Heads In Beds Show - Here's What To Look For In Your Monthly Vacation Rental Marketing Review

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul brainstorm what are the best ways to get the MOST from a monthly marketing review from either your internal team or a marketing agency. 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, Paul, good morning. How's it going today? level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. I'm your co-host Paul. All right, Paul. Good morning. How's it going today?

Well, you know, it's a lovely day in the neighborhood here. We, you know, we may have had a few technical difficulties already here today, but, um, yeah, this is a, this is, this is the fun time of year. This is us, uh, getting into the sports nexus. We'll call it for right now, a little basketball, a little baseball, a little football. If you're into that, hockey probably is gonna start here and in Minnesota, I should like that. I do not, but I digress. How are you doing there, sir?

Yeah, doing pretty good. You joke about technical difficulties. Really wasn't technical difficulties. The fact that I'm trying to watch dogs and record a podcast at the same time. These are two things that do not mix together. This is very oil and water, or I don't know exactly what the right analogy would be here, but that's what this is. So anyways, we've got the we've got rid of the dog, the dog's gone,

rest in peace. He's outside my wife's gonna take him from here. And we will we shall soldier on and continue on. So do a good in my world. Doing good, I think, broadly speaking in the sports world, although much of my teams are not doing well. I'm enjoying watching and I'm just a fan. So it's good entertainment at the end of the day. That's kind of when I think about it right now, because I sit here and get emotionally invested, it will not end well for me. So I'm not even thinking about that.

This is that time of the year where it is. We don't have to jump that far and deep into the pool yet. We can just wade into the shallow end and just say, okay, my heart doesn't need to be broken this year. And mine will be and it's fine. I'm good with that. You say that now, but I feel like you're not going to say that when they're 17 and out. You can't put that into the area. This is early. Let's go. Oh, man. Well, we'll see. We'll see. It's certainly entertaining. It's good to watch you enjoy it because you know, you just never know. It's. I think that's the most enjoyable form of sports is when you don't expect much and then you get a lot of it versus when you expect a lot and get nothing or little out

of it, that's when you get really frustrated. So that could be the fun side. It's rooting for the underdog and sometimes the underdog doesn't always win. The underdog doesn't always win, but when the underdog is winning, you got to enjoy it. So I think that's a plus. That's positive. So that's why I'm thinking about it. The industry. Other things that are plus and positives that are not sports related is a kind of this this idea, I think you kind of pitch this idea. And then I fleshed it out a little bit more. What does that monthly marketing call look like? You've been a part of many of these, I was trying to calculate quickly, I couldn't do it very simply. But I was trying to understand how

many think I've been a part of. And I feel like the number is probably in the 500 range, maybe, maybe it's a little bit higher than that. If I think about it, I've been doing this kind of work, you know, pretty consistently since the summer of 2016. Here we are in the fall of 2024. So we've got like eight years really of just build up. And then before I worked for an agency, which I started in the fall of 2013. So I think about it, I'm like, I had to have done, you know, maybe 200 of these every year for 10 years. I mean, I've done a lot of these calls. And some of them have gone awesomely, and the client loves us, and we love them.

And it's like, gosh, you just look forward to them. Some of them have gone horribly, and everything in between. Usually the more common outcome is just one of just more, I guess, like apathy or like, oh, sounds good, like that kind of stuff. So we thought we tried today to beat up what did this call look like? How should it be done well on the client side? How should it be done well on the client side? How should be done well on the agency side? And like, how can we perfect this process and make it better on our side of things? I will not say that we do all these calls perfectly even today. So we can get better for sure. And what is the what is the way

that we can use this time effectively, efficiently to be better when it comes to working together for long term? So what's your experience? I mean, I took a guess there and how many I've done? How many do you think you've done over the years? Uh, see that this is the upside of being not ever really the account manager, but just kind of being the need to sprinkle a little spice onto the dish. Um, but that's the thing, because there weren't always a lot of people to be able to talk about things and be able to talk about everything. I think that's something that in account management often, I think we do, we get kind of niched into I really know email marketing, I really know social, I really know retargeting, something like that. But it's difficult to have the conversation about all the things we're going to have to talk about here today.

So I mean, how many have I stepped on or have I hopped on for 15, 20 minutes here? I would guess it's thousands. I don't know what that number is, but it's just one of those things where I probably had a higher number than you because I didn't have to lead the call. So there would be days where I'd hop on 15 calls and just do 15 minutes here and 20 minutes here and this and that. And it's at a certain point, you feel like you're not driving the... Like you've said the same thing over and over and it is, I think these calls are so important because this is the roadmap of where your business is going. This is where it's been.

This is your opportunity to connect with someone that I would say should be one of your most important vendors. You know, we'll be biased here, but definitely on the marketing side, you should be having better conversations with and that are going to educate you on some really important parts of your business. So I think that it's probably a big number, but it's a different conversation that I've had with a lot of these people than what you've had. I mean, you are really nurturing that relationship. I've come in and just talked about the numbers here.

But again, there's some good stuff that we're gonna talk about, and it's not just about the numbers. So I think this is gonna be a really good conversation here. Well, I think fundamentally too, like going back to that idea of like, there's this account management layer, and there's this sort of specialist or subject matter expert layer. My early on my career, and this

is where I just have had to evolve my thinking quite a bit over the years. Early on in my career, I thought the best scenario is when you're talking to the subject matter expert as much as reasonably possible as much as you know, could be allowed. And you're limiting the account management layer as much as possible. I still believe that to be true. The thing that I've kind of learned over the past few years in particular, as we've scaled and got more business, got more clients,

is that it is unfortunately a waste of time to be sending subject matter experts down paths that could be solved by that account management layer. So if you're a client and you want your agency to do well for you, you want them to do amazingly well for you, handle as much as you can on your side without having to really involve or, you know, bother whatever you term you want to use their stop up time from an account manager. And the best questions you ask can be ones where you've done the research, you've thought about it for two minutes. Like if you thought about it for two minutes, you're going to get some better rationale. And we're going to give you such a better answer out versus, you know, having not

thought about it at all, or having done no research whatsoever. And I like it to things. And I've, you know, the example I've given before is like, the accounting finance kind of side of my business is not something that I enjoy personally. But I've had to learn it, absorb it and get knowledgeable about it. Because if not, then unfortunately, I've been led astray by people in that space before. So to give a very specific example, I mean, people that are listening who are like the owners of their

vacational business may relate to this. I did not do the S corp delegation, you know, I think it was like 2018. So it was like two or three years after I went in business, I didn't do that delegation. So that I didn't have set a payroll at that point in time, and so on and so forth. That decision, that one decision, I'm not properly like categorizing things from a tax perspective cost me roughly 30 to $40,000 of just lost money, just straight up lost money that I could have legally not done that I had to basically pay because I didn't understand that delegation or that significance. If I had had a two minute research and five minute conversation with my accountant the year prior, expect here's where my business is going to go. Here's what's

going to happen. Here's what I'm thinking. And I'd have that conversation. I could have done that delegate or that election a year early. I could have saved a lot of money and it would have been win-win. You know, it would have been actually in a way more billings for the CPA because he would have started to set up that paperwork for me and I could have saved a lot of money and it would have been win-win, you know, would have been actually in a way more billings for the CPA because he would have charged me to set up that paperwork for me and I could have put a lot more money in my pocket and not to the federal government. So that seems like for me when we could we won't do an episode of libertarianism, we'll say that for a different day. So I think it's a good example of like, you don't know what you don't know. So I didn't I had to research that and find that out of

my own, you know, when you're when you're going through that process of understanding accounting things, like I have to sit down and really focus and really study like, again, it's not my it's not my default. I don't run to that I run away from it, if anything. Right. So when I sit down to do research, like I led to I got to this conclusion. And in my head, I'm like, well, why wouldn't you suggest this to me? But to be fair, like he didn't, well, I didn't know what your business was gonna do. So we had a valid reason why I didn't suggest it all reasonable around whatever it is, what

it is, what water bridge at this point But that's kind of how I think I think of that same relationship now where it's like I get it I'm in the marketing metrics all day The vocational manager is not so they're not going to sit here and remember every single little term on this spreadsheet And that's okay. They don't need to it's not their job to remember all those little terms in the spreadsheet But like if they don't if they don't tell us kind of where they're going what they're trying to achieve If they don't communicate some of those high level things and then understand what's possible within the framework of running ads, just at a high level 10,000 foot view, 5,000 view, then

these calls end up being impactful. Or if they're forgetting and just like blowing simple things like, hey, we need this access approved, you have, you'd be shocked how long you believe would be many listeners would be shocked at how long it takes us to get access for certain things for our clients. And like, we give them the exact instructions we get with them on screen share. And then it turns out like they don't even on their Facebook page, or they don't even have access to

their own website or whatever the case may be. And these are things that are just like such bad stoppers, because like, it just halts progress, it just like coming to a grinding halt. And then that's what if the marketing call should be one thing, it should be like, as little as possible on like, things that can be done asynchronously, things that can be done with like 10 minutes of research, and as much as possible of like, here's what we're trying to go, how can we like come up with some new ideas to get us where we're trying to go? That's my philosophy on the guest side. I don't know what your philosophy is, if you could design the perfect call from the homeowner side or just broadly other marketing experience you have. Well, I think what happens more often than not is we make these big decks,

make a 60 slide deck, and we're going to go through all of this. It's going to take and again, maybe it's a 30 minute call, maybe it's an hour long call. Okay, so you're going to sit and look at someone read things off of a slide deck. Could I not have done that? I think there's a process by which you can have a more effective call, but unfortunately too often I did. I just saw it as a, well, we have a monthly call, so we're going to get on., we're gonna make that deck, we're gonna run through the slides, which again, you could read on your own,

but we're not gonna say anything about the slides, we're not gonna say anything about the numbers, we're not gonna interpret those numbers, and we're not gonna think strategically. So I think that's what moves the needle on these calls. Yeah, you can talk about numbers, but truly, I mean, I think, so as we're kind of just jumping to what should be presented,

if you're gonna do a deck of any kind, that deck should be sent over in advance with the opportunity to ask some questions up front. That's something that, I'm sorry, I don't need you holding my hand through the numbers. Now, if you have questions as a result of that, you should be able to fire those over to the account manager and they should be able to answer those. That's at a very base level, actually having the call be beneficial. And I think you talk about bringing two to five questions on the, you know, on the property manager side of things. I think that's important because way too often I would get on these calls, listen for 15, 20 minutes, there's been almost a half an hour call. There hasn't been a question.

What value are you trying to get out of the call? But I mean, what, you know, what does that look like for you? How, how do you try to engage your clients, your customers at a deeper level to make sure they're getting some value? Yeah. Well, I think the first thing is like, what are you presenting? And is the person you're talking to actually the person that's, you know, again, the right person to be going through those numbers with you. Like one thing that I'm

surprised by, it depends on the client, of course, this is all client dependent, ultimately. But I'm always surprised when I get on the phone with a client, and that client actually doesn't know their numbers that well. It's like, well, that's more reservations, I'm more on the marketing side, or I'm more ops focused or whatever the case is. It's like, okay, well, like, let's get the reservations, you know, people here. And it's funny, sometimes it takes like three or four calls, I have a client where it took us like five calls to get to the person who actually knows what's going on. I don't mean that like a flipping away, I really don't. But like, no, everyone in the company was informed by this person. So like, once I started talking to this person, then I didn't need to like get things second hand,

third hand. It's like when you play telephone when you're in elementary school, if you play before, you get a circle and the goal is to get the phrase all the way around accurately. And of course, it never does. And that's kind of I think what can happen inside, particularly larger vacation on companies, you know, that have a dozen employees, two dozen employees, they've got, you know, 510 1520 million dollars a year, an annual booking revenue, those companies like things just kind of get a little misinterpreted from like, this department over

to this department, like that just tends to happen as any company gets bigger, it doesn't matter if it's vacationals or not, like that just tends to happen. So I think having like the right person there, having the facts and figure straight ahead of time is like so much more beneficial. And I actually wish clients would tell us more proactively what's happening on the OTA channels. Like we don't always see what's happening there. So we have, I think it's about 40, maybe 40% of clients give us PMS access where we can log in and run reports, but a lot of them don't. And that's fine by the way, we wouldn't need PMS access to do our job. Now we need analytics access, we need revenue tracking

in there to really do our job well. We need some things, but we don't need everything. And that's understandable if there's certain things they don't wanna share with external vendors, I'm okay with that, it's not a problem per se. But it does make things a little bit trickier when we're trying to figure out like, well, what exactly happened last month?

Where was the weak spot? Where was the gaps? How seasonal is this? Particularly with new clients where we don't know their seasonality that much, that can be a little bit of a complicating factor. We're learning your seasonality. You know your seasonality better than I do.

So if you're not committing that to me, I'm making some guesses that may or may not be correct. So I think those kind of things are where getting off on the wrong foot, it's not one of those things. It's usually three or four of those things stacked together, right? Like, not knowing the numbers, we're not talking to the right person.

That's where I think you have those calls that you're describing. 40 minutes of information is presented, but really, we could have just done something else for 40 minutes. Like, it didn't really move the needle in a meaningful way. So that's not awesome. You know, I think, you know, the first few calls in my mind,

so getting outside like the monthly call thing for a moment, just some people that I have in the outline here, is like, you want to own as much as possible. Like we've talked about this before at length, but your agency shouldn't own your ad account on Google. Your agency should not own your ad account on meta, it's more egregious when they own it on meta, because there's nothing you can do about that with Google, you can kind of

transfer it out on meta, you can't, your agency should certainly not own your domain name, they should not own your, I would argue, like really anything in your business, if you can help it. Now, sometimes they have like, they host your website, and they control that code, and they control that framework and stuff like that. There's not a lot you can do in some of these scenarios, like you would actually be worse off trying to host, you know, the website on your end, if you didn't know what you were doing, and they control that framework and stuff like that. There's not a lot you can do in some of these scenarios. You would actually be worse off trying to host the website on your end if you didn't know what you were doing and they know how things are set up there. So there's

limits to all these kind of things, but make sure you own as much as possible. That's one thing that you don't want to be in a situation where if you're trying to move on from someone and you're in that call and you're giving them that notice or whatever the case may be, you don't actually have that opportunity to just take things and run with them on your own. I think that's such a common trap that people still fall into. It feels like it's falling out of fashion a little bit.

There's not as many people falling into that bucket now as there were before, but it's still coming up pretty regularly. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that element before we do it. We'll go into some of the other questions on data and such. I think this is something we ran into on the inventory on the owner side of things. And a lot of it was businesses that were new enough, early enough on, especially on the

Google side of things. Meta, yeah, certainly. We didn't want to play that game. And we've told some more stories about trying to get access to the meta side of things. But there were times where to ease the process, to get things moving, we absolutely created ad accounts. But I told people on that initial call with them, hey, you're going to be I'm going to make you the admin account on admin on this account so that ultimately, you can own it, you can take us off as users of any kind. And that's how we're going to do that. But yeah, I think on the meta side of things, we saw firsthand the pain point of once Meta put that Meta Business Manager account on top of all these ad accounts and business pages,

well, what happened was that all of a sudden, the only way we could run any custom audience or retargeting ads, essentially, was that you had to have a Meta Business account over top. So what did all the agencies do? They quickly created a meta business account for everybody. I think we're still dealing with the fallout there in some cases but at that point I mean I worked with a property management company down in well bigger they're kind of good they were working more nationally six months working back and forth with Facebook trying to submit all this information like I thought we were gonna get a firstborn child down some somehow we're gonna try to have to package that

up just to get access to a Facebook business page and a business manager account so it is the the concept of someone doing you a favor and buying a domain for you or doing something like that. Nope, ultimately it's not a long-term favor. They made, and I found myself very much in kind of the crosshairs here a couple of times because again, we created these things. We didn't get the necessary access over

and in some cases, things didn't get shut off and do some cases, you know, things didn't get shut off and do some things like that. So you do. You don't want anything you know. These are business assets, just like your website, just like anything else. You need to own those accounts because and you need to know who on your team owns them because the next step is giving someone else access. And you're right. We've been on those calls where it takes 45 minutes to an hour just to click two or three buttons to give the access needed.

So when you're starting the business, you do. I mean, you have a lot of people helping out, maybe an intern over here. Make sure you understand who owns it, what those logins are. Use one password because that is going to be a change management thing and an overall operations thing that will help you very much long-term.

And especially when you get on these, I mean, if you need to get on these calls and you need to give access or get access or do something like that, it's a very, I would say, awkward feeling. It's kind of that naked feeling. You're standing up in front of the class naked. Just like, oh, I don't know who has that.

And I think we've both been on those calls where it's like, I don't know who has that. And you we I think we've both been on those calls where it's like, I don't know. And as a someone running the business or being in control, that is not a cool answer you want to be able to you want to have to give to an agency. Yeah. So yeah, the I don't know answer. And then knowing that there's not the answer on the other side of the, you know, there's not like one more page we can click on to get the right answer. It's like

a person level problem. Like, yeah, whoever set this up is like no longer involved in our company or they moved on to another opportunity or whatever. And then you're just toast. Like that's so problematic. So I think setting up that good foundation starts with like these calls go better when like the access is clear, the ownership is clear, all these things go better in that respect. So awesome.

All right. Let's turn the page a little bit. So once you're actually open, we've got numbers we're looking at. Let's assume that people looked at it before. And maybe just to pay search first doesn't really matter which order we go in here, to be honest with you. But I think there's obvious and then like not obvious things. And maybe depending on the call, and like how much change is necessary, like it's maybe it's just worth going over the obvious is anything really am I looking I'm looking more for like problems here, red flags than I'm anything else. But like,

how much did I spend? How much did I earn from a gross booking revenue perspective? What was my base level row ass? So I spent $1,000 I did that $10,000 in gross booking revenue. My row ass is you know, 10 to one ratio, right? Like, cool. That may be all you want to look at. And maybe we have clients actually, for example, that have like corporate type budgets that are like approved in advance, we get those numbers. And that's about it. Like, we're not really going to get a lot more budget. That number could say 50 to one. But like, if you know, we can bring that back to them and let them know what's going on. But like,

we can't really get much beyond that. So it's like, okay, cool. That's obvious stuff. I would say the non obvious stuff that can matter in like a paid search discussion is like, how well is my best campaign doing? And could I put more budget into that campaign? So my kind of favorite simple way to sum this up, usually, it's not the symbol, but it's a good way to sum it up to a high level is like, what is my impressions here are my best campaigns? So my best three campaigns, let's just say, my impression share is 50%. So I'm spending $100 a day. I'm just making up example numbers here. I'm only showing half the time. If I spend $200 a day or so, I probably will show roughly double the amount of times, will that potentially increase my results to X? It could. I mean,

usually it's not always linear. Like at some point you kind of find diminishing returns, but there's like more meat left on the bone is the analogy of always given clients, like that could be a good discussion to have on paid search, if we wanted to spend another $1,000 this month, or $2,000 this month, or $10,000 this month, whatever the number happens to be, depending on the client, their budget, etc, etc. What where can I put it where it would actually work well, that's like a good detailed

discussion to have where it's like, all right, I see this much, you know, potential, like if I took this campaign from a thousand to 2000, I think that would be about accurate that would spend we would get it. But I've had clients before actually tell me this campaign, I'm spending 1000 is profitable. Let's go spend 10,000. The answer is, it's not there. Eventually, we kind of cap out, we can't find it there. So having that conversation where I can kind of explain the nuance of it, here's what I see, let's go look at some numbers together. That can be really healthy, I think, way to talk about paid search.

A few other things that make sense to me in that realm, where are search terms popping let's go look at some numbers together. That can be a really healthy, I think, way to talk about paid search. A few other things that make sense to me in that realm, where are search terms popping up that don't match up with what you have? So we just had this happen the other day. We had a client where I'm like, hey, we negative out, we negative these keywords out. And he's like, oh, I actually have properties near that landmark that you're talking about.

I'm like, oh, but we don't have a page on it. Cool, then we made a page on it, we're now gonna build a campaign for it. That was an excellent use of our time, because it was like, I assumed not knowing this area super duper well, like, oh, but we don't have a page on it. Cool. Then we made a page on it. We're now going to build a campaign for it. That was an excellent use of our time because it was like, I assumed not knowing this area super duper well, like he did, that people searching for cabins near this landmark, that he didn't have any because it wasn't converting. That was an incorrect assumption.

Me talking with him and showing him that led him to be like, no, we do have stuff there. Let's talk about it. Let's make a page for it. I think that campaign, hopefully, will get good results as we launch it out there. Then what's new? I think that's always a good way to spend time on these calls, whether it's paid search or anything.

But like, I think it can impact paid search quite a bit. We have a client who got this new house and it's like a glass house on the on the lake. So it's like very cool. People are searching for it. And like, awesome. Maybe we could do a paid ads campaign on this one keyword, this house keyword, which you've done before. But you know, people are searching for it.

We found some conversions there that we would not have found. Otherwise, Airbnb was also bidding on that property detail page. So, I was really happy to kind of slot us in there ahead of Airbnb and get those direct bookings. So, would I found that if I just looked at his website and looked for new properties? Maybe, but it was useful to have that conversation to understand most new properties coming in this guy's program are nice, but nothing that eye-catching or that unique. This one was, we did a pay search campaign around it, and then we found something that's going to perform well, I think, for a long time. So those are some things that come to mind. What's in your world of paid search comes to mind of

what's the obvious, what's the digging deeper impression stuff that you should go through as well? Yeah. I think the obvious is you still want to know cost. You still want to know cost per click. It's not something that you're going to devote your entire budget conversation to, or whatever that is. But knowing those numbers is still important. Like you, I think impression share is really important. And I think it is on the areas, especially on the owner side, where the total impressions is much lower. It is important to understand when you're kind of hitting that top of the limit, busting through that ceiling there. You have that example too of wanting to spend $10,000 when there's $1,000. I remember we had a fishing lodge up in Alaska that did boat tours and stuff like that. And guy wants spend, spend, spend 150 bucks a day. Well, we took the budget from like 15 bucks a day to 150 bucks a day. And our cost per click, you know, went from like five bucks to $50. So like, when you

think about the real world effects of what something like that happens, that's where being able to explain to someone, well, so here's the thing with that impression share. At a certain point, there is a lot of diminishing returns with Google. So I think that's something where, and I don't think anybody in our industry specifically does this, where they're encouraging people to spend money

when there's no money to be spent. But I think that is something that at a certain point, you can spend more, all you're gonna do is drive up that cost per click. So I think the more. All you're going to do is drive up that cost per click. So I think the obvious is you do want to touch on that cost per click and say, okay, hey, my cost per click went from $2 to $5 or $5 to $10. What are we actually looking at? What types of things, what should stick out?

Oh, big increases in costs, big decreases in cost per quick or anything like that. There needs to be a story behind it. Yes, we are going to have fluctuations in the data. That's, that's the reality of what we do. And every day is a little different every week, every month, you know, go down that, that cycle, but there is a story behind each one of these numbers. And I think that's kind of what, ultimately that's what this, the call is going to be all about

there. I think that if you're not able to say, hey, we do have some room to spend some more money based on the impression share we're currently getting with our budget, or going down to, hey, let's take a look at one of the other things I think at a deeper dive level on the display side of things, we do a really good job of showing, hey, this picture with the house or the interior or the exterior or the pool, they're great. But in all of our responsive search ads, there are 15 headlines and there are four descriptions that are being used that Google is rotating around. So understanding, and this was very important on the owner's side, that if

your ads are all referencing property management as opposed to short-term rental management or vacation rental management, maybe people aren't seeing the best version of your ads, of the content that we're trying to present to them. So you probably are getting a visual from your agency of which Facebook ad is performing better. But I think it's also important to understand, okay, of the 15 headlines, these are the four that are really,

you know, driving the traffic, driving the engagement, doing things like that. So it's, I think paid search, there is a lot that you could do. I think you could do a call on paid search, you know, in and of itself, just because there are so many numbers there, but again, what numbers are moving the needle? What numbers are important to cover in that call?

And what numbers can you actually impact by having the discussion and saying, I'm gonna move this budget here, I'm going to take some of this over here, move this campaign, I'm turning off my owner side, I'm turning on this, please don't turn things off. That's a whole nother discussion, but I do. I think the paid search

conversation can suck the oxygen. Oxygen, I'll have some of the rest of the conversation because typically I would say a little more ROI from that if you're doing it right as well. So, you know, the, the guests and the owner side are pretty similar on the paid search side of things. It's maybe, you know, talking more about the volume, but ultimately the numbers and the stats we're looking at are pretty uniform there. Yeah, yeah. No, I think so. I think the the fundamentals apply the same. We talked about

fundamentals, you know, previously, and that's my take on it is that the fundamentals are the same. Even if you're in a different industry, you're doing different like types of like, what am I spending? What am I getting out of it now? Like lead gen is a bit difference, you know, like where I talked about ROA, you may talk more about cost for lead or like what's the quality of those leads. Those are sort of different discussions in the sense of like, I'm paying $1,000, I got 10 leads, my cost really $200. What's the quality of those leads? Do I want more and so on and so forth? But yeah, that's that's a conversation I have on a phone where it's like, let's go

through it. Let's talk about those leads, you know, which one was more ideal than the others. And one thing to move clients gonna fit in different ends of the spectrum here, sometimes try to change things way too quickly. So like, they get one month of data, they want to start to pivot in all these different directions. And it's like, no, that's not the case either. And then your boy sometimes change way too slowly, you know, where it's like, I have a client who kind of collects these campaigns, it doesn't want to pause them or stop them. So like, they kind of these like harebrained ideas, you know, it's like, oh, let's go target over here, let's go target this, let's go target these keywords, a lot

of them are not working like our four that we built are really working well, the other eight are not. And I'm like, all right, we've got 14 campaigns in this account right now. Let's simplify like these, these we've got 90 days a day on these, it's not working. We've got three months, let's go ahead and move on from these. And I feel, I feel comfortable saying that. And sometimes I have to like really talk them into actually changing those four or five, six campaigns that are not working well. So you've got to strike the right balance, as with all things in life and marketing. There's nuance to the equation here that kind of factors into what you're trying to accomplish.

But regardless, what it comes down to is like, you're trying to achieve something, the simpler you make it, the better. The feedback that you get is helpful. I think that's a good way to think about paid search. And honestly, although same logic applies to paid social. But let's go to organic search. I think there's obvious.

So like the obvious here in my mind is like, clicks from Google search console. What's your growth year every year or like period over period with some clients that kind of measure different ways? How many new links have I built? Or how many new pieces of content have been published? Maybe depending on the scope of the project, those are things that that person on the other end is responsible for. We have clients where we do content and no links, we have clients where we do links and no content, we have clients where we do both. So obviously, it depends on kind of

how things are set up for that particular contract. But that's kind of the obvious stuff. I don't know if I had a really list of non obvious things for organic search. I think it's just more so like, you know, is there new like one thing that kind of can help us in those calls is like, what's new happening there that we can maybe write an article about? Like we maybe they get wind of something earlier than like, it'll show up in a keyword research tool, for example. So I think I've given this example in the podcast before, but like, we did an article for a client in the Outer Banks. And it was like talking about the publics before it opened, like, that was a tip from a client, like,

we wouldn't have found that in a keyword research tool. And then people kept filling out the form, like, when's the publics going to open? Like, they wanted, they thought we were like the source of information, which is just kind of funny in hindsight. But yeah, that's like a good way, I think, to, you know, think about the organic search side of things. What relationships do you have, being the property manager that could be helpful for link building? So like, we have clients where they're like, Oh, yeah, like, I'm partnered with seven or eight different tubing companies in the area. Let's make sure we get links on all the websites. I'm like, cool, like give us the contact info.

We'll do the outreach, but like do a warm intro. That's going to help us like then we can follow up and so on and so forth. So those are things that come to mind on like links and content. But anything else in your mind from SEO and that would make sense. I think just understanding that that keyword total number and just understanding where what pages the search engines are identifying. That's pretty much, I mean, it is kind of covered within what you're talking about there, but I think that it deserves a specific call out. Just understanding

some of the, what's that low hanging fruit opportunities? What are your pages eight through 10 where hopefully there's low competition and being able to strategize, you know, how we can attack some of those keywords, like you're talking about there. On, you know, what types of blog posts can we write? What types of link building opportunities are out there? But I think generally it is the,

you do need a tool on the organic search side. I think anybody who's trying to, any on the agency side of things, if you're trying to do it without some type of search console, some type of SemRest, some type of HAA, Trafs, whatever that is, I think you're going to struggle to actually be able to visualize whether there's improvement or there's improvement or there's a decline in performance there.

So I guess maybe that's the thing with the organic search site is that some of the things that we're talking about, hopefully you have an agency that has access to those tools. I don't think you can be a really quality agency on the SEO, delivering on the SEO side of things if you don't have some type of reporting visibility tracking in place there. So maybe that that's what it is. It's just understanding what tool is being used and what is available there. But on the other side of it, organic searches that slow moving monolith type, okay, we're not going to get the immediate ROI. You do want to that's why you do want to see those trends over time. Growth year over year as opposed to week over week or month over month,

things like that. I think that's really important there. Yeah, 100%. So I think use that data to your advantage, and then you can kind of make good questions on the SEO side. I think the most common question that a SEO client is going to ask is, why aren't we ranking better? The classic joke that an agency and a remake is, have you called Google yet and asked them why we're not ranking better? You know, like the classic joke that agency in a room like is like, have you called Google yet? And ask them why we're not ranking better.

It's like, if only, if only, as the first goes. But you know, all that stuff there. All right, let's get over to paid socials. So like good paid social questions to ask. I think some of them mimic what we talked about, or a few minutes back with paid search, right? What did I spend? What's the gross revenue, booking revenue from this?

I would say the quick check in here is how are they doing attribution? So I'd always like this more of an early on question, but maybe check in regularly on this. You know, we have a client call today with someone who's going to show really, really, really high bookings from paid social. And both Matt and myself on our side of things here are like, look, a lot of these are V3 conversions, and you're a very high traffic, high converting site anyways, and we're doing retargeting. I don't know how much of this is additive. Like we were not doing these campaigns before things were obviously going well. We're

doing them now things are still going well. Is it fair to assume that like half of the ads deserve credit for these conversions? I don't think so. That's my take on it. But you know, there's different kind of ways to chop up that data depending on how you want to structure it. So yeah, just my take on that is like gross booking revenue, understand attribution on paid social Facebook or better in particular is going to want to take credit for everything with

these are conversions or view only conversions. I would be a little bit skeptical that it's not that I don't think views here can have a meaningful impact in terms of number of conversions that are driving from paid social. Of course, people consuming your ads, looking at them, watching them is going to make them more likely to convert. That's a natural assumption, but they they'll take all the credit. I mean, if you let them so you get to just find out what's actually right for you. You know, what's the right kind of conversation out there with their agency or with the person that you're talking to, we tend to skew a little bit more towards like, I don't think social deserves all as

much credit as they want to take. Some people will give social all the credit again, find the right balance for you. It's kind of take there. I think the like deeper discussions here on paid social during these calls is like, we always want new creative, we always want new videos in particular. And we just want new stuff in general general Like mostly, you know, we have clients who will get mad Sometimes I would run an ad for a month that I'm like, no We've got an ad working like running it for a month or two is perfectly fine Perfectly normal if anything changing the ad constantly is gonna kill our performance So I sometimes have like their brain has to work a little bit differently on paid like Facebook and Instagram ads

Versus sometimes with organic socialize, you know, you post something and it's like it's dead You know 24 hours later, of course the story and things like that are designed to be that way So you kind of almost have to like take off your organic social hat put you know, you post something and it's like, it's dead, you know, 24 hours later, of course, a story and things like that are designed to be that way. So you kind of almost have to like take off your organic social hat, put on your paid social hat. Of course, there's similarities, but there's a lot of differences too. And the idea of like creative working that would go turn it off is something that sometimes clients just don't connect with that idea at all. But I also want to try new things all the time to see what will work better. And that's one thing sometimes, again, I have to like convince clients up is like, you haven't sent us a new video in like six months. So like the video we're

running is doing well, like we're getting clicks on it's fine. But like, let's try something new, like let's do new videos, like you're getting photos done or properties, let's maybe chop those up with them into something new. So that's like almost every call we do with client that we're running paid social for is like, give us new stuff, like give us new videos, we can do the editing, you know, but if you give us more raw material to work with, we can make some good

ingredients with that. Or some good dishes with that, I should say, if you give us the ingredients. But it isn't just that the videos, like new specials, new feature properties, these are all things I think that can make paid social perform better. It's just like having kind of new stuff to show people, particularly those that are kind of in like a retargeting audience, and they're not website visitor retargeting, but rather like past guests or people that follow the page on social media. These are people that can get fatigued if they see the same ad over and over and over again for a really long period of time. So we've got to find, again, what's our right balance

and we want to rotate a new creative somewhat regularly and sometimes just drive their feet on that. And I think they really hurt their performance. But what's your take here on paid social? How have you approached that in the past? I think, I mean, I think you've got pretty much all the keys there. I think the one thing different,

and again, some people use the different ad types and ad set types and stuff like that. I think if you're using dynamic creative being able to break down and see again very similar to the responsive search ads you know what dynamic element, which headline, which primary text, which photo, which video, whatever that is is actually being served up more frequently. I've talked about before there's no because we use this image and this, that, obviously this is the combination that Facebook likes. I don't know. Facebook wants to make more money, I assume. But if you are using those dynamic elements, definitely the ability to break things down by that dynamic element is important. I think the two, on the social side of things, kind of to combat that conversation that you're

having with the business owners, things like that, of reach that conversation that you're having with the business owners, things like that, of reach and frequency, I think, on the Facebook side of things is so important. You want to know how many people you're reaching. If you're doing a custom audience list, it's a 5,000 person list, but you're hitting 2,000 people, or 1,500, or 500, just depending on what that looks like there. Frequency the same way. You can start to figure out right away if people have seen the same ads eight to ten times Ten to fifteen times fifteen to twenty times there is going to be some ad fatigue there, so

If we're making that decision based on what the numbers are telling us as opposed to Mom sick of this video being the same thing. I see all the time well It's effective so that works. But again, if the same people are seeing the ad 15, 20, 25 times, yeah, at that point, I think you can justify doing a refresh because they've seen it, they didn't react to it, and now we've moved past that there. So I think those are, I think you covered it perfectly, it's just thinking about how people are going to question some of those things. And, and definitely the reach and frequency is where

I would say, Hey, people have only seen the ad four or five times, not saying we want to over inundate them with it, but they might not even recognize it. So I think that there's, there's something to be said for, for that on the paid social side of things. Yeah, for sure. Awesome. I agree. All right, we can wrap it up here, I think with organic social email, and then we'll perhaps collect a few odds and ends before we put a bow on this one. So organic social, again, like we talked about this a few minutes ago, right? Reach and press and I think page growth is a good one to include organic social is the page growing, you know, that

being said, though, sometimes pages shrink or stay flat. And that's not a bad thing. You know, sometimes you lose followers, they're no longer interested, you gain followers that are interested, they're going to book. So, you know, this idea that we should be collecting followers at all costs, you and I've kind of beat that idea up on mine that there's people in our space that have a lot of followers on social media platforms, tick tock being good example. And yet they have to

use our videos, they can't crack 1000 views, even though they'll have 100,000 followers, right. So it's one of those things where you just got to be careful, you know, I think there's some vanity that can certainly come into organic social, we all want a lot of people to follow us. We all want a lot of people to care about our business. That's like a reasonable and like logical goal. And you think the agency is their job to make those numbers happen. Yes, for sure. I agree. But like we've got to also have nuance and context there. You know, if we want to get a bunch of

followers for cheap, we can go advertise our Facebook page in Bangladesh, for example, not saying anything negative about that area, but we can get followers there very independently. Nope. But it's probably not people who are going to book a vacation rental in Florida, for example, not saying anything negative about that area, but we can get followers there very independently. But it's probably not people who are going to book a vacation rental in Florida, for example, or Texas or California or something like that. Right. So like, be aware or think deeply about why am I growing more organic social following what type of people are following me and why and how are they actually mapping back to like what my core objective is, which is like brand awareness amongst people that are actually likely likely to book in the next 90 days or 12 months or something like

that. So I don't know, we're getting social if you want to kind of add anything else into that. But I think the right followers. No, no, it's that was perfect. That it is that's don't get sucked into the vanity metrics of just seeing your page audience grow and a an audience or a following of 50,000 followers. I have not seen that improve your performance of your ads in the slightest.

So don't get sucked into that. Get sucked into the numbers that matter. Yeah, 100%. So last one here, I think that we've got the channel side of things, email marketing. So this one, I mean, email marketing, the metrics are so old school in a way. I feel like we can wrap this one up pretty quickly.

How many emails got sent out? We encourage clients to recommend and allow us to do resends to non opens. That's that metric is not perfectly reliable, but we still think it's like the net positives there, I think are worth it. So recent, like we even would do one set in a month of failure resends. So there's some overall total sends that are going to be higher than whatever the list size is by hopefully a decent margin, how many opens how many clicked, and

how's the list growing? You know, so if we're losing people off the list, which is going to happen in an email marketing campaign, even the best email marketers on planet are going to send an email and some people scroll to the bottom and hit unsubscribe, it is what it is. But if that's happening, how are we growing the list and from where? So we have clients, for example, using StayFi, they're doing a pop-up on the website, they're doing a giveaway, that's kind of doing everything to grow the email list. But it's always worth studying that and keeping an eye on it. Again, clients love when they have a

big email list. Again, my concern is how many people are actually caring about the emails that are being sent. I'd rather have a 10,000 email list that's super active than 100,000 less that's mostly dead. And there's a lot of that in our space, I would say at times. So yeah, email is at least how I think about it is like opt in newsletter email, I think you have more experience on like the cold email side of things. Maybe you could talk to those metrics. They're similar, but a little

bit different, I think when it comes to like, send books, meetings, that sort of things. Maybe you could talk to those metrics. They're similar, but a little bit different, I think, when it comes to like, sense, books, meetings, that sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately, you know, we're on the cold email side of things, we need to be a little more concerned about the reputation. So you know, how many are unsubscribing, how many are bouncing and not hitting email, or not hitting email inboxes and stuff like that, because ultimately, that could have longer impacts on not just your owner email marketing but your overall email marketing if you're not taking the technical steps of setting all the DNS stuff up properly there. So I think that's anytime you're doing more of the cold email, you're guarding against

more of those negative KPIs as opposed to the positives are all great, sends open rates, click rates, all that. That's still key. And I think lead conversion and doing stuff like that, that's important over there. But really, it is about making sure you're not burning a domain. I've seen it many, many times. It's why we bought a lot of the, just, you know, not the domains for the businesses, but we bought a lot of burner domains, just knowing that the email marketing that we're doing isn't perfect.

I mean, it's not scientific, it's not a system, let's throw a whole lot of emails out there. The content itself is supposed to drive what we're trying to do here, but a lot of cold email there. The content itself is supposed to drive what we're trying to do here, but a lot of cold email is hoping for the best, crossing your fingers, saying a little prayer that you're not burning up your domain there. So I think the keys there is list growth anywhere. You want to be growing that list wherever you're doing it, open rates, and sends is important because it does that gives you some idea of where your health the health of your of your, you know, email marketing software or the domain or whatever that looks like. So

I think I think we I think we've wrapped it up pretty well. Yeah, I think so. I think so. I think your your last thoughts and ends on your side, we're talking about not just the numbers, like we spent a lot of time over the last few minutes, talking about numbers, but rather maybe bring us home on like the user experience side of things or like understanding better how people are using the website. That's more like, we can always sum that up quickly. So it's a good form to talk about in a call, maybe go through that really quickly.

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, it is, if you're using something like a hot jar or Microsoft Clarity and you're actually using the session recording and heat mapping, I think it is. And this isn't just those two systems. It's the Google Analytics side of things too. It's, okay, these numbers are great. The numbers are going up. The numbers are going down. But that doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, if we can't interpret it and we can't

tell the story behind it, if we can't use that data to actually make actionable decisions to improve your conversion rate, to do anything like that, then why have the systems on this website in the first place? It is. It's that data deep dive. I'd rather have too much data than not enough. Well, you got to use that data. Otherwise, it truly is worthless. We'll wrap it right back up to the call itself. Again, these are great calls, great conversations to have if you're getting value out of it. But if you're just listening to someone read some numbers to you and there's no strategy actually being implemented

as a result of those numbers, it's a missed opportunity at the very least. And again, it's a reason to at least explore what else is being discussed in different areas to understand how can you get the most out of these calls? How can you get the most out of your marketing? How can you get the most out of your strategies moving forward? Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

I think that last piece is probably one of the most important pieces, which is like, the point here is to be strategic. The point here is not to like you said copy and paste and read numbers It's something I think about a lot. You know what I mean with the way that I'm doing things with my own agency I wish I found the perfect balance. I will be the first to admit that I have not found the perfect balance I think the truth is that we need People in our organization and our teams and you do people on your side of things who can get the basic work done Or perhaps get the boring work done, you know, access, getting things lined up, getting images,

getting graphics, there's kind of that admin layer. There's also a strategy layer above it. And I think the more time you could spend in that strategy layer, the better outcome will be over a long period of time. One month. No, that's not gonna make a big difference over the course of a year. It's gonna make a huge difference, right? When you think about like having really strategic discussions, thinking about creative thinking about how to make the ads better, thinking about how to make your website better, thinking about how to make the ads better thinking about how to make your website better thinking about how to make your brand better. All these things are gonna make a meaningful difference. So I think it's how going to spend as much time as possible in that zone. And then I you know,

ultimately a lot better outcomes come from that my experience. So that's a fun one. Paula anything else to tie in here? Or should we put a bow on this one for today? I think we wrapped it up well. All right. Well, other than the misfire at the beginning, we locked in I think we got it done. So hopefully the listener enjoyed spending roughly this 40 odd minutes with us, just like you might spend 40 minutes with us if you're working with our agency. So hopefully there was some value there. You got something out of it. One thing that we do before you depart for today is leave us a review and follow the podcast. So if you go to your podcast have a choice iTunes, if you click follow, that helps us a lot. You don't just listen

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