as part of your overall marketing efforts. If you are open to it, yeah, ask people, hey, how'd you hear about us? Say, how'd you find us? That sort of thing. It's not uncommon for, you know, clients that we work with to say, well, I saw you maybe first on Airbnb or Verbo and then they made a direct booking, you know, because they went and searched them offline. I'm happy that occurs. Now was our advertising responsible for that? Not really. But it's like it's part of the puzzle, you know, and that person is now in your ecosystem. They're willing to book direct. Like, that's the kind of person you want a lot of so you can get more of them in the door and then do more

results there. So I think there's a lot of, you know, pluses and pros and cons there to go into. But other odds and nons ball, we would try to button up here on attribution and tracking before we put about one. Yeah, I don't know. Just as you were saying that, I think either I mentioned it on a call or one of our episodes the last couple of weeks. But it is. How did you hear about as forms, they just have to, it can't be radio buttons anymore. Now you're going to have a multi-check system if you can, if you can figure that I... Checked-T, that's how I heard about you. Right?

That's a, let's not play that game. No, we can't end up that. Oh, come on. No, this is, this is something that I am, I am this. This is the stuff I love. Like, this is the stuff I get super geeky over and Conrad probably has to deal with it a little more than he likes him. That's okay.

But it is. This is why, this is also why. clarity, I think, provides some additional insights here as well and trying to connect some of those dots as well. If you can visualize some of those items and visualize the pathway a little more, it just helps. So it's what we're just trying to make everybody have a better understanding into what we dive into behind the scenes every day to understand how effective the campaigns we run are to make sure that they're more effective moving forward. So hopefully you all knew the same thing. And hopefully this shows you the way and some spots for the pipe stuff. No doubt.

You don't be cool. Paul, if someone filled out the contact form on your website, they reach out to you, maybe they smell from you, that happens. Or they booked a call on the buildup website. And they put in the comments, heard about from the podcast. Like, we got some attribution there, right? Click on the link in the show notes and do that. You can reach out to Paul in LinkedIn or on his website.

I think LinkedIn's probably best. You can reach out at buildup bookings.com for myself or my team if that interests you. So that can be fun. I think we've found a little experiment if we get some in bounds from this episode as we have in the past to get some attribution on it. And then you realize how tricky it is, right? Because you might Google Buildup Buckings, you might Google Paul Manzi. You might go on LinkedIn and then search Paul Mansey. And then you find him, you know, you've really thought about the podcast.

It's all very messy. There's one more also homework I would need for that person to do after they booked that call with you or me, potentially, Paul. It'd be going and leaving a podcast review. So go to your podcast app of choice. iTunes, Spotify. We get the most downloads there. click five stars and that there's no attribution really there it's just click us five stars leave us a friendly comment we read them all i think about them all i print them out um i put them on my pillow at night

and i just sleep so much better knowing the people left me a five-star podcast review so we appreciate that have an awesome rest your day and we'll catch you on the next episode bye