Heads In Beds Show - Meta Ads vs Google Ads: When To Use Both For Your Vacation Rental Business

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

In this episode, Conrad and Paul talk about all things Google vs. Meta ads, capturing vs. creating demand, splitting your ad budget, adjusting spend based on seasonality, non-brand search, shoulder season marketing, and a lot MORE! Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteBook A Call With Us🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Bed Show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host, Paul. The red light is blinking. Paul, the caffeine is being consumed. And we have a favorite topic on deck. What's going on? What's happening? How are you doing?

It's all right. It's a little odd. It's fall. We're recording. We were pretty football free. And those who know, those who know, those who are. who are listeners of the show, know why that is. The one of respective fan bases are.

We'll just leave it. I'm going to leave it at that. Is that right now? There's one happy person on this podcast. There's one demoralized person on this podcast. I think as with all things sports, it's always expectations that kills you. If you have no expectations, nothing can hurt you.

And the moment you actually have expectations and you think good things are going to continue, and then basically some of the worst things possible, happen is the moment you start to lose hope. And it's going to get worse before it gets better. You'll hear this after, but I can hope to Buffalo, don't they? That's just going to, that's just going to get worse before it gets better. Barring a miracle, I will say, the 1% chance that they pull it off is, I don't know, Josh Allen gets abducted by aliens between on Sundays, something like that. That would certainly help. I don't even know if that actually would do it, to be honest with you.

But even that, the 1% chance they pulled out a rabbit out of a hat here and do this sort of thing. It could spark a hell of a story, that's for sure. Oh, man, they were down on the dumps and then they came out of it, but I don't think that's going to happen to be very clear. There's that. Yeah, I kind of go ahead and just put the bank account on the bills this week to be my lovely Patriots. It's funny. It's like, so, okay, some rivals. So the bills and Patriots now being rivals, I suspect last year was a little more equal this year, probably a little bit more favored towards the bills. Of course, the Patriots just smashed the bills for decades on end with Brady. So we have a lot of smashing back our way, probably do for quite some time, which I

think is going to happen as long as 17s back there for Buffalo. Same rivalry, maybe the Google and Meta have a little bit. They both want your ad dollars and as a result, they want to see if they can become your ad platform where you put your hard-earned marketing advertising dollars into. So we're revisiting, revisiting a topic today that we have done before a few times in the past, but our changing, our thinking, excuse me, evolves and changes over time. So we want to do a little bit of a refresh review of Google Ads versus Meta Ads, when to use them, what do they do? What is the tools within each of them? And just kind of talk a little bit about other companies that have spread it up and popped up and using meta ads. What are they doing? What's good about their strategy?

what can you learn from your own approach? And yeah, just kind of, one's a screwdriver, one's a hammer, they're not right or wrong. It's just when do you want to use the screwdriver? When do you want to use the hammer? And how should you think about these both of these platforms in your business? So what's kind of your mix today, Paul? If someone were to come to you brand new tomorrow, say, hey, Paul, I want to get more bookings. I've got a $5,000 a month ad budget.

How would you generally steer them? Or how do you know how to steer them between these two platforms? I think it is. I think a lot certainly depends on the portfolio, but they have. I think the location, the market, those are going to be. be some things that dictate. I go back to the fishing lodge that wanted to advertise their flying fishing trips and devoted a huge amount of budget for day and drove us $75 clicks for the three clicks that we got over the course of the item. It's just you can't generate you can't

generate search demand in some markets so I think that's something that certainly has to come into the conversation. But at the same time, and this is not me, I will admit. So it's hard for me to empathize, put myself into this persona or this archetype. But I know there are people who are using social media channels more as search engines than they do Google or than they do Bing. Now, I think the sheer volume of impressions queries we see on a weekly, monthly basis, and search console tells you that's still not the majority. But that is a way that people are really using that thing. This is not when you needed the EDU to sign up for Facebook anymore.

This is definitely a different channel. So I do. I think that a lot of my guidance and strategy is going to be reliant on some of those factors. And again, just the issue, what do we have for digital assets right now? I think that's a huge part of meta is do you have video? Do you have good pictures? And not just pictures, but do you have really good photography of your homes and stuff like that? And can we use that?

And can we use more of the experiential side of not just the home itself, but what you can do in and around the area and the market and things like that? $5,000, I would say, is going to be broken down in a way. Yeah, it is. I think it's going to be spread out relatively. equally again, depending on where we think we're going to find the best return there. What do you think about that? You said something in there that made me think about something from a few years ago,

and I had to do a quick Google in your block there. There was these articles written a few years ago back in. I put a link in the chat here for you and I had to look at from Sierra Active Will Reynolds, November 2022, and the title of the article is, is TikTok taking over Google. And they reference five articles between USA Today, Ad Week, ABC News, and The Verge, where it said, I'm replacing my use of Google with TikTok, which is hilarious. But Google, this is obviously now four years old. And Google's had some of the best quarters and years and usage that they've ever had in those last four year period.

So everyone loves to write about the death of Google. It is always the topic du jour. Of course, now the flavor of it is not TikTok as it was four years ago. It's, of course, AI. And when I have a lot of previous episodes on that, we can certainly come back to those slightly in passing here. We talk about where you should be putting out in dollars. Because you could run ads, by the way, in Chachabit.

That is an always self-serve tool available to you. you'll spend a lot of money, you'll get some clicks, they won't convert as well, or the volume will be nowhere near as what you get on Google, at least as of this recording. That can change a lot over time, but that's how it does in the testing that we've done so far. But it just reminded me, it just made me laugh because I was like, wait, we've gone through this before and relatively recently, and it was this idea that TikTok's going to take over Google and people aren't going to use Google to search and find things. Another insert loud error button here, if you will, in post-production.

But yeah, to go back to what you were saying there, my typical response for a 5K budget, or any budget, but just for percentage split, is like we probably want to put 60 to 70% of this in Google and we probably want to put 30, 40% into Facebook Instagram via meta. But there are lots of exceptions and nuance to that. So, for example, the thing that spawned this other day, we had a client where that was our mix, and it had been shading a little bit more towards meta.

And then we've had two really good months around meta. And it went back to, and two bad months around Google. So I had this client call just last week, and I was like, you know what? I think we can go ahead and flip these now. But we were putting our toe in the water. Let's just do it. I killed a lot of Google budget, especially in a lot of these top funnel keywords that

really were converting that well. I flipped a lot of that back into meta. And it's only been a week or so, but already have gotten four more bookings off meta in the last week from this shift in strategy. And this particular client, this inventory is very visually unique. So I think there's attributes to go build on what you're saying there that make a property more successful on a Facebook ad or Instagram ad. And there's attributes that make a property or a set of circumstances where your advertising dollars go further on Google. I'll give two examples for my own portfolio. This kind of one that I'm talking about here is imagine the unique stay style thing. I guess I always think of Ben Wolf when we talk about these things because I'm on his newsletter and I listen to what Ben says.

And I think Ben's whole approach is really about the more visually unique the property and then the more you share that in different ways on social media, the more eyeballs you're going to get that are significantly cheaper than those eyeballs in OTAs. I feel like I've summarized position, his position reasonably well there. I think it's very challenging to do that with a boring condo building. Not impossible. It's just harder to do it that way when it's like, here's a condo building that has 30 units. It's on the beach. You can make your Instagram account about here's what to do, things to say, blah, blah, blah. But when the home, the property, the vacation was the start of the show, a video ad on Instagram does a really good job of getting people excited by that and showing them that and they're into it.

As we've seen now for many years with these unique stay style properties. When you're a resort brand that is already getting 20, 30, 40 percent of your bookings on Verbo, Airbnb, maybe even kind of your classic Expedia, Hotels.com. We have some clients in that world as well. and there's two, three, four, five thousand people a month searching for your brand name on Google. There's a lot of demand we can capture that's just right there at the bottom of the funnel, and we just need to route people away from booking.com and hotels.com and Expedia over to our website, and it's not sexy or interesting or exciting marketing. I get that, nor does it deserve a lot of praise when it works well because it should work well. I can acknowledge that on the branded Google outside of things.

But the same token, would you not want to spend $1,000 a month to make $50, $70,000 a month of return on your husband? of course you would. So that could be a part of your mix that's very effective, even if you have a boring property that people are just searching for before they look and book that sort of thing. So I do think that there's, like we're saying here, this idea of like 50-50, 70-30, 30-70, the splitting depending on the property, that sort of thing. But very rarely am I recommending, like, zero. What I think happens on these clients where I have low meta-budgets is that it's just mostly retargeting. So once you visit the website, I think I want to show my stuff to you again, even if it isn't the most visually interesting property on the planet, because you're in that consideration

mode, you're in that booking mode. You're not going to be there forever. Like data tells us you're going to be there from seven days to 21 days on average. Of course, sometimes a little bit less, sometimes a little bit more, but that's kind of your typical window of booking. And I just want to be in front of you during that time frame on Facebook and Instagram. I think in that case, there's a line that we have the notes here about like meta can be a discovery platform. Google's just uncovering existing demand that's already searched on Google. Then you're just capturing it with an ad. I think that's broadly true, but I think retarget it kind of carves out its own little niche of I've been in the website. I'm looking

around I want to book it, but I'm just not ready to book right now. Let me get retargeting ads in front of them that will work well. So that may be part of your budget from there. But yeah, that's like some some high level thoughts there of how I probably would pull a budget and put it together for someone. But I think you bring up good points of you got to get some more, you got to do a little fact finding first, right? Before you say this is the way we're going to go because you need to understand exactly how they're set up and what it is that they're doing before you go and spend those dollars there. At least that's how I think about it. Yeah. I think on even going down to Google, going on that Google path a little differently,

We just did the little search for vacation rentals in the X market market, big sky in this case. And we saw, let's see here, four ads. We saw four results for a local map pack. And we saw an AI overview. And then we saw the number one position, which was, I don't know. How many legs down the page? We scrolls 40, 50, 60 percent down the page way further than anybody. We're talking not below the full.

This is, it's kind of silly. This is the, I think that's the reality of. the effectiveness and the question of the effectiveness. Again, I think we'll probably lead a lot more people to, at least look for those other channels. Whether it's meta, whether it's TechSoc, whether it's Shep, GPP, maybe that is going to be an effective channel down the road.

Right now, yeah. Early returns are lacking. But I think we're also at a point where we're all really new to how this is all being done, what's being planned, what's being, how people are able to use AI to, get through the travel planning booking process. We're not there. Like, we're not at a direct path there yet.

It's just, it's fragmented. As the marketing journey has always been, or the sales journey has always been, it's fragmented. AI has only added that to that complexity. But I do. I think that when we take a look at that Google landscape now and try to figure out where ads fit into, AI overviews and AI mode and I don't know.

This is the, it's the weird. I can remember initially seeing some of the results that came out and everything was taking you back to your Google business listings. Keeping you within that Google ecosystem. Google wants those answers to happen right there. Let's not be confused. Despite what, I don't know, with the most recent Google guy who came on yesterday, two days ago,

and said, oh yeah, I'll have never seen more, more AI sessions happening and more high-quality searches happening and all these great clicks coming to your website, they may be good clicks that are coming to your website. Engagement metrics in Google Analytics would tell you that. But the traffic metrics, the acquisition metrics, would tell you that you're getting fewer of those clicks coming in. And that's just a reality. And search console tells you the same thing. Your citations may be going up. But is that enough? Is that brand awareness enough? And again, let's throw it back to where meta is effective. Branding is, it is.

You can do that effective branding and make sure that connection people are making with that prompt, with that citation. Hopefully, they're seeing your brand, they're seeing your logo there. Hopefully that is rekindled by those retargeting ads or, again, trying to find them in a different way there. But I think that's, that just, yeah, it's never been a beautiful landscape for us. It's always been muddy, but it keeps getting muddier and muddier. And I still don't think we've seen even the final iteration of that they were talking about at Google Marketing Live in May.

We're not to that part of the next UX or UIUX version of what search is going to look like here. So let's even pump the brakes there and say, whoa, where else can we head or how high on the page we're going to be when that organic time comes. Yeah, that's an interesting question, right? Because is there, I would describe it. is there reason to assume that Google is going to ingest your website and they're going to serve up a lot more information on their page than ever before? That very much seems to be the trend. In theory, is that going to have a massive impact on our conversion rates?

Or eventually, you still have to go to the website to make a booking. You still have to end up in this final place in order to make a booking. So what I'm noticing with clients, and this has already been the case twice the day on calls, I already had two calls for September data, which I feel like is not very common. But we're recording on October 1, by the way, is going and basically doing a year-over-year comparison. and two clients, both down 10% plus in traffic. A lot of that loss is from organic search. And they were both up 20 plus percent on revenue,

a number of bookings made. So I'm like, okay, I don't like the fact that we're getting less traffic. Traffic in general used to be a very good measuring stick for us to employ and talk about in these types of meetings with clients. But if I'm losing organic traffic, I'm losing this type of stuff, but I'm gaining in revenue. Obviously, what we're doing is working. We never pay our bills with traffic anyway, so it's fine. It's okay.

Now, I don't like what's happening, but maybe that's just because I'm stuck in the old way of thinking about things. and a marketer coming up today, a 20-year-old kid, 19-year-old kid who joins and starts working on marketing today, is going to go, what do you mean? They actually click on your website all the time. The answer is right there. It's on Google. It's in chat TV.

It's like, oh, I'm just going to look at it there. It's like, yeah, it's just not the way we grew up, but we just grew up at a different time, didn't we? Maybe it's that simple. It's, I don't know. The, I think, I remember. Zero quick searches, all these. Anything we can go down the list of those.

But the reality, is that this is not a new thing of Google trying to give more answers right within. People also ask, structured snippets, all these little things, they've been trying to beg in more answers the whole time. So next logical step of now all that logic is built into the AI machine. Yeah, of course they can really continue that conversation. And when you bring that personalization in, and boy, I think they can really lead it to a spot where

maybe down the road we can connect the dots and Google travel or whatever that looks like there's got to be an agent here at some point I like there's got to be something specifically designed for

our space like that's something like it is it's there's the other fragmentation on Burbo and Airbnb and Marriott and booking.com and like there's no one spot anybody can go to find it all. You know that. Silly. Which to your point in theory should help us from a discovery standpoint because they go,

when they see an ad on Facebook to go back to the show topic and they see something they're interested in, they go, yeah, I want to go check this one out and see if I want to stay here, right? If you're actually offering an experience that's worthy of visiting, then your advertising should be effective, right? And I hate to say, oh, it's not our fault when the ads don't work because that's a very myopic view of the world. And we should always take accountability when our ads don't convert in the way that our client wants them to or it's not working well. But when I go and see ads that we haven't, when we've run before that haven't produced a good result, it's usually that's the case of the property's not very good.

Or it's, hey, we've got one listing and then we're trying to fight up against 500 other listings that are pretty similar in the same market. It's like, okay, I'm not saying your listing is not good. I'm just saying it's hard to get attention enough on your listing to be like, this is the one that people should book over the alternatives. I think that the communication of like what your property is, what it does, who is the fit for why it's worthy of someone's attention is a hard problem to solve. But once you solve it, then it starts to work well, then you're like, yeah, this is what advertising should do.

But this wasn't even in our outline, but I'll just toss it in here. Let's also look at Verbo basically doubling their prices. No. Like, why are they doing that? They're doing it because they want to make more money. And they're doing it because the cost of marketing, the cost of acquisition has gone up. And I don't think it's even related to AI at all. I don't think there's really much correlation.

I think it's just the cost of marketing, getting attention, getting clicks is higher and higher. Wait till we settle in on this 20% number because we're already, we're getting there. We're going to get there in stair steps. It's not going to be like tomorrow. It's going to be 20% but wait until it's 40% commission. When on $10,000 booking, a guest is paying Airbnb 2 grand. You think you can get a booking on your website for less than $2,000 if it was $10,000 reservation? I think you can't.

What do you think, though? Could they spend ads and get enough bookings to reduce their reliance on OTAs to maybe the point, at some point the fees get so egregious, you have to consider any listing, right? If you look at Amazon sellers, a complaint about this for a decade where Amazon puts these sellers as much up to the margin as they can possibly sustain and somehow keep the lights on. And Amazon makes way more money selling t-shirts or headphones or computer monitors or whatever

than the retailer who's actually listing stuff on Amazon because they figured out that maximum limit and they pulled people just off of that. I think the Airbnb and Verbo's of the world think, oh, we can cut deeper in this. We can go up to 18%. We can go up to 20%. We can go to 23%.

Why not? Why wouldn't they want to do that? They all have shareholders. They want to maximize their shareholder value, right? So you getting skilled with advertising is, Paul and I talk about this a lot, is a bit of a short term or short, short win to say, hey, I'm more direct than I was OTA, but yes, direct marketing costs money. Like I have, but so that when you go and do all the math of I paid money to Google and meta and I run ads and then I have this whole direct booking infrastructure I had to build out that was expensive. I had to hire someone or I'd hire Paul. I'd to hire Conrad, his team to run the ads.

And then you go sum all that up and then you compare to the OTA commission. I would say it's most cases there's not a massive difference. So you're getting more margin, but it's not a massive difference. depending on how efficient you are with advertising. But this is the floor. I promise you it's not going to get cheaper. It's only going to get more expensive over time. So it really comes down to how do you value your business and how do you want it to run? Do you want to have more independence in your business and the way it's set up? Or are you okay being very OT-dependent. Some people are okay that way. I've talked about a lot of people like that in the past. And I understand

where they're coming from now a little bit more than I did before. They're trying to keep the lights on too. They look at marketing as not an investment in their overall growth. They look at marketing as, gosh, I just, I don't really want to do this. But if you guys say it'll work, then maybe I'll talk me into it, but those are people that don't stick with it and they don't put effort in, and they get very poor results with their advertising efforts. I think that could a whole lot of things there, but I think that's a, obviously it's a difficult lens to try to view that through because if you're constantly looking through that narrow lens of, you're never going to come out on top there. I don't know. I think that we're not at that

point despite all the LinkedIn banter to just take your property off. I think that's, we are once again in that position of Airbnb feels confident, Verbo feels confident that you need to keep your homeowners happy, so you need to keep your rooms full. And that's the captive audience. They're never going to have the inventory truly, but they are going to have you by the Cajon is enough every once in a while that, I don't know. I think that's the, and this is something I'd never considered before, trying to get new owners on, but it is, it's just such a different conversation that you have to have there. And it's, that is the long-term marketing.

You got to go, you have to have a little bit of a B to be marketing degree to do effective owner retention, right? Not an effective owner marketing, but effective owner retention because that is a different business that you are talking to. That's that different. It is. It's that, that's it is. It may not really be, but in some capacity, you're running 100 mini businesses, 200 many businesses here. This is the reality of what we do.

So, yes, I would allow for someone to say, yeah, let's just everybody get off and then we'll show them. We may show them, but they may show them. but they may show us right back, that we can't quite do it. And those who have relied on it for so long certainly don't have the direct booking strategy in place to be able to compensate for that. Then we have a conversation and we're in good shape. But I think that's the other side is that you can't just cut it off. You can't just pull the plug and say, yeah, I'm taking, as a result of this, I'm taking my listings off.

And then what? What are you replacing it with? Because if you didn't have a direct booking strategy in place, you don't have a website that's ready to convert. You don't have all these things that we have been talking about for 190-200-ish episodes. Yeah, then you're going to have a problem.

That's where we're in this weird limbo that we have created ourselves, admittedly. We've taken from the OTAs and demonstrated at least some amount of reliance to a point that they do think the ball is in their court, and we'll see. That's the reality is that I don't, I don't know.

Maybe it gets litigious. Maybe it goes to a different level. Maybe it's, hopefully that's outside our paid rate and we don't have need to worry about it. But I think that's the thing that it's easy to say, then take your inventory off. It's harder to say, how am I going to fill the rooms? I mean, you've got some ideas, but that's where we get to that balance and breaking board. Have you ever heard the term FU money? Like at some point you have so much money that you can just help people to F off.

You basically need FU marketing. Right. Right. That's what you need. You need FU marketing to say, Airbnb is going to double your fees. Verbo's going to double your fees. And you just say, okay, I'm gone then. Bye. Click, unconnect, disconnect, whatever the case may be. And if you can't do that, or basically you're unwilling to do that, then it explains why they're doing what they're doing, doesn't it? If we don't, we're not political, not a political show at all. But if you'll journey with me for 30 seconds or 60 seconds into the world of libertarianism, what you would say is that is a rational free market activity from Airbnb and

Verbo to jack up the rates as high as seemingly possible. So they make as much money seemingly possible, cutting you deep enough, just like Amazon, to keep feeding their business and make sure they're growing and driving profits for their people inside their, and their company. So they could spend more on advertising and marketing, by the way, to get you the bookings, because to be fair, Verbo's got to sponsor their bowl. Airbnb's got to have the million square foot office in San Francisco. None of these things are free. I'm not stupid. I can acknowledge that. And it is only rational for them to do that because that's what they should do. But then your only rational re-response to do that should be, here's the option to build to me. What can I do?

this is the cards I've been dealt. Am I holding? Am I betting? Am I folding? What am I going to do from it? And if your response to it is I'm not doing anything and I'm just basically going online and I'm angry or I'm mad, first of all valid, you can feel as angry as mad as you want to. That's totally reasonable. But it doesn't change the behavior. If it doesn't change your behavior, then like it's a bit performative, isn't it? If you go on there and say, whatever, I'm not going to do it because I don't like this, but you're not going to go click the D-list button, then it doesn't really matter. But if you go back to the idea of running advertising on Google and meta and you say, okay, If I delisted from Burbo, how much money could I spend on Google to recapture what I was getting from Burbo?

Historically, let's say you've been on 11 to 1 return and that spend or 12 to 1. And you go, great, what if I spend another $5,000 a month? Would that net me another 10x return? Can I get $50,000 a month of additional bookings from this channel? It depends on so many factors. Search impressions here that you're currently capturing, your inventory, how well you can work on your site. There's a lot of factors there. But you can at least have the conversation if you have some historical data and you're running Google ads and you see an effectiveness from it and you see a return and ad spend.

you definitely can't have that conversation if you have none of the plumbing or the back end infrastructure set up and you're just putting a bunch of properties on Verbo and on Airbnb. So to go back to this whole thing of like, why run Google ads? But it ads in the first place, it's basically like this is your bet on those platforms, eventually screwing you over a little bit. And right now it can be a smaller bet. Maybe it is 20, 30% of your overall reservations are direct. And maybe a portion of those are people coming back to you hopefully directly again

after they've stayed, that sort of thing. So maybe it's only 10, 15% of your net new bookings most months are coming from you're advertising. That very well could be the case. But if you have the ability to take the knob that's kind of working and turn it up and make it work well, then Google is often a very good channel for that. Meta is often a very good channel for that for discovery because you have the ability to go and get results from it. But if you have none of that stuff built out, as Paul has already mentioned here, and you try to go start it from scratch and you already feel like you're in a bad spot, that's where bad decisions compound. That's where advertising doesn't work and these sorts

of things. Because I say this is one of my favorite lines lately on client calls, specifically with meta ads, but it can apply to Google to some degree, which is that every ad fatigues. I don't care if you're a small business that's spending a $1,000 a month, if you're Coca-Cola, if you're Apple, if you're Ford Motor Company, if you're the biggest advertisers in the world, Procter & Gable, every single ad that you run eventually will fatigue. So it is imperative. It's your job to figure out new ideas all the time. You, your agency, your partners and your organization, your marketing leaders in your organization to say, how can I keep coming up and do things to put out there so that my advertising continues to be successful on meta, on Google,

that sort of thing, so that I am not reliant on anyone platform, like Verbo, who my double your rates with 20 days notice, 25 days notice somewhere in that range, and then you're left to pick up the pieces of what that means for you in your business. Yeah, I think ultimately here, is it, is it a head-up versus Google conversation? Yeah, but I think we're probably rounding into more, you do have to do both, or you don't have to, it's not a zero-zero. some outcome thereup. It's got to be here. But I think it is. And it's always been a unique mix of that you have to run. But what you have to do is you have to do something. Because you have to be

prepared just in case there's another shoot to drop. Just in case there's an algorithm update. Just in case we drop further down the search results somehow, just in case your website all of a sudden goes down and your domain has some issues. Go check out the Beckett. domain at some point here in the next week or so. There's a company that probably ranked for tens of thousands of keywords and just shut it down. It's kind of crazy. This is. This digital age moves fast and again, results can move pretty quick here as well. So making sure that ultimately use some marketing because the marketing that Verbo does and Airbnb does comes at a cost at some point along the lines and at some point that doesn't quite match up for you. Yeah.

Let me punch through a few things here because the last time we recorded on this was probably, what, September, I think, or August of last year. So some things have shifted. I want to highlight some of those. So we talked back on, I think it was episode 157, Google Performance Max, kind of being the thing that we're putting more budget into. So let's say you decide to put X percent of your budget into Google ads. The question is, what should I do? When I click new campaign on Google, there's nine options, Conrad, which one should I click? And the quick answer is you probably for guest marketing should focus, consider focusing much your efforts on performance max campaigns. with the caveat of you might want to fall back into search and kind of test two and see kind of which one is working best, that sort of thing. Be very aware, though, there's some weird stuff going on with PMAX right now. I'll give you some example.

Every single time I open my PMAX asset groups right now, don't know this is the case for you as well, Paul. I'm getting AI generated images as the top suggestion in these things. And the edit, the AI edits that occur for these properties are really bad. Like I saw one the other day. It was funny. I was screen sharing,

and I had up on the other screen that, this ad unit. And the client was like, wait, is that image in her ad? I'm like, oh, no, don't worry. That's just like their suggested ones. I was showing in the bottom of the screen. This is where the images that were actually running. That's not showing. Don't worry. That sort of thing. But he just opened it out of curiosity. So we opened it. We had some times. We were looking at it for five minutes. And it took the backyard of a property, basically stitched together three different photos and put it into one photo. And it was not at all accurate. So it was like, it was putting like a pickleball court next to basketball court where that wasn't out where it was.

It put fake people in there, which is fine. But like the people were like, there was too many for the property. So let's say the property slept like six people or eight people or something like that. There was like 20 people in the photo. And they're like no, like even that alone would be like that'd be a violation of our local STR codes. Like that kind of thing like we should not advertise 20 people in this property. That is not appropriate. And I'm like, yeah, don't worry about that. That's not what we're running. But Google is going to keep suggesting it because they have these AI generated asset composites. You know, fake pools, things that don't exist, that sort of thing. So yeah, be really careful with performance max. That being said, when it is working, it tends to work very well. It tends to be the cost per click on PMAs compared to most. campaigns, even for the same kind of set of keywords. Even when serving is relatively similar, by the way. Like, we have a lot of PMAX campaigns we run where they're 95% search placements. So you would think, why would that be cheaper or different than just running search campaign? I have no clue. I can't explain to you.

I'm not Google, but that is the case in my experience, broadly speaking. So you probably want to run that. And I think on meta, it's really interesting because broadly speaking, like I would say 50% of our best ads end up being video campaigns, mostly of properties or someone of visual hook plus a property video or something like that. But more and more lately, I'm coming across ad stuff. where the videos are not at all the best performing. We have a lot of statics that do really well at a call today

where our best performing one was an ad carousel. So I think on meta, you have to do a lot more testing with your creative to see what's going to work best. And that may require a lot more patience and a lot more creativity. It kind of come up with different concepts that are going to work well.

But just kind of food for thought. I think on Google it's a little bit more a straight line. There's like you can kind of go down this path or that path. Like it's search or it's PMAX and then it's what keywords and then landing page tracking. Like it's all a little bit more straightforward. On meta, it's more like, what is my audience going to respond to? What video might work well?

What hook might work well? And you could try five ads with like relatively similar copy on them and have one be 10x, 20x better than the other. And that just doesn't happen on Google. Like very rarely do I write two ads and one way best. Like it's just like maybe there's differences in ClickTor rate and performance and stuff like that. So I think also one part that I probably didn't say so far, but would be worth going through

here for a moment before we come to a close would be what do you, what do you, what do you interested in? What do you want to do? Like your team and the people that you're involved with? If you like the idea of filming up with new ideas and running meta on that kind of stuff, running cool Facebook Instagram ads, I think you'll do a lot better in that channel versus if the idea of shooting a video is horrifying to you where you don't want to do that or you don't like coming up a new ad concepts or you don't want to work with an agency and have them come up a new ad concepts and you approve them.

I think you're going to really struggle on meta. So maybe part of this is like your own personal preference and interest and what you're trying to figure out what things are going to work best for you. Just some thoughts there. I don't know if you want to build on that. I think that's the kid. I had a client go and shoot a video on a tuxedo. A couple weeks, that's the way it is. This is the type of thing where you have to but want to have some people just don't want to do Facebook.

That's okay. If this is, if it doesn't tickle that little part of your brain, then do something. Find a different way because there are other channels. They will find effective ways to do it. So I think that's that there is something that I really like you saying that. and pointing that out because I do think Facebook is a channel that if you want to do it well, you have to be a little bit passionate about it. And if you don't have that passion, I don't think it's ever going to come off as authentic and really good Facebook meta marketing. So just food for thought

there as well. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. And I think that that probably an underreported part of our business because I think you and are a little bit more logical, rational and numbers driven. And it's like, do you want to do this? Because if you don't want to do it, you're going to have a really hard to do. If I have to drag you kicking and screaming to the gym and I'm your trainer and then I'm not there one day. You're not going to go to the gym, you have to want to go to the gym and exercise. And if you don't, then you're kind of really hard time with it. Some other things here are just like when, again, when to use different avenues. If you have a campaign working well, we talked about this idea a few minutes ago.

Can I dump more budget into this and will work well? On search, you have search impression share, which is pretty reliable. If I take this campaign spending 100 bucks a day and I'm at 50% impression share and then I go to 150, we'll still do pretty well. It probably will do pretty well in that scenario. But you've tried to go from 100 a day to 500 day. It probably won't spend that much more, or it'll actually spend a lot more sometimes, but the ROS will go down.

I just find, unfortunately, PMAX is not at all reliable with the search and pressure metric. They have the metric technically in PMAX. I just don't find it's reliable because they're using the data, the inventory available on Gmail, YouTube, display, all these places where technically there's almost like an unlimited amount of inventory

on those platforms. There's not in search. And I think it's really challenging to trust that data. So with PMAX, even what clients tell us, hey, PMAs is going well, I have more budget, dump it in there. we tend to do so pretty slowly. If we had an approval to go from 100 to 200,

I tend to go like under 120, 130, 160, 175, 200, like I tend to do that, assuming it's working well along the way. If you take a PMAX campaign that's doing okay or well, and you go from 100 bucks a day to 200 bucks a day overnight, you may not like which with PMAX. So just some food for thought there and thoughts that maybe people could learn from

as they consider spending more, changing their budget allocation as well. PMAX, it's performance max. When you look at some of those clicks that you get in there that kind of soften the blow for a penny and things to do. Again, no problem with it. If you have content that's going to attract it, awesome. There's some reason.

I think that the numbers are always going to look good there if you can get it refined. So if you can put pump money into those PMAX campaigns and make it come out green on the end of it, keep doing that and find ways to convert the stuff that may be more tangential to the lodging side of the business as well. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I'll just kind of at last point here and then we can come to a close. But it's if I was, again, giving people some rules or some thoughts to think about as they kind of work on their OTA dependence. Basically, on the Google side, like brand search, you pretty much just want that. You can go shade up and down a little bit depending on the time of year.

But if you can spend $1,000 on a campaign or $500 on campaign and get a 40, 50, 60 XROAS, I don't care how much of it is incremental. Like, it's such a dumb debate, to be honest with you. Just do that. In the moment you don't do it and you lose all these brand clicks, you're shooting yourself in the foot for no reason. So run your brand stuff pretty much all the time. figure out what's efficient and then do that. I think your peak booking windows, I think you want to lean on Google there because that's when the search demand is going to come.

So when you have search demand coming and you can have your ad there ready to accept that demand and have it work well, I think Google is going to be your friend there. I think meta is almost better in like the shoulders. Like meta can be better where it's like, hey, do you want to go on this trip? Let me get you excited by it. Let me get you to click. And then maybe after the shoulder where it's like, hey, still go right to come here. We have specials.

We have deals, that sort of thing. Let's be honest. Meta or Google can't save your like dead low season. Like I always joke like, who wants to come to where I'm. based Myrtle Beach in February. Like it's not that much warmer than wherever they are. So it's like hard to kind of create a demand art of thinner. It's probably a lot warmer than when you are. It's not that much different from a behavior standpoint. Yeah, that's there's there. But yeah, other than that, I think it's like I personally would have a hard time with a client saying no Google, no meta.

Like we had one recently that kind of said that and I was like talking her into this idea of rolling meta out and I'm very excited by that. But other than that, I think you want to have a split. I think these both have a tool in your tool belt. Again, one's a screwdriver, one's a hammer. It's not right or wrong. It's just when do you want to use it? It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. And I think ultimately, the more results you get from these budgets, put more into it. I think it's a very common thing, Paul and I've joked about this before, that like people stop far before their maximum madspend. If things are profitable and things are working well, and your goal is to have less dependence on the OTA, why have a spreadsheet for the whole year? Like, I have clients

that give me those spreadsheets for the whole year. And if you have very reliable data, it's fine, but clients that are like, we're only going to spend $2,000 this month. I'm like, what if it's working really well? What if we're getting a really good return on investment? this is not a casino, right? A casino is random. Hey, we got a hot run of cards or whatever the case may be. This is reliable. If we're putting $2,000 in and consistently getting you back 15x, 20x 30x return, let's keep dialing up the money dial until it stops working as well as it is well. And then maybe we can dial it back a little bit and find our efficiency level. But gosh, just don't stop early. Like, I feel like there's so many clients I've worked with over the years. I've not done the perfect job of like telling them be more aggressive when things are working and leaving some budgets uncapped and just being like this campaign is working. It should spend as much as I can spend on Google or whatever the case may be. So. Yeah, those are our repetitive thoughts, anything else all we should put in here before we slap a bow on this one, pop it on the shelf and get this one up in our archives. No, I think it is. It's whatever channels you're using, make sure you're understanding where that's been going. Make sure you're understanding what that return is. Don't just be, don't be dazzled by the big numbers and the fancy numbers. Just make sure there's numbers to back it up behind the performance there.

So that's, I think, the key. Yeah, one more number they can help us with Paul is a living. us a review. There's only one number you got to think about and it's five, five stars. iTunes, Spotify listeners, you get the most downloads there. Go over to your podcast app of choice. Click five stars. Leave us a fun little comment. We read all of them. I print them out. I put them on the side of my office here. Put them in my bedside night table. Read them before I go to sleep. It means a lot to me. So please do go ahead and leave us a review. Appreciate that. And we'll catch you in the next episode. Have an awesome rest of your deck. Thank you all for listening.