Heads In Beds Show - How YOU Can Target Guests On Facebook, Instagram & Google With Ads

Episode Date: July 19, 2023

In this episode, Paul and Conrad break down HOW and in what ways you can actually target ads on Facebook, Instagram (Meta) and Google. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'Connell🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All right. Hey there, Paul. How's it going? Fantastic, Conrad.

We're just making our way through the summer here. We blink a little longer, I believe, that we'll just be in fall and we'll have missed all this beautiful weather that we've been enjoying here a little bit. But how are you doing, sir? Yeah, pretty good. I see what you're saying. The summer definitely has an expiration date on it because I think it was Friday, my wife got her email that our son was accepted into the four-year-old program at the school. So that tells me that we're not that far off from going back. And then my wife requested a certain teacher for next year or two for my oldest. So yeah, like you said, we're not that far off if we're even having that conversation.

And then actually yesterday, just to add a little bit more to that, my wife said, let me make sure you have enough clothes. I'm like, the child has enough clothes. He has a thousand things of clothing. But no, it's all good. Let's see. Let's dive right in. What is going on marketing minute-wise today? I think you've got two little updates, one GA4 related, one something else. Yeah. So it is. We've been monitoring the GA4 side of things, seeing when those properties are turning off. I'm starting to finally see some

of the universal analytics properties that are at the property has stopped processing data. I saw some of those notifications coming through last week, but it seemed like they were still processing. We're finally starting to see some of those properties that are turning off. So again, I wrote a LinkedIn post last week. I don't know where we're at beginning of the end, middle of the end of the end, but it's happening now. Like we're definitely seeing tangible properties that are turning down.

If you are one of those who still has not transitioned over to G4 on Linux, and I hope there are very few of you out there that listen to this podcast, because I think we've been pretty adamant about the need to do that. Make sure you're doing it because you will start to lose data here. And the nice thing, or maybe not so nice thing, is that Google is letting you know. They're saying the property has or will stop processing data very soon. So I mean, they're giving you that last ditch effort to say, okay, let's have some continuation there or not losing, not missing out. Again, at this point,

if you haven't transitioned over, you're missing year to year over year data, you're missing a lot of stuff. My hope is that people are going to go in, they're going to, if they are seeing the universal analytics properties, no longer processing data, they are going through, they're implementing G4, they're having their web services company, they're doing it themselves, whatever it is, have someone do it, make sure you've got data running in so that you can continue to understand the performance of your website. I think that's critical there. So that's point number one. Point number two, it is. What I've seen recently is people talking about the helpful content update. And we addressed this back in February, March as well, as at some point, Google's probably

going to be able to identify because of a digital watermark, what is happening, whether it's chat GPT, whether it's machine written content and there's a little bit of buzz that on may 18th or around that time there was a lot of websites or a lot of people who have websites who saw dip in the in the traffic coming through or the rankings overall for pages that were heavily machine written or chat gpt written content. So that's one of those. And we're almost two months removed from that now. The fact that people are just talking about it now, I think it is, there's always going to be fluctuations in the algorithm, in everything that's happening in the SEO side of things. It's not just core updates. It's literally Google makes updates to the algorithm every day, a few times a day, multiple times a day, whatever that is.

So it is, I think the volatility that people have seen, they've maybe attributed back to different areas. I think now that they're maybe doing a little regression analysis or whatever that is, they're starting to maybe pinpoint it back to a specific timeframe of specific date and specifically pages or websites that are heavy or completely chat GPT content written. So something to keep an eye on if you have been leveraging chat GPT to write content on the website, just make sure that those pages are staying or maintaining their presence, maintaining their visibility within the search results. Certainly if you wrote the content and

hopefully you were writing it to get into the search results. Just something to keep in mind as we continue to leverage AI and ChatGPT and other forms of AI written content or anything like that. The search engines at some point may not be so happy with what we're putting out there. So just two notes for people to take notice of. And if they want to dig further, there's certainly some resources out there. Yeah, I guess my main takeaway right now on the AI written content is if you can click a button and create a page, then any other site on the internet can do the same. So if there was some advantage to be had, I really think it's more so on like the keyword

research topic selection side of things, because again, anyone can hit the button. So if you're finding these little kind of pockets of keywords other people aren't focused on, then sure, maybe there's some validity in exploring the content further. We've been a little hesitant. We've got some clients that have asked us and we've listened to their requests and we've expanded our use of it at their request. But it's not like part of our kind of standard approach right now, because I don't think it does a good job at, you know, best restaurants in location. Like it can list a bunch of restaurants, but not as good as a human can. So yeah, I'm with you. Be careful with this kind of stuff.

There's certain keywords where I think it's fine on and sure you can get a lot more content out of the website if it's best weather is the example that we've given before. Average water temperatures in North Myrtle Beach. It can do that kind of stuff. Put it in a table. Sure. But yeah, so can every other site on the internet has that same page. Many other sites on the internet have that same page.

So what's the real value there long term? So I'd be careful. I'd be cautious. I think you still need a human editor. I don't think very much content straight out of any AI writing tool is perfectly ready for prime time as a solution to like your SEO content growth goals. That's for sure. Agreed.

What is helpful for growth goals? Knowing how to target advertisements. So I like our topic today, understanding targeting options inside of Google and Facebook. This was your idea, Paul. So I'll kind of let you run a little bit more today. I like this idea, though, when you pitch it to me, because we see this all the time. Hey, I want to target XYZ. And then the answer, of course, is XYZ is impossible.

And then people get sometimes upset about that. Or they go, oh, man, how is that not possible? And maybe you could set the table a little bit with 2016 and the election and Facebook and all our options that got removed from us. That was like one, I feel like inflection point that occurred. And then maybe do another 2020, 2021, like cookie-less world. Like everyone needs to move away from cookies. Those are two little trails worth diving down before we get into the specifics.

It is. I think certainly anybody who remembers the 2016 election remembers the whatever you get the ad farms we'll call them just the when we heard it was crazy at the time listening to people say oh yeah this individual spent $250,000 to create ads for the election now in my mind when I heard $250,000 on Facebook I'm thinking oh my gosh that's millions and millions of impressions or clicks or whatever that is, and being very targeted with that. So I think that was certainly, I think when Meta or Facebook at that point didn't know who was doing the advertising and what was doing the advertising, it was certainly a little more of the Wild West where you could target anything and everything you wanted and spend a whole bunch of money and

not really have to worry about it. I think on our side of things, the real inflection point was, the cookie list is certainly important too, but in our timeframe, I think it was 2018 when housing, employment, and credit really came into play as well. And that's something that to this day, into play as well. And that's something that to this day, there aren't too many days that pass that I'm not swearing under my breath a little bit about both Facebook and Google saying that, oh, you can't target ads for housing, employment, and credit. Housing for us on the short-term rental side of things, vacation rental side of things, we aren't housing, but Facebook is certainly seeing us as that. And that's where on the targeting side of things,

they really reduced a lot of what we could do as far as specific age ranges, specific locations, and really how far we could narrow that targeting in. And theirs is anti-discriminatory practices. I'm not trying to discriminate. I'm just trying to target. Literally. I'm not trying to discriminate. I'm just trying to target. Literally, I'm not looking for housing. I'm not trying to do ads for housing. I'm not doing anything like that. I think that was really the major point for our space specifically. And it wasn't just the vacation rental side of things. This hit the hotel resort sides of things

as well, because a lot of those still had that in a lot of those businesses, maybe they have some real estate or they're talking about real estate on the website. And that's how easy it was. It wasn't that like you had to have a realtor license or a brokerage license or anything like that. If you mentioned real estate on your website, that was enough. The sensors were going to pick it up and they were going to automatically flag you. Now, I think everybody's been through the process and Facebook of, oh, my ads have now been, they've been, let's see here, disapproved and something like that. Or yeah, rejected in there. And all you have to do usually is just select the housing category.

But man, would it be a lot nicer to not have to say, hey, I'm in housing so that I don't have to limit some of the targeting that we're going to talk about here today. And that is that. How have you adjusted? What are your thoughts on how that timeline and you can take it to the cookie list side of things as well? Because I know that's something that you focused a lot on as well there, too. Yeah. So I think there's two inflection points. I forgot about the exact timeline for what you're describing.

But yeah, some bad memories there. And we deal with it all the time, too. I just didn't remember when it started. It feels like it's just a part of my life. It's this little burn I have on my left side of my leg. That's just been there for 15 years at this point. I'm just used to it. No, I joke. But anyways, I think with regards to removing a lot of the detailed targeting options, and then one major change from 2016 to today, and when they made a lot of adjustments a few years after that, was having these tiny lists that we could target. We used to be able to upload 30, 40, 50 people into a list in Facebook and target that. We used to be able to target based on household income. And that was amazing because every luxury vacation rental

provider out there wants to be able to say, my properties are not right for most people. My properties are right for people who are going to go and drop $10,000 to $15,000 on a week-long vacation, if not more. We have a client whose average booking value is over $20,000. And he has several bookings that exceeded $100,000 this year, three-week stays during prime in these huge, massive properties down in the Bahamas. That can occur where you have this product that you're out there trying to promote to a certain group of people, and those options are just gone now. You can't target based on household income anymore. You can't target based on these really small lists anymore, you have to have ideally around 1000, if not more people in a list actually serve. And that makes everything a lot harder for clients can,

for example, giving us past guest list and saying, Hey, please show ads only past guests. And the answer is, it's just not possible, we can take that past guest list, combine it with something else, and then maybe get to a decent list size to advertise with. But otherwise, we're up a creek without a paddle there. So that's frustrating for sure. Those are my two main ones that come up weekly or bi-weekly that I have to deal with those limitations. The housing thing, maybe I'm just stubborn.

I just refuse to give in to the housing restrictions. If I have to make that ad set 50 times, I'll do it. I won't curse on the show, but I will do it if I have to keep making it over and over again. Because as you said, we're not housing. We're not offering a housing product. Facebook is flagging this unintentionally. I think the goal was just launch a ton of creatives, like launch 10 ads if you have to in the same ad set. And one

seems to slip through and the other nine get rejected. Can't explain why. And then I'm just appealing the other nine. So I'm just stubborn. I just refuse to accept the housing restrictions if I can help it. Because I don't like losing all those targeting capabilities. I don't like not having a lot of the interest. I don't like not having this kind of stuff to show my ads to the right people on Facebook meta, if you will. And that's ultimately what they should care about. They should want our ads to be relevant. And like you, I'm not trying to violate any laws.

There's a good reason, I'm sure, for those laws that exist with regards to like, you know, not discriminating people and getting redlining neighborhoods and stuff like that. That's not at all what we're doing, obviously. So those are frustrating for sure. And then, yeah, I think to turn the page a little bit into the last few years, and obviously we're talking about GA4 as this new solution. The reason for that, one of the main reasons for that was they had to figure out a new tracking script that was more compliant with a lot of these privacy blocking platforms, apps, features, et cetera. Even Apple natively on the iPhone blocks a lot of tracking scripts by default

on Safari. And that's 30, 40% of most sites traffic. So you've got to figure out a way to be compliant with these different, more privacy focused cookie lists, future tools. And obviously these tools and these ad platforms have to kind of keep pace with what's going on in the marketplace. Google and Facebook can't just stick their hand in the head in the sand and say, oh yeah, we're not going to care about what Apple does because Apple controls the majority of the phone market.

And most of the phone market that they care about is obviously controlled by Apple. So they have to figure out ways to play nicely and figure out paths and methodologies to allow us to target ads, but also be compliant with what Apple is doing, as an example, on the device side of things. Yeah, frustrating for sure. Maybe we can go through, instead of turning this into a heads in bed, complaining fest, we could go into the ways that you can target ads or just like things that you should be aware of as you go along. So maybe you can get us started with Google search ads. Not a, there's some things here that I think are useful, but your first one is pretty solid location targeting. How can I make sure my show my ads to the right people that are actually right in the right places?

That is location targeting. And I think this is something that Google is, and I think Facebook to a certain extent as well, but Google is always trying to expand your audience more than, or expand your targeting more than you want it to. Location targeting was really the first place I think I noticed this. And the fact that initially it was just, okay, you put the city in, you put the country in, you put the state in, boom, that's enough. That's where you're going to target people in that location. What Google started to do after that is now it's going to be, our recommendation is that you do people who are located in or interested in the location as well, which means that you could have people who are interested in Florida,

but they're located in Sweden or another country completely there. So that is what we started to see back four or five years ago now was that, oh, okay, we're getting clicks on Google ads from other countries. How is that happening? That's specifically what you have to do. You have to tell Google, I only want people who are in these locations. And what that does is it refines your targeting a little bit there. Not a lot, but it ensures that you're not getting maybe some of those international clicks that you're not focused on. A lot of those clicks, especially in the heart of the pandemic, there was no use in getting international clicks or

anything like that because nobody was going to be able to make those trips over. But I think in understanding how Google was allowing that targeting to happen, we took a step back and said, we shouldn't just be limiting it now. That should be the focus is that you really are going to those locations. And the nice thing about those locations is not just, I'm going to target the entire United States. You can go down to specific state levels. You can go down to one of my favorites is the DMA regions. So the same regions that people are buying up ad space on for the network broadcast side of things, you can target people in a very similar way. And I think when you get to some of those more metropolitan locations, Minneapolis, St. Paul is a great example.

The MSP, SDP, DMA region actually extends into part of Wisconsin as well. So I think it's understanding how you can leverage those different types of locations and understanding the messaging that you're putting in those specific locations. Looking, if you're more of a drive-to market, maybe you target more to the drive-to side of things and you're not expanding further out into the entire country or vice versa. If you're, If you are more of a national brand, maybe you are, instead of doing pockets of little segmented state-by-state search campaigns, you're really taking it at a more of a national look and making more evergreen, universal content there. So on location targeting side of things, what have you done

or what have you seen that's been effective? Is that something that you've put a lot of focus into there? How does that look for you? Yeah, honestly, it was just one of those things where once you learn that's what's happening, it feels that this is a common thing now with Google ads. Like you said, you nailed it earlier. I just didn't want to interrupt you. Google is, it feels like you're trying to keep your handle on the steering wheel and Google is just constantly ripping it the other way on you. Hey, go over this direction. We're going to spend more money. You're going to get a lot more benefit from it. And the truth is the majority of the time, that's not the case.

And it's frustrating because I think a lot of our clients too are, they get called by Google. They get, this is not a, again, complaining about this sort of, but this is the issue that we deal with where it's, Hey, we've set up the, we've got 50 bucks a day. We've got to be really intelligent about how we spend it. We can't be out here bidding on stuff that doesn't make sense we can't be doing this we can't be doing that we have to be very thoughtful and it feels like that's what's happening with this all a lot of targeting options inside of google ads you're trying you have the steering wheel you're trying

to go where you're trying to go and google's ripping you over here into the land of wasted ad spend and wasted clicks and wasted money and wasted budget because it needs to fill in certain quota or they need to make sure that you're getting clicks in this department or they need to fill in display ads and stuff like that. So it's definitely frustrating. This location targeting thing is the tip of the iceberg, in my opinion. Broad match keywords is maybe under the surface for you a little bit here. But yeah, this is one where on all new builds, we have this as a part of our checklist process. Hey, did you select search targeting location in? And if not, I have to go back and sweep behind it inside of editor and make sure that I'm changing all these. And when we ever get a new account, one of the first things we look for, and most of the time it's set up incorrectly

where you're getting impressions in locations that you're never going to get a guest from. Guess what Myrtle Beach, you're probably never going to get someone who's going to fly from India for a weekend in Myrtle Beach. Like so when I go and audit accounts, I'm looking at stuff like that, that just doesn't make any sense, ultimately. Yeah, that's definitely one that we have as part of our initial process. And it's frustrating that the web interface continually pushes you into bad decisions, hiding things under dropdowns, things like that, that you have to know where to look to hit the right button. Correct. Yeah.

So the next spot that when you're building out the campaigns, whether you actually, it's not one I don't think, I think you have to actually expand it. So to get custom audiences in place, Google doesn't necessarily push you into that location. But custom audiences, they have two different areas, in-market segments, affinity audiences. This is something that I've found to be pretty helpful, specifically with this type of audience that on the owner side we're looking for. It is, it's maybe a little more high end type of traffic that we're looking for. Those people who maybe are avid investors or they are homeowners or they have specific areas of interest there. That's something that we've used the observation side of things. So there's two different ways you can target on those audiences. You can use observation where you're putting them in and seeing what the performance is at that level. So for these avid investors, what is my specific and what Google is matching up on the back end?

What is that performance? What's the click through rate for investors versus homeowners versus people who are interested in luxury travel versus people who are interested in oratory financing, something like that. So that's something where over time, as you start to understand what are your top performing custom audiences there, you can put small bid adjustments on it. And anything that we're talking about here, it is, I like putting the bid adjustments on more than just doing direct targeting based on any of these demographics or

custom audiences. Because really what you're doing there is you're educating the algorithm. You're saying, hey, I'm willing to spend 20% more or 15% more on this specific audience because I can see it's performing better. Whereas if you're just targeting that specific segment of people, you're really reducing your overall targeting ability. So your target audience may go from 100 million people to 50,000 people or 100,000 people. I'd rather let Google know, hey, I'm more interested in this group, less interested in this group. And you can bid up or bid down on those bid adjustment side of things. And again, educate that algorithm and saying, okay, I want this specific

person and maybe as we go down to the demographics as well, this age, this income, all these different statuses, and really being able to customize the type of audience that you're showing up for more, more frequently, it is, you're still going to show up X, Y, Z in different areas. But the nice thing is if maybe you're bidding down 50% or 75%, you're getting a steep discount there. So on the custom audience side of things, and maybe a little bit on the bid adjustment, have you used those custom audiences? Are you using that in observation and targeting or doing anything like that? Yeah, I like to have just observation typically turned on with a bid adjustment. I think that's

the right way to play that ultimately. And on paper, it sounds great to have some of these more interest based ones in there. I see a little lift, but it's not a huge lift. And some of the audience sets just don't always make a ton of sense to me. For example, in market audience, researching trip to Ocean City, Maryland. Okay, that sounds great. Obviously, I'm going to target that. But by searching Ocean City vacation rentals, aren't they automatically telling you that they're part of that audience? So I wonder like the true value of it. But in theory, like I'll trust Google is trying to do the right thing on that one. So I'll give them the benefit of the doubt there. And we'll include those with that observation ability or the smart targeting.

And then we'll put a minor bit adjustment if it seems to be noticeably increasing performance as another option there. So yeah, I like this. Use it, leverage it. I think there's some tiny benefit to doing so. And hopefully it gives us three, four or five more bookings a month for some of our clients when we're playing on the edges here a little bit and driving those targeting options. Right.

And the next one is going right down into those demographics. So I think this is one where it's much more effective in being able to maybe take away some of the lower age, the younger potential travelers, the 18 to 24 is where maybe I'm not as interested in getting those bookings. I'm more interested in getting family bookings. I'm more interested in getting older individuals who are traveling as well. Some of the main demographics that we've seen or that we've seen be effective are age, income range is in there. Now, the thing I always have to preface when I'm talking to partners is, okay, is Google getting a copy of your W-9 or any of your tax information? No, absolutely not. But based on your search information,

your search history, and all of your unique demographics, they're trying to pocket you into the top 10% versus the bottom 50%. And then some ranges within there. So again, if you're that business in the Bahamas that is going after Uber luxury travelers, you're probably not going to want to have a lot of people who are in that bottom 50% income range that are clicking on your ads. That's waste that's been for you there. Parental status, that's one where I think if you are in more of a family destination or if you're looking to really push that maybe something you're considering. It's not something that we consider a whole lot of on the owner side of things because it doesn't necessarily move the needle one way or another for us. Gender, I think maybe in our

space, it's not as important. When some more gender heavy or gender segregated outlets or verticals, maybe you'd be, if you're maybe more on the hunting side of things, okay, maybe you're going to do, try to bid up on males as opposed to females or anything else. And if I offended anybody there, that's my apologies. But, but that is, that's something where in our space, I think it is, it's pretty universal where whether you're male or female or anything else, that's something that you'll be able to kind of make. I think you don't have to necessarily put the adjustments in that area there. So yeah, I think that's something where, you know, generally the ones I find most effective are age, income range. And the one kind of gray area there is that in that income range, we do get hit much more on the housing, employment,

and credit categories as well there. So have you run into that same thing or are you leveraging those demographics as well as you're kind of looking at the targeting on the backend? Yeah. What I say, I'll just be honest, old women book vacation rental spots. Yeah. Yeah. So when I go look at the demographic and age targeting stats and I go look at accounts that have lots of data coming in, not a booking or two every day, but like multiple bookings every day for extended periods of time across $100,000, $200,000 worth of ad spent, it's 55 to 65 women. That's who books vacation rentals, the highest clip.

Now, it doesn't mean they don't get bookings outside of that set of people. I'm just saying that in my experience, looking at the data that Google gives us, those are the people that I want to spend the most on showing our ads to because they tend to convert the best overall. Yeah, no, I think there's something to be said for these things. I always like to in theory, let's go chop out these 20% of impressions that aren't leading to conversions. My reaction though, here with the demographic targeting is that I let it run for a while first before. Because I don't know necessarily if Google is as accurate as they think they're going to be or claim they're going to be. So my general point of view here,

unrelated to custom audiences where I'm like, oh, go throw it in early and see if it makes a difference, because we're bidding the same either way. We're just like, we might bid a little bit more when this is true. I don't necessarily feel that same way about demographic data. I tend to rely more on like the geographic targeting. Okay, I exported my last 100 guests that have come in. And then I put them into a tool and it shows me where they're all from. They're all from the three hour radius. Okay, I feel pretty confident targeting a three hour radius given the 100, 200 data points you have on past guests. But most clients aren't going to sit there and go, how old are you? What's your gender? How much do you make? That's obviously not part

of booking a vacation rental. I tend to leave those alone until I have maybe 50 bookings under my bill. It might take a few months if not more to get that data. But once I have that much data under my bill, then I might go back in there and start to look at it and say, Oh, let me go ahead and uncheck these boxes. So that's my general point of view there. And I share your concern. It's harder to trip up the housing restrictions of my experience on Google ads than Facebook's last meta, like we talked about at the top, but it's not impossible. So yeah, if you're tripping housing, then a lot of these options go away. In fact, gender targeting goes away completely on housing. You can't even consider the option.

You click on a tab and it's just completely zeroed out. So that's something to be keeping in mind for on the search ad side of things for sure. But yeah, my general point of view on this targeting is wait till you have data. Don't just go in there willy nilly for excluding things. Because at first you need to know what you need to show your ad a thousand people to men and women at least and get a few bookings on each at least before you even think about it. Going in early and making those decisions too early, I think can lead to subpar performance,

which you don't need when you have a new account or you're trying to see what's going to work the best. 100% agree. I will say, actually, we've seen more on the Google ad side, I think not a ton, but more of those violations coming in for the housing policy violation, which I'm not exactly sure why that is. I'm looking at the root cause analysis there. I can't see it yet, but I don't know if it's Google sensor is just going or just realizing that maybe it seems more on the owner side of things when you're talking about the real estate component. Because I do think that's something that gets mentioned more on our pages or things like that. Maybe that's what's flagging us, but I've certainly seen a few more

there. So something to keep in mind, obviously, anytime you're doing that, because anytime you're getting flagged for the housing, whether it's Facebook or Google, they're going to restrict what you can do on the targeting side of things. Yeah. Moving over to the display and video side of things. Now, granted in Google, we're not using a ton of display, a little bit there, and certainly on the video side as well. But the three areas that I've seen most frequently that are used for targeting are going to be topics, keywords, and placements. Now, keywords, is it working quite the same way as searches? No, not really. You can feed in some keywords and you can feed in some topics. You can feed in specific placements that you want.

You want those, you want your display ads or your video ads to show up. Doesn't necessarily restrict Google from showing it anywhere. Because again, Google still wants to spend your money wherever that is. So I never think of the placements or any of the things that you can do in display and video targeting to be that effective. I think what you can do over time, if you see that you're getting the one place that you can see where your ad showed, Google does a good job of showing that. I think the best thing you can do is see what is performing in there better.

If it's a specific YouTube channel or it's a specific website that your ads are getting shown or delivered more frequently on, that's something there. If you're not happy with those placements, that's where an exclusion should come in. But as far as actually being able to take that and target it more granularly, I haven't found it to be that effective.

What about you on the display side of things? Where are you finding those little niches that work for you there? My opinion on display. So I often talk about display as mystery meat placements, and you never know really where these things are going to show up. So I think if you're going to do it, you need to be careful and thoughtful in the back end here about where those exclusions are, and be very unforgiving when you see stuff that just doesn't make sense for you or your brand or your company. And think, are people going to be on this site and then going over and booking a vacation rental? Or on YouTube, for example, are people going to

be watching this YouTube channel, Blippi, as my kids might watch, and then come over and book a vacation rental? I think the answer is no. I think that's the mother gave the iPhone to the kid to watch while they were eating dinner, speaking from personal experience. Yeah, I think you need to be really careful here. I just generally find that the placement quality is just mediocre to low in most everything on these ideas. And you need to be very careful about where the ads show up. really careful here. I just generally find that the placement quality is just mediocre to low in most everything on these ideas. And you need to be very careful about where the ads show up. And it's a combing. It's just like when you use broad match keywords on the search term side, you're just combing, combing, combing constantly to find what you don't need to be working at, looking at

and showing up on and excluding it. So I'm just not super bullish here. I think when we do retargeting ads, it's always just purely a brand awareness play. It's, hey, people are going to see the brand, they're going to come back, there's some recall there. It's typically 10% of our budget if that is dedicated to this, because we just don't think it's where the action actually happens. We find it typically happens more on search, skip the mystery meat, skip the I guess not spam per se, but it's like spam. It's like spam, meaning the meat, not the stupid, pointless, annoying message acronym there. And I just generally find the best thing to do here is to limit your exposure as much as possible, have retargeting and then constantly come through and exclude stuff. Yeah, yeah, I think those the exclusions are key. And

the nice thing is, you can exclude you can exclude by custom audiences of those in market affinity segments, whatever you're looking at there, you can turn off by specific demographics, or you can exclude and I think that there's, there is a difference between just turning it off and excluding more of a larger audience within Google. And that's something that, that if you really want to turn, if you really want to turn it off, that's really the way to do it. And again, the more, I think the more granular you can get with that targeting, depending on what you're trying to go after is going to be really important there. So I guess now we can kind of transition over to the Facebook meta side of things. So what are you using most frequently when you're targeting people on the Facebook and meta side of things? Yeah, so I know you have a list here. I think maybe I'll grab the

first one, the targeting pixel. I think that is the first one. So I think that makes the most sense typically. I would say that combined with a custom audience of people who already know and trust the brand. So most commonly that's an email list or that's most commonly people who follow the page. So I think if you follow those three things, people that have been on my website recently, people that know and trust my brand because they've stayed with me before, or they like and follow my page by their own choice, by their own volition. I didn't pay for them, but they chose to log on Facebook, log on Instagram, click follow, click like, whatever the case may be.

Those three audience sets, I think, are actually the meat of what you should be focusing the most of your budget on if you're looking to retarget and bring people back, if that's more of your angle. Now, if your angle is discovery, just get new people to see your properties or new people to see what you have to offer. I think there's other things that you can be leveraging. Lookalike makes the most sense, generally, I find there. So people who are similar to the people that have already stayed with you. So you upload an email list and then you look like off

the back of that. But those targeting options are the one that I would say we do the most of. People that are on the website recently, past guests, and then people who follow the page. So those are my three, but you may have some other ones that both span owner and guest marketing as well. I think in the retargeting, the pixel's key. That's something that it's funny. One of our account managers, they were on a partner website and they got served up a Facebook ad. And I think it's still one of those things where, ah, this is so cool. Yeah, this is what we do.

This is, it's one of those things where sometimes you get so into the details that when you take out and look at how many of the ads, the recall of, oh, I was just at that website. Oh, they got some good retargeting working there. I think that's always really helpful there. For Facebook, I think that's the gold standard, really. That's the best measure that I've had or the best targeting that I've had that has effectively come back. And yeah, I still think it is more about brand awareness on the Facebook side of things, just like it is on the display side in Google.

But at least with that retargeting side of things, you are, you're able to recapture and stay in front of those people who have hit your page. For us, it's, we don't necessarily want to have people who are hitting the full website. We just want to see the people who are hitting that owner acquisition page. And obviously that's the first question is, are my guests going to see this as well? No, unless they hit your management page, they aren't going to see it. So I think that is something that for us, we have to be very careful of. Custom audience, we have massive sets of data that we're trying to upload and make sure that we're connecting with potential homeowners that are absentee homeowners or people who are on OTAs and different areas like that. Custom audiences have been helpful for us as well.

Facebook page engagement on the owner side of things, not quite as effective because you don't have a whole lot of businesses who have a specific owner or management side of things, business page set up. But certainly I want to take that into consideration if you've liked the page. But again, getting into that mindset, getting in that persona of who we're targeting there, just because you like the page doesn't mean you're necessarily going to be an owner or have some interest there too. So I think that's where we get more of the guest side crossover where we're trying to avoid a little more. But there's kind of some other areas that we've tried, certainly the video views,

something that because Facebook groups are such a big deal specifically in our space, but I think just growing all over the place, whether it's a private group, whether it's a public group, being able to target those groups is very difficult. I've seen someone, a lot of people volunteer, oh, we can scrape this group and find contact information and you can upload it into a custom audience. That's a lot of work. It may require a freelance developer or data person or something like that. Whereas if you just drop a video in some of these groups and start to, and it is whether that's an overview video, whether it's talking about your business, whether it's talking on the owner side about your management, anything like that,

you can start to retarget based on those video views. And I think that's probably the most effective way I've found to an outside of scraping, trying to scrape the group of trying to target those groups and target, target the users in those groups. But have you tried that? Have you done anything with those video views or targeting based off of anything like that? I have some experience with the video view piece because we have clients that have some influencer type videos that they've shot or they've had other video content that they put out there and then we'll do like a promotional campaign where people see that video and then if they watch over half of it or over 75 percent of it or something we've done targeted off that I think it's a great kind of top level thing I'm fine with that approach for the most part I don't

see any bad ideas there but I just don't think the commitment is nearly as high as the other pieces that I shared earlier. So it's a little bit lower commitment thing to watch 35 seconds of a video that's fast paced and cut and looks interesting of a nice property. It may indicate a little bit of interest. I think it's like a nudge in the right direction, but I don't think it's all the way where it needs to be as far as, okay, this person is ready to book. This person is on my website.

They put in dates, that kind of thing. So I'm all for it. I think if you're looking for ways to kind of get your property out there and get more eyeballs on it or properties, whatever the case may be, then I think it's a decent place to start. But the video has to be worthy of watching said content, or it's not really going to make a lot of sense to me. So that's my view on that. Agreed. The other bullet point I've got on the list, but that's in the business or the ads manager area. And the one I didn't realize, and maybe it's a shout out to Arthur again, but the guest Wi-Fi. So I don't know exactly. And this would be something that you'd have a lot more experience with the traveler side.

Is there a direct integration there with the guest Wi-Fi as far as, I mean, is StayFi connecting right into Facebook or what does that look like as far as how people are doing that or how you would connect that into Facebook? Yeah, to my knowledge, there's no connection there. I'm not familiar with that. I've seen that option there, but I haven't used that. So I don't have any insight on that one. Unfortunately, maybe it's something we can dig in further and come back to this. I certainly I think the value in Stafi would be when they connect to your Wi Fi, they're going to give you their email address, at least most people do. And then you upload those into custom audience. So that's more of the angle that we've gone on that particular path.

Yeah. That works. And I guess it is. So you talked about lookalike a little bit. Hey, I guess that's where, where do you use the lookalike? This is something where I try not to use lookalike and I'll explain why I do that. But for you who does use lookalike and what percentages of lookalikes do you use? Kind of how do you parse through and find the right lookalike audience to deliver the right ads to? Yeah, again, I like past guests as the source list for lookalike because I think the theory that I'm working off of is that if person A has stayed there, then it's reasonable to assume that 1% lookalike audience of people that are just one layer outside of them would be at least

some of them are likely to be interested in what we have to offer at this particular vacation rental company. So that's generally the one that I use past guest is like the seed or the build it off of this. And then we do 1% us only is my typical targeting set there. And yeah, at that point, it's not really to try to get them to book, it's more so introduce them the brand that could be actually a decent video of you targeting campaign idea. That could be a decent like page campaign idea. That could be a decent giveaway idea. If you're doing a giveaways, we haven't talked about that too much. I don't think we've done chosen giveaway in the past, but it's come up a few times recently. And that could be a really good targeting set. You stayed with us, your friends might want to

stay with us too. How about a week giveaway? How about a weekend giveaway at one of our best properties to entice their interest, get them on our list and say we have to offer out here at XYZ vacation rental company. So that'd be kind of the way that I've played that in the past. But the way that we structure the Facebook guys, I didn't say this earlier, maybe I should have, is we have to offer out here at XYZ Vacation Rental Company. So that'd be kind of the way that I've played that in the past. But the way that we structure the Facebook ads, I didn't say this earlier, maybe I should have, is we have top funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel. So everything needs to fit in those three methodologies. And honestly, bottom funnel,

it's hard to get audience sizes big enough to make bottom funnel make sense. But most of the time, it's just top funnel, middle funnel. In theory, it'd be great if I had enough traffic to do a true bottom funnel campaign. But most of our clients don't have enough because going back to what we said 20, 30 minutes ago at this point, the audience size needs to be a thousand to be a bottom funnel. So in theory, if people who visit a checkout page

and don't convert, that'd be a great bottom funnel campaign if we could do it, but we just typically can't do it. So it makes it a little bit more limiting in that respect for us for most of the time. And it is for us. The reason we don't use lookalike is because we are. The data sets that we're going after, it is. It's absentee owner information or things like that where for Facebook to try to find a lookalike to that, the likelihood that they're going to find that information. So to be able to connect the dots and find a similar lookalike audience there, it's just not very likely that they're going to find other owners that we should be targeting there. So that's something that it is. Certainly, if we're needing to expand the audience, that's something that we consider, and we look at other ways to do that as well. But it's something that, and anybody who's listened to us and listened to me

talk about the owner side, it is, it's just a very small audience that we're going after. It's not the tens of thousands, not the thousands in some cases, it's hundreds or dozens, even if we want to go down to that level. So finding ways to expand that organically, as opposed to letting Facebook run with a 1% or a 2% lookalike is something that we've found to be a little more effective there. And again, we're always trying to find other channels and other areas that we can serve up those ads and try to get a little more engagement there as well. Yeah. That's what it's all about, getting more engagement, getting more results. Anything else on the targeting side? I don't think we covered every little nook and cranny, but that's a pretty

good overview, hopefully. Yeah, absolutely. I think we're in good shape. All right. I like this idea. This was all Paul's idea. So if you like this, leave a review, but then mention Paul's good idea specifically, because I think it was a good one to say, here's what we can do.

Here's what we can't do. And ultimately we are limited by the platforms a little bit. So yeah, we would appreciate if you listen this far, we appreciate you. Thank you very much. Leave a review.

We'll be back next week with a new episode here on the Heads and Beds show. And yeah, thanks so much for listening. We'll catch you next time.