Heads In Beds Show - Is Your Paid Search Strategy A DUD Or A STUD?

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

In this episode, Paul and Conrad share an update on the Maui fires and how Airbnb is handling it, along with a discussion of how to run PPC search ads the right way and as a STUD and not a DUD.Enjoy!PLEASE CLICK THIS - Coconut Condos Ohana Relief⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellAirbnb offering full refunds to guests with Maui bookingsOptmyzr🔗 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. Hey there, Paul. How's it going today? Oh, just another wonderful Monday morning here. Just trying to i had

not a whole lot new i guess i we do we get closer every time we record it's just one more week to the end of the summer and it just makes my skin itch a little more how you gotta have kids going back to school almost for you what's the timing on that right now yeah next week i think so this week i think tomorrow julian's going to meet his teacher the orientation type day liam did did his last week. So we got to meet his teacher last week. I think that's going to go smoothly. Let's hope at least. Knock on wood, the last daycare situation was a misfire. So we won't bore the listeners with the details, but it didn't go the way we intended to. It's hard to get kids to cooperate and do what they're told, especially when they're not, they don't like doing what they're told. They like to not do that. So always a little bit of a challenging situation.

So yeah, we're there. Summer feels like it's, it feels hotter like yesterday. And last week it felt hotter, at least on the golf course than it did in July. I don't know exactly what that situation is. Technically the temperature is lower, but the humidity is jacked up. And at about one 30 yesterday, I was not feeling fantastic. I was like, it's always strange when you're on 17 and you've, I have one of these big cooler drink type things.

And I think I've gone through three Gatorades and I haven't gone to the bathroom one single time and I'm just drenched in sweat and I'm just like, the ball flies a long way. So we're rolling with it. My dad is not so charitable with his interpretation. He's like, I don't think I'm going to come out again till fall. So it's always a little bit challenging. That's legit there. That's, we're back in the sixties.

So I don't know, but probably just for there. That's we're back in the 60s. So I don't know, but probably just for today and tomorrow we'll be back in the 90. And I love weather these days. It's just so predictable and everything. Variable. Yeah. We've got to turn the page, unfortunately, to something pretty unpredictable, but it does tie into marketing minutes. Obviously our thoughts and our consideration all to all the people out there in Maui and

what they're going through. It's absolutely brutal. And some of the images and things like that I've seen have have just made me tear up. I've never been to Hawaii actually know a lot about Hawaii for someone's never been there because I had a large client there for almost four years. So I've studied all these islands and I like written content about the island to way back in the day, different islands and I feel like I know the area a little bit even though I've not been there. But obviously what they're dealing with is tough. We'll actually put some links in the in the show notes. I've seen some different GoFundMe

slash approved fundraiser things. I think I caught one for Coconut Condos, who I think was previously a Venturi partner. We'll put theirs in the show notes so people can certainly donate if they want to. But I think, Paul, you add a marketing context from this whole situation that's going on. And I'm curious your thoughts on that.

Yeah, so I think the, anytime we get into these natural disaster things, there's that what's going to happen to bookings travel we're in this space this is what we do in airbnb as they did with covid went through and it looks like they've given all of their guests a full refund on those bookings and it is that's it looks great on paper it makes everybody all those travelers feel good but for those property managers and we've talked about it in the past, that's revenue that's now off the books. That's something that I understand that Airbnb plays the role of the supplier or how they see, they

perceive themselves, but they're a marketplace. I think you can make the argument that they maybe overstepped or that when they make these decisions, they're overstepping the role of the marketplace versus that of the actual property manager or the supplier here. It is. I can't imagine being in the position of all of these property managers that are going to lose all of that revenue, all that income right out of their bank accounts in some cases, probably. For people who are cash flowing a little, depending on how you cash flow, if you're a little tighter, if you're a little more loose, if you're month to month,

this probably had a pretty big impact on you. Again, continuing the thought process of, and we'll talk, I'm sure we'll talk about it again in the future, but that distribution versus marketing versus where do you want to have those bookings coming in and your relationship with Airbnb and those other OTAs is very important and understanding how it could impact you, not just in the good times, but the bad times, I think is certainly important here. But what are your thoughts on this? I know it's been a little while since you've been affected directly for your partners, but what do you feel? How do you feel about that? affected directly for your partners. But what do you feel? How do you feel about that?

Yeah, I think it's a no-win situation, to be honest with you. I tend to lean towards Verbo's angle, right? Because obviously, no one wanted this to happen, right? The guest didn't want this to happen, the owner didn't want this to happen, etc. But there is a lot of consideration that needs to be given to the fact that we have policies and procedures for when this does occur. And most of our clients offer travel insurance, trip insurance type things for the fact that you booked to stay. So for Airbnb to unilaterally flex themselves to make themselves look good, sure, it makes them look good. And I'm sure the guest has a lot of loyalty in this situation. But I don't know if it's really best for the actual ecosystem, the health of our business and the health of what we do long term when they've done this. And COVID was the most extreme example. It's been a few years. So maybe that's just faded from memory a little bit,

where the amount of money they took from some of our clients during the COVID cancellations was extreme. And now looking back on it, like this isn't a show about that topic or anything. Let's be honest, it was probably unnecessary, much of what they did, much of what they canceled and things like that. They could have been perfectly safe stays by being and standing in a freestanding property and driving from their house, whatever. It's not even really the topic for right now. But in this situation, I think them not making money, any money off this scenario seems like a very fair angle to or approach to take as Verbo's done from my understanding from what you shared with me. But the approach of, oh, we're going to take all this money out of the hosts or property

manager's pocket. Look, they may think they're hurting some large company. Maybe that's fine in their bucket, but there's plenty of single property hosts that is not going to help them. That's not going to be the right thing for them to do. And it's going to put them in a tough spot, especially given what happened. Imagine your property burning down and to add insult to injury, Airbnb is going in there and topping off your bank account and removing a bunch of money from your bank account on top of what you're going to have to deal with, try to even consider, I don't even know, rebuilding or at least trying to do an insurance claim or something like that for your property. So I have a hard time supporting that that approach to be honest

with you yeah yeah and i will say shout out to mount actually the island of maui for reducing i think they just eliminated i don't know in just in the short term reducing their long term or their short-term ban of sorts they before it was nothing under 30 days So they have rescinded that to allow people who are trying to recover here to have homes, short-term homes, short-term living accommodations and stuff like that. But yeah, it's when the municipality or something takes the right step forward and Airbnb, the big national player, maybe it doesn't help. It's a lot to add on there and pile on, but that's okay. Yeah. So anyways, like we said a minute ago, we're going the coconut condos ohana relief go fund me i just found the link so

i'll put that in the show notes as of this recording we record monday mornings it's already raised 84 000 of their hundred thousand dollars goal i will chip in a little bit after we're done recording here to try to get a little bit higher um and there's been some a lot of industry folks in the in our space have donated i can see their comments and their donations on the page which is fantastic so yeah certainly all the best to those people and yeah we'll try to maybe we can find a way to promote them down the road and if there is a path for people to go back there because that's obviously a core part of that market is tourism and for the people there obviously it's tough for sure yeah we'll try to turn the page i know it's hard but our main topic today is about paid search strategy so we'll go in that direction we're back

on the dud or stud train. So that is the approach that we're going to have here. So this was, if you haven't heard the first episode, you can go back and listen to it. We talked about more like the website design side of things, the vacation rental website design side of things. And we talked about, is there certain elements on a website? Or in this case today, we're going to talk about the way you set up an account that's a dud, which is kind of a bad idea.

Don't do it. Or a stud, which is fantastic, is going to perform well, it's a good idea, and you should do it. So today, we're going to be a little bit more focused just specifically around paid search. When I say paid search, I mostly mean Google Ads, but we'll even maybe paint some context around other search platforms as well. They are out there. Yeah, Paul, do you want to take the first pick your poison? Do you want to take the first dud or stud bullet point here and get us running? Let's do dud. Let's do the first dud and we're going to do not reviewing search terms because I think that this is probably

one of the I think it's one of the things that has the most impact on how you're actually spending the budget. For those who aren't as familiar, you put in keywords into Google and what you actually get served up

for or displayed for is going to be a little different there. Wait, it's not the same? Don't show me for that keyword? I know, right? It is. I think the search terms, it is. That's the actual output, what the searchers are actually putting in. So if you're not looking in and just assuming that, hey, I'm getting all these exact keywords that I put in, there's probably a good chance that you're getting, and it varies. Maybe you're getting, if you're doing on the owner side, you're getting more guest-related terms. If you're doing guest-side marketing, maybe you're getting more branded terms.

Maybe you're getting branded terms across the board in campaigns you don't want it. But you really want to understand whether Google's taking liberties, if you're doing a broad match or a phrase match approach. It's really the true understanding of how the campaign is performing. You can look at the metrics, the KPIs and stuff like that. But the search terms is really a number one of what you're getting out of it. What people are searching to get to your website, your landing page or XYZ area. And it is, if you don't know, you're blind to the intent that people are taking to get to your site. So I think it's one of those that Google doesn't do us any favors at the same time.

They're not giving us full visibility. Typically it varies. I have some accounts where I see maybe half of the search terms that I get total clicks for. Some are maybe closer to 60 or 70 or 80%. Some are closer to 10%. That is a report that is very beneficial it's just a matter of how much how much google is going to give you there so thoughts on the search terms there kind of anything to add in there and the does there yeah i guess it was number one on my outline for a reason as well which is that this is i think because two things are happening simultaneously to make this just a dud part of running bc ads right now number one google is aggressively pushing you in the interface towards using broad match

keywords, which are going to naturally lead to more and more irrelevant search terms over time. So in other words, they're making you cast a wider net out there into the ocean of people searching to try to find what you're looking for. And sometimes there's a time and a place for that. I'm not like never broad match, but I'm, I'm use broad match with extreme caution. Maybe if I could put a label on myself, it would be that label. And unfortunately what happens here a lot is that you're trying to bid on Myrtle Beach

condo rentals and you end up showing up for keywords like resorts or keywords like places to stay or keywords like cheap or keywords like luxury. And maybe your properties don't meet those other types of descriptions for that particular inventory type that you're going after. And you end up spending a ton of money on stuff that really you're selling, you know, tomatoes and someone's trying to buy a banana. Ultimately, if I could explain to someone who's not super savvy about Google ads, that's what I would describe. You think you're marketing and bidding on people looking for tomatoes, and you're instead showing what people are searching for

bananas. And that's very challenging. So yeah, this is number one on my list for a reason. It's a huge issue that I see when we do like an of an account or we look over an account or we're trying to figure out what's going on. That is often the first place I dive into, like how frequently are they going in here? And pretty much you can tell the health of an account pretty quickly by going and looking at search terms and seeing the size and scope of that if the account has been active for some time. We have clients now where we're a thousand keywords deep on a negative keyword list and somehow I keep finding new ones every single week or every other week. I go in there and I haven't got that one yet.

Somehow click. I don't want you anymore. So if we're going to be listening to Google's guidelines on broadening our search sphere of again, casting a wider net of what we're actually going after, then we have to be, unfortunately spend double or triple or quadruple the time on the backend to make sure we're constantly getting rid of stuff that we don't actually want to search for once they interpret the keyword how they want to. So it's on your side, I know it's challenging because the search volumes are so low. So you want to cast a wide net. On my side, I usually don't struggle as

much with search volume when I'm doing guest targeting. It's more so relevance is my typical struggle there. So yeah, number one, done. Got to review those search terms for sure. Awesome. All right, let's go stud then. You did that. I will say segmenting campaigns narrowly. So one thing I see quite a bit is that people are putting together a campaign and they're putting one campaign out there and then a bunch of ad groups and they're slapping 20 bucks a day on it and they think that's the approach. The stud approach, in my opinion, is instead to have a lot of separate campaigns with very narrowly defined topics or keywords or search terms you're going after, and then spreading the budget a little bit further across different campaigns when that makes

sense. So let me give you an example. I think the stud approach would be if you want to bid on, let's give an example, Gatlinburg cabinet rentals, and you also want to bid on Gatlinburg pet-friendly cabinet rentals, I would actually put those most likely into two separate campaigns. So I'd have campaign targeting the cabin rental term with a negative for pet friendly so that we're not accidentally cross matching. Then I would have a separate campaign for pet friendly so that people searching pet friendly, I could put into sort of a separate bucket from a cost perspective. Obviously, I can send them to a better landing page. So when they

click on pet friendly, they get a landing pages that matches pet friendly. These all seem like pretty straightforward things, but you'd be surprised how often the case how people set things up. And the stud approach that we find is that the more narrow and specific you are at the campaign level, you tend to get better outcomes because the message matches so tight. And you can really figure out how effective that spend is. If you're taking $10 a day on one campaign, and then $5 a day on the other, you may say, what's the difference? Why don't I just take 15 bucks a day, put them in one campaign? Surely, surely, it'll make my life a little bit easier. Don't call me surely. And also, it's really challenging to figure out the approach that you're having, because you don't know, you can't really

control where the spend goes. When you put 15 bucks onto a campaign, and you dump a bunch of different ideas into it into into separate ad groups, you can't like Google is just going to serve what they want to serve, they're gonna maybe do algorithmically what they think makes sense. What you want to do is have more control on the dial and say, I don't want to turn this campaign up that's doing well, I might want to turn this campaign down that's not doing well or just pause it and you can't do that with this other structure so if you're going to segment campaigns do so narrowly be very specific you can take this too far you can get too specific but it's rare that i see that usually it's people are way too broad and they have one or two campaigns with a bunch

of stuff in them we have builds where we have 50 different campaigns because we're targeting 50 different topics mostly that's like a condo resort environment where we're trying to target like every, the name of every condo building or something like that. But again, I've seen setups where people take one campaign and they'll put all the condo names under that same campaign. It doesn't work. So if you're going to do stud BC approach, segment your campaigns narrowly and then go from there.

Your thoughts or your experience on that. I agree. And that's something we actually partially because of that low search volume on the owner's side, we do, we, we can't segment maybe as narrowly as we'd like in some cases, or it takes just a little more time to develop where we want to segment because it is, I think what I call it is cannibalization. You, once, if you put too much in there, you're going to, Google's going to take the path of least resistance. They're going to try to get you either the lowest cost click. They're going to try to spend all your budget as effectively as

they see it. But they don't know whether you want more homes or more people looking for Destin versus Panama City Beach versus these different areas. So I do. I think that's something that the more you can segment in, you're going to give people a better experience. If you're just generally putting a big group of keywords in with a lot of different topics and you're just sending them to a homepage, you're going to get the performance that you deserve, which is somewhere in there in the middle.

No, I think segmenting is really important in making sure that you're spending that budget appropriately. And that it is, it's going to the right keywords, it's going to the right intent. And ultimately, you're getting the right people to your website there. Let's go back. I'm going to go back into stud now. We're going to jump back in there. And we're going to go with giving campaigns enough budget. And I think this is one of those areas where it can be difficult to budget out what you're looking for there, what you're looking for your individual campaigns. And I think understanding what type of cost per click

you're getting, there's a lot of factors that are coming into play there. One of those insights, one of the data points that I look at in trying to determine whether we've given enough budget is going to be that auction insights and really understanding how much of the search impression share are we getting? How much of the budget are we filling up? Certainly. But what do we want to buy? More traffic? Do we want to buy less traffic? I think that's a good gauge on having enough budget out there. But then again, it's all about your goals and what your conversion rates are and getting the most return on that investment there. So I think specifically on the ROI side of things, how do you make those determinations on the guest side, Conrad, for giving enough budget? That someone had a company that we're working with,

and they wanted to take a relatively small budget, it was like 1000, 2000 a month, somewhere in that range, and spread it too far. They wanted to say, I want to bid on this and this. And they wanted to basically take it and slice it into these tiny little buckets that in my experience typically don't lead to the right outcome in terms of figuring out what's working and what's not working. So my frame on this is that if we have a thousand dollar budget, we probably can only put that into two, maybe three campaigns, depending on the volume of the different keywords that we're going after. So if you have a low budget, that's fine. You just have to start by testing one thing, giving it enough volume and traffic and conversion data to actually see if it's working well enough or not. And then you could maybe stop that if it's not working and try something new,

but you don't get the right results even with a lower budget by taking 10 different campaign ideas, 10 different keyword ideas and putting a dollar a day on all of them. And then thinking you're going to get enough data to make the right decision. So you've got to give the campaign enough budget to flourish, to get traffic, to get clicks, to get bookings in the door. And then from there, you can make better determinations on, okay, this one's working. Let me just add on another $10, another $20 a day into this campaign so I can see what's working there. So yeah, the stud thing, giving campaigns enough budget is absolutely critical in my mind to figuring out what's working and not. And if you have a low budget, that's okay, but just don't try to do it all. Focus on what you can do and then move on to the next thing. Once you found a winner, move on and find

more winners. And then you can start with a low budget and eventually scale to a lot more. I always share the story to my team internally because I have to remind them sometimes. We have a client that we've been working with since 2017. He started on a $500 retainer and with a $1,000 Google Ads budget. And now his Google Ads budget exceeds $10,000 most months. So we had to show him that we were doing the right thing and getting results. And then we kept the edge up over time, an extra 500, an extra 1000. And on peak months, he'll spend 12, 13, $14,000 a month in Google ads and very profitably, by the way, that's not just him shoveling money in there. That's very profitable spend for sure. Yeah. All right. So I can't do another stat. So I guess I'll have to go

back to Doug. All right. So I'll go with Doug. I see this quite a bit. Not testing or finding the best bid strategy. So again, Google's interfaces is going to push you into maximized conversions, most likely, or in our scenario on the guest side, typically maximized conversion value. Sometimes that's great. In fact, honestly, if I could look at our campaigns, most of the time, that's great. Most of the time that works well, but sometimes not at first. So what we find is that on a brand new campaign, the best thing to do oftentimes is to focus on getting traffic. We'll typically use maximize clicks. We may even leave it uncapped,

which is just, hey, Google, give us as much traffic as you can within this budget that we're giving you. And let's see, let the cards fall where they may in terms of conversions. Let's get a sense of it. At first, it's really sometimes not ideal to tell Google maximize conversions when they haven't seen any conversions. They don't even know. They don't even know. I say they. Google doesn't even know really what it's looking for. So at first, you may have to find a more simplistic or suboptimal bid strategy is actually the right play. And then over time, you can swap it into maximized conversion value. Once you've seen 10, 20 bookings come from a campaign over a few month period, I find that those tend to perform better. But you can't just follow like a playbook. Like I saw the

checklist from another agency, not really in our space, but from someone else who does BC work. And they were just like flip every single campaign to this bit strategy. And I'm like, maybe not like we have to sometimes test it and see what's working best before we actually go down that path. So again, Google's interface is gonna, I don't wanna say trick you, but it's gonna encourage you to do certain things, which sometimes don't actually lead to the best results. You've got to have this, the mind and the awareness to say, I can't just do everything Google says, maybe automatically, I need to put some thought into it and maybe consider testing other ones. But that particular one that I find is most extreme is on a brand new account, brand new campaign with a small budget, we've just got

to get traffic at first. And usually that's best done by maximize clicks in my experience. So I don't know what your thoughts are here on the owner side or just generally from bid strategies. Yeah, bid strategy. I mean, it is this i can remember getting on a call with google like long ago when they were first doing the maximized conversions that was the beta not all the other betas they've done since then and i remember just the because we were running this was on the resorts and lodges.com side of things we were running six seven 700 campaigns in that single account. So they had a lot to choose from. But we did tests on probably 10 or 15 campaigns and really did our due diligence because we wanted to get the best performance possible.

And I think it was one of those things where we did A-B testing, we did experiments. And every time we did them, and I continue to try to do them, it is, we just couldn't find anything that was statistically significant as far as this bid strategy is better than this strategy. Not saying that you shouldn't be testing and doing that, but it is, you really want to go through the experiment process, even if it means increasing that budget a little bit in the short term to give enough budget to be able to see what strategy is going to work best for you. I think the key with maximized conversions is something we're going to talk about a little later is making sure you have your conversions tracking properly, your detailed revenue conversions and all that other

stuff. But I do. I think that you can choose any of the bid strategies that you want to. And certainly some of them might work well in specific verticals, specific industries, stuff like that. But don't just stick with it universally. I would say long-term, test it, try it, just like you're saying, whether it's quarterly, monthly. I would make sure anytime you're doing this testing, give it the time. Don't just test it for a week or test it for two weeks and say it didn't work or it did work. You have to make sure anytime you're testing out those bid strategies or doing any experiments of any kind in Google ads, give it the time to let it work and to allow those results to become

statistically significant there. So that's all I got. Yeah. And unfortunately, it's really hard to do that at low budget levels. So that's one thing too. Sometimes the clients with low budgets want to get information and data back quickly, but those things are, I hate to say it, they're completely in conflict with one another. The best way to get results back quickly is to spend a lot of money. So if you have a low budget, that's fine, but you've got to, if you're dialing the budget down, you got to dial the patience way up internally to say, okay, I have to be a lot more patient to figure out what the results are really driving me here. And ultimately, the best thing for you to do maybe to temporarily increase the spend so you can hopefully get some better feedback quicker, some better data quicker,

and just deal with sort of the consequences of that. If you're not seeing profitability at first, that's common. That's that sometimes happen happens, but you have to figure out how to get there. And usually that might mean spending unprofitably for a few months until you find out what's really working well. All right, I'm going to hop back into too many broad keywords because I think that's a big old,

another big old dud thing to talk about. It is. And I've tiptoed along this line, I would say on the owner side of things, just because there is such low search volume. And every once in a while, there's a consideration to make there of, do I go to broad match? Or do I go back to phrase match? Or how do I extend that further? I think the downside with broad match is you are. You're giving Google the

keys to the castle, the keys to the car. They're going to fill up your budget. But we've all been in that painful position where we put in Myrtle Beach Airbnb or Myrtle Beach Vacation Rentals, for example, and you do see Airbnb searches, just Airbnb, just the branded searches coming through. It is. If you're actively managing the campaign, broad match is an option. Maybe I still struggle doing any broad match of any kind at this point. It just leaves the door too far open to have a lot of wasted spend. Even if you're actively managing and you're running a small budget, the likelihood that you're going to either visually be able to see that wasted spend or you're going to have that hidden information in the search terms, something's not going to be going to the bottom line like you want it to. So that's my thing. I want to avoid the waste.

I want to make sure the keywords that are coming in, I know what they are as much as possible, and I can control those. Broad match really takes away that ability. So that's short and sweet there. What are your thoughts on it? You touched on using them a little bit, but what are your thoughts on it? Yeah, I just think because this is a default, people just tend to put too many in there and they tend to use them initially at all. So my general approach I spent, I shared earlier, max clicks is my general bid strategy at first. My bid strategy first also tends to be phrase with three, four or five, perhaps keywords per ad group.

It's going to be very tightly focused. And then over time it tends to expand a little bit. And when it's expanding too much, that's typically when you get into some trouble in my experience. So it's a cousin to number one about not reviewing search terms on the dead side. But ultimately, yeah, that's where some pain can occur. So I think that be very cautious and careful or review your agency and ask them if they're using broad, just be like, that's okay. But just explain like, what's the benefit of your broad versus phrase?

What's your backend systems look like to monitor what's going on so that I'm not throwing money away on the Google machine? Correct. Yeah. Easy to do. Okay, awesome. All right. So mine, then I think I'll go back stud direction targeting ads correctly. So we talked about segmentation earlier, which is what you decide to actually bid on targeting, in my opinion, is a little bit different, which is where do I want my ads to show? And when I say where physically, like where someone actually located, again, at first, I tend to be a little bit more broad here. But usually, it doesn't take too long to figure out, okay, people going into this particular destination, we have a client of Broken Bow, for example, are coming within a very tight radius, it's a two hour, three hour, maybe

a little bit more type radius, parts of Dallas, fourth words, parts of some parts of Oklahoma, a little tiny sliver of ordering states sometimes get put into that bucket. But we don't really need to go target California, or Florida or Massachusetts, those people just don't go to Broken Bow enough for it to actually make a meaningful difference for our advertising. So this sounds relatively straightforward. But again, once you have enough data, just going in there and making sure that the tracking is targeting people who are the most likely to book every once in a while, I see like an egregious example where people are ads are showing in India or people's ads are showing in Europe or Russia or something like that. And obviously, they're like, I've never even had a guest from outside of these four states. Why would I be targeting ads in India or something like that? So yeah,

be very careful there. Google tries to trip you up, I swear on the location targeting, you want to choose not what people are interested in, because their search term would indicate that they're interested in pick your destination here, but where they're actually physically located. That's what I'm interested in. They could be physically located in North Carolina, and they're likely to come to Myrtle Beach. That's a common thing that happens. But again, Google tries to trip you up on that. And the default setting is always more broad. You'll sense a theme here if you're listening to this. It's more broad and more general than it should be. We want to try to narrow that down and just

focus on the areas that are most likely to get bookings. I put an outline, where does 75% of your bookings come from? Let's look at those 80, 20, whatever terminology you want to use. Let's look at those areas and target our ads there. We could always expand it down the road if we need to, not to go back to Hawaii, given where we started this episode. But when I did work on the FC account for Hawaii, sure, a lot of people come from California and British Columbia and the West Coast of the US, Oregon, Washington State, etc. But they get a lot of bookies from the East coast as well. So that one was harder because people will come to Hawaii from all over the country. It's kind of this bucket list type destination, bucket list type place to go to.

So they tend to have a much wider set of people traveling in just given the nature of that destination. But most clients we work with in most leisure markets, that's not the case. It's usually drive to, or if it's fly to, it's from a few markets. It's not fly to from all over the place inside the country and internationally. That's pretty uncommon. So yeah, be very aware you're targeting geographically. Go ahead. Certainly it's going to happen on the Hawaii train as well. We were working with the luxury hotel. And that was the first time I had to build app ads for to go be served up in Japan

and Australia, because that's where a third of their bookings were coming from. And they had to devote a pretty solid amount of budget to that area because you're not going to rely on the domestic. And at that point, it was 2019, 2022. So there are some other factors there, but it's really understanding. I think that's where just understanding not just the way your digital is working, but understanding the way your business is running and having that CRM information of where are your guests coming from, because that's going to help educate where you're going to put those marketing dollars down the road. It's not just giving people a better experience on the guest side or traveler side, which the CRM is important there, but that's just more insights that we can use, bring into the digital strategy and especially on the targeting side of things. Yeah. We're not that way. We're not wasting money. We've talked about not wasting money on bad clicks for keywords. This is not bad. We're not wasting bad money on clicks for areas where people just aren't going to travel

to your location. How's your Japanese by the way? Solid. It was a Google translate is it was my best friend. And then it took about four rounds of revision with the hotel themselves saying nope that's not the right context okay thank you very much 30 character limit to yourself yeah awesome yeah i couldn't tell you one japanese word i don't think i know any so that would not be the that would not be the play for me no all right go ahead i think it's your turn let Let's see here. Detailed revenue conversion tracking, stud things. Knowing how much revenue your everything is producing, your website is producing, your digital marketing is producing, obviously your paid search is

producing is incredibly important. That's the nice thing about Google Analytics. Down to the keyword level we can see it we've got that visibility and i don't know can we see it in google ads at the keyword level specifically we've got okay you can do a segment yeah you can flip on a segment and then you go in the keywords table yeah yeah so that is i think that's something that you again you need to have the visibility at the very least. Certainly, if you're spending $2,000, $3,000, $5,000 a month, $10,000 a month, you need to know what kind of return are you getting.

Are you getting a 2-to-1 return? Are you getting a 10-to-1 return? Are you getting a 50-to-1 return? All of these things are possible, but you have no idea unless you have that detailed revenue conversion tracking set up in place. And I think the post G4 switch, flip, whatever it is, I haven't heard too many pain points. I think people are still working through some of the e-commerce and the revenue tracking and stuff like that. It's not a perfect thing.

I've hopped into a few analytics accounts that just turned off. So that's certainly one of those things that you don't want to be worried about. But again, it's all about ROI on the search side of things. And if you can't determine your ROI, and it's just the spend, the investment, you're going to have a pretty big hole and gap in how you're able to better manage those campaigns. So anything on that, on the conversion tracking side of things? Yeah, no, I think you have to have it. It's definitely the stud thing to do to make sure you've got detailed revenue conversion tracking in there. Some companies and partners we're working with on the development side make this very easy. They work with us. They're trying to figure out the best way of doing it. Others make this like pulling teeth. If you DM me, I'll share some names.

It's been frustrating, needless to say. But overall, once you get it figured out, it's a headache to get figured out at times. I really understand that and can feel that pain deeply. But once you get it figured out, there's obviously a lot of upside there. The only thing I would add in there is that decide what revenue is. Everyone get in a meeting or on email thread and let's decide what revenue is. Is it just gross rent? Is that what you decide revenue is? Okay, that's fine. Or do fees that you include in that reservation also have some specific margins associated with them? For example, cleaning tends to be virtually no margin fee, a reservation admin fee, which is all the rage. A lot of our clients doing that now, that's fine, but that's pretty much all margin. We're not really paying anything out. It's just

another way to slide a little bit of dollars from the property owner to the manager side. I'm not opposed to it. That's kind of the game that they're playing and we can work with you, but let's decide what revenue is so we can decide what a reasonable ROI is when a booking occurs. One thing you see some large national property management brands do is they slide so many fees on their side of the equation that I feel like they're comfortable taking very low ROI, like return on ad spend numbers from their Google advertising because the booking for them, because the admin fees and other pieces that get added on cleaning with a little bit of margin added into it, they make a two night booking, the owner gets 250. And then they somehow make $500 in that scenario, whereas longer stays might

be a little bit more flip. So anyways, I say a lot to say, I think I did a LinkedIn post on this a while ago, where it's like breaking down, there's a fee component to it. There's a rent component to it. There's typically taxes, which are just passed through. You're not getting any of that. So you might just want to exclude it from your revenue numbers and Google ads, but decide on that, agree on it, and then understand what data is being fed into Google so that you're properly accounting for it and understanding it as well. So that's my only other piece to add on there. Perfect. Yeah, right on. So let's, let me go in this direction then overly relying a dud thing to do, is overly rely on auto-recommendations. This was actually your suggestion, Paul,

but just the way the cookie crumbled here on the outline, I guess I get to do it. So I'll go through it pretty quickly. Yeah, Google is going to push you again into these auto-recommendation. There are some auto-recommendations I opt into. So I do one that's like the pause inactive keywords. I think that's one I typically recommend.

I had my rep suggested that I auto-recommend the maximize conversion value when it has enough data. So I did do that if the ROI is there. I'm a little cautious. I always go and look at it, but that one did help a little bit, especially on some bigger accounts that have a lot of campaigns. I have a few other ones that I think I look at. I think there's one where it looks at certain like timing, like day parting or something and applies it. I have to go look at the table and see, but maybe let's say there's 20. I think I've opted into one or two of them, something like that. But if you opt into a lot of these auto recommendations, Google is going to add a lot of broad match keywords without your

consent. They can raise your budget without your consent. So let's say you had $10 a day on a campaign. One of the auto recommendations is basically telling Google that it's allowing you're giving Google automatic permission to just keep spending more and more money and more and more ascending daily budgets without you really going in there and modifying something that makes me super uncomfortable. I just can't think of anything that I would dislike more than that. So a lot of these auto recommendations are not good. So maybe you can dive into a little bit more because I know you have some experience and thoughts on this as well. It is. I think that there's some that I think it's the way that they do it is what bothers me more than anything else. It's not that you just do it in the UI of the

Google ads platform. It's that they send these emails that seem rather innocuous and they say, Hey, would you like to, would you like Google to improve your performance? Yeah, it is an op. Essentially it's a call to action button opting in, but they're not clear what they're saying. They're not giving you the bullet points of those optimizations and auto apply or the recommendations that are being auto applied. And they do, they talk about as targeting and stuff like that. But then when you go in, you see what's happening, adding display for a search display extension for a search campaign. The last thing we want to do is water down our results because we're getting 10,000 impressions on the display network for

search ads. That's the last, that's not where we want those ads to serve up. So the, I think it's a good place to understand where those recommendations are. So when you're going into, in your campaign or you're going into the recommendations area, there's a little, and it's going to give you cards of all the recommendations and optimizations that you can make. And it's going to give you an optimization score. Now here's the dirty little secret. If you dismiss all of those, you're still going to get an optimization score of a hundred. That's just how it works. They really don't care whether you actually take the actions or not. And that optimization scores has very little basis on what's going to help your ads perform better.

But take that into consideration. Go into your Google ads, go into recommendations. And in the upper right-hand corner, there's a little auto-apply button. Click on that just to see. I think you're right. There's somewhere between about 20-ish recommendations that are automatically in there. See how many are checked. Hopefully, it's a smaller number. But if all 14 of them

are checked or all 20 are checked or all those specific areas are checked, just take a look at the actions Google is taking on your behalf. Because whether you realize it or not, with all those being checked, at some point along the lines, you authorized it. Whether it was through that email, whether you went in and said, auto- this or auto apply that, you vouched for it. So it is up to the, Google's not going to take those actions without some type of prompt. So you're going to have to actively do something, whether it's an email, whether it's in the account or whatever it is, just make sure you understand what's being auto applied or auto recommended right now. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. A hundred percent. If you're giving that kind of access, you got to understand what's going on. That's awesome. I think we've got

a few more here to get through. I know one was no conversion tracking, but I think we covered that. So maybe we can go in a different direction on that one. Yep. Yeah. So let's go ads to I think the last dud thing I'll hop on is ads to minimal missing assets. So it is the, while the search ad is great, if you don't, what Google's trying to serve up is the most comprehensive ad possible. They want site links. They want structured snippets. They want call outs. They want everything because again, it's a better experience for the ultimate searcher.

They want more clickable items on those ads and more information. With call outs, you can get pretty detailed. With structured snippets, if you're in specific neighborhoods, you want to do something like that, or you have specific amenities you want to call out, great opportunities to do that. Putting a call extension on. Location extension is something that, especially on the guest side of things, I think it's a great option because it does. It connects your Google business listing with your Google ads and allows people to, I think it blends in a little more of the local search to your results

there because it is when you're in a certain radius, you will see more of that location extension being added on there. As comprehensively as you can build it out, even if it takes a little bit of time, I promise it's worth it because the quality score will improve overall holistically. Google will try to serve up that ad more frequently. You'll probably see a higher click-through rate with more of those extensions and everything added on there as well. And I didn't even mention the image extensions, but those are obviously important as well. But yeah, it is.

Do you have a checklist for how you're building out those ads as far as extension goes when you're building those out thoroughly? Yeah, my logic is certainly put all the relevant ones in there that you can. We don't end up putting every single one in there typically because sometimes it's just not possible. There's, there's not always like lead ads, the lead ad form, for example, we rarely use that. I think there's a time and a place for that on the owner side maybe, but you got to set up a lot of infrastructure for that to work. There's a few that we skip. And if someone's listening and they're a client, like we probably skipped them on purpose, but but for the most part i think you should be filling out site links for sure

stretcher snippets the phone a lot of people call from google ads yeah we're surprised by that yeah that number is declining over time but sometimes i just forget how frequently that action occurs people are just using the phone option to call or phone calls from website we track that as well excuse me and that does make a big difference in my experience for sure. So yeah, you want the ad to be beefy, nice big ad, bigger the ad is more clicks you're going to get, it doesn't even take a lot of advanced reasoning to get that out. So yeah, one thing that I see again on quickly set up accounts, you know, it's just they don't really have anything, they have an ad, they have a few headlines, that's it, they don't go through the effort of making the ad really fleshed out in full. And that does help increase the number of

people clicking on it and increase the number of traffic that you're going to get from it as well, in my experience. Yeah. Let's see if I can bring us home here with studs. So stud using budget pacing tools to evenly spread your spend through the month. So we've talked a little bit about having a low budget, or whatever budget you may happen to have, you got to spend it logically and evenly. And one thing that's really hard, there's really not a tool inside of the Google Ads interface natively that makes this easy. You can set a daily budget, but then you might have a day where you spend half of it. You could have a day where you spend over it because they're fine with that as long as the monthly amount is the same.

So you don't really have a good sense just looking at an account quickly. At least this is my perspective to go, oh, yeah, we've spent, it's the 14th of the month. We've spent X amount of dollars. Here's how much we're going to spend. Knowing that some campaigns might be ascending, some might be descending. It's complicated. Anyways, a few years back, we found a tool called optimizer. I will put a link to this in the chat or excuse me into the show notes as well optimizer.com. And I find it does a phenomenal job of helping us really understand exactly how

much pacing is going how much spend is going out what our pacing is, if we need to bring things up a little bit if we need to bring things down a little bit, and we control not just budget, but where that budget goes. So if we had like we were sharing earlier, if we had 10 campaigns that all have $10 a day, some may be getting a five or six return on money. Okay. Some may be getting a 20 to one return on our money from a gross booking perspective. So we might want to take some of those budgets down to a dollar a day and maybe leave them active, but come back to them in the future and then put $20 a day on a better campaign.

Optimizer makes that super easy. Yeah. We highly recommend that tool. It's fantastic. It probably doesn't make sense until you're spending several thousand dollars a month to consider it. But if your agency is using something like this, or if you can use something like this,

I think it can make a huge difference. It looks like their plan started about 200 bucks a month. So I think there's a time and a place when this really does help you out and makes things a lot easier from either a time perspective or a reporting perspective or a return on ad spend perspective.

I'll put a link in the chat there, but yeah, know your budget pacing. Don't overspend, don't underspend. And then I think you were saying too, before we recorded, like the seasonality, like maybe speak on that for a second, the seasonal aspect of ad cost as well. Yeah, I think, and especially, we see it on the owner side. But I remember seeing it on the guest side as well, is that there's times where your bookings are good, and you don't need to spend on the owner side of things. When the bookings are high during the summer season and beach markets, not a whole lot of people looking to switch things up. Not a

lot of people looking to switch to a new property manager. So typically we're going to keep those summer months a little lower on the budget side of things. We still want to keep a presence. Never want to turn the digital budget off. That's just too scary for me, but it is. It's a consistency thing. If people are doing those searches, you want your brand recognition to stay out there. Whether it's happening 50 times or whether it's happening five times, you still want that consistency. So I do, I think understanding the seasonality of when people are doing bookings during February to April, that's usually when people are doing a lot of those summer bookings. So you want to have your budget a little higher on the guest side during

those months if that's what your timing dictates. I think it really is understanding your pacing and when those bookings usually come in. That's when you want to budget your search or any of your marketing efforts to ensure that you're taking advantage of that high booking season, low booking season, high signing season for owners, low signing season. And you're not just putting in 500 bucks a month and running that across the next 12 months. That's it's fine. Maybe that's all you need. But I truly think that for those people who do that, they see more waste in the slow months and they see not, they maybe run out of budget in those months where it's much more important for them to have that. So I, when you're putting together a budget, put together a 12 month plan,

make sure you know the ebbs and flows of when the bookings are coming in or when that signings, the signing season is and plan accordingly so that you're spending that budget around that. And the last holiday one for us is between Thanksgiving and Christmas, take a really close look at what you're budgeting there just because there might be some quick inflation costs there. Yeah, I think that's, it's just like you understand your seasonality just on the bookings themselves. Make sure that seasonality is going into your marketing and budgeting plan so that, again, you're spending right at the right times and keeping that spend a little lower at the other times. Yeah, 100% couldn't agree more.

The note about that Black Friday time period up till Christmas, that's when ad costs just get so inflated because everyone on the retail side and the Christmas gift season. So there's clients that get a lot of bookings there for an advanced year. So I'll never say turn off ads,

but like you were saying, know your market, go look at your historical trends. Do you need to be another Black Friday noise? Are you making a legit offer that people are really going to be drawn towards? Or are you that? Are you noise that actually people don't really are drawn towards? And then you're not really spending your money effectively. Let's just hold those dollars, wait till Jan 1, and then start to deploy them where we might get a better return on ad spend.

Because then the retailer just goes whoosh on the ad cost typically get a lot lower, especially on display type platforms. Think Facebook, et cetera, which we didn't really talk about today. But yeah, right. Yeah, no, I think that's 46 minutes on paid search.

People got it like that, right? I think so. We could go 46 more minutes if people want it. I don't think it'd be difficult. Yeah, I think that's probably a third of what we actually wanted to say.

But those are some of the highlights. So hopefully you got some value out of today's episode, dud or stud, BC edition. So we appreciate you. If you've listened this far, we greatly appreciate it. Again, the top link in the show notes

is to the Coconut Condos Relief GoFundMe. I just dropped a little bit in there. If you could drop a little bit in there as well, I'm sure it would mean the world to those folks out there, people in our industry that were affected by this. It's horrible.

So if we can do a tiny part from afar, maybe collectively we can do a lot of damage in a good way, which looks like that is happening right now on the GoFundMe page. A lot of good stuff coming in. So forget about no review requests this week. If you're going to click on a link, forget the review request, click on my GoFundMe and drop something in there. If you can, I'm sure it would mean the world to those folks. But thank you. We'll be back next week. We appreciate it. I appreciate you listening. And we will be back next week with a new episode. Thanks so much. Bye.