Heads In Beds Show - Recapping Google Marketing Live 2025 For Vacation Rental Managers

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

In this episode of The Heads In Beds Show, Paul and Conrad recap Google Marketing Live from May of 2025. ⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101Googleblog RecapMartech - Everything You Need To KnowYouTube Recap🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagram🚀 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 Meds show presented by BuildUp Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacation properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing, and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All right. Hey there, Paul. How's it going? Double week for us. I'm two times seeing you, two times recording. We always see each other. We always, you know, usually kind of plan when there's not sporting events going on, which Well, it's over now for the dear listener.

I was going to say, dear listener, we are done. We are toast. Conrad and Paul do not have to worry about NBA basketball and unfortunately the season is not over. So you don't have to deal with that. Maybe we'll talk golf for the next few months. I don't know. We'll figure something out. I'm probably not gonna talk baseball,

but outside of the heartache that we've been experiencing over the last couple of weeks, How are you doing, sir? Yeah, pretty good. I mean, I'm over it. Your wound is more fresh than mine. So we probably feel a little bit differently in that respect. But no, it's all good. I think we've got a good one on the docket today, which is all about kind of the future of Google. And you in the past have been a little bit more tuned into these announcements, I guess, both literally and figuratively than me. But I pitched this idea to you this time as kind of like, let's cover what happened at this Google event. And Google Marketing Live is, I think, the actual name of the event.

This happened a few weeks ago. So this isn't breaking news. This stuff has been out there for a minute, obviously. But we put our thoughts together. We've got a bunch of resources, both actually from Google directly that we're going to talk about today from one of my reps, and a bunch of recaps and stuff like that.

That this is kind of what Google talks about. This ends up being what ends up in the products, in the ads products over the next 12 months. So I think it's worthy of talking about, because I did a recording this morning with Heather Mayer for her feed, for the Vacation Mental Success podcast feed. And she was kind of asking a lot of questions about that.

Hey, all these things are changing. Hey, AI is here. Hey, how does that impact ads? And this obviously, I think a lot of people have those questions. And I think this is a good time for us to sit down, maybe dive in a little bit more, go through some of these specifics on the ad platform, see what's going to change, see what's going to happen. And then yeah, ultimately, you know, turn that hopefully into something actionable to people

on the other side listening and can tune in on and actually, you know, run on their marketing and make it more successful. So yeah, absolutely. It is. I mean, this is this, this has been appointment viewing for me for the last few years this year. I took not really a break. I don't think they hyped it up as much this year. I feel like I didn't get the email notifications. I remember the first year I signed up for it, and it was 2015, 2014, something like that. They actually sent out a hardcover, a Google Pen and a Google Notebook and everything like, maybe some swag. So it was pretty cool to like do that.

Now they don't do that anymore, but truly, I have Philip Schindler, he kind of leads things off and he's the hype man. He talks about what happened last year, kind of gives a little recap. You know, last year talking about Astra was a big deal. I thought it was very interesting. We always get the Google marketing live and stuff will roll out over the next 12 years and or 12 months, excuse me. And that's something that he said, everything that they talked about. And I went back and looked at, you know, some of what was talked about during that Astra thing, video, the videos, the image searches, the circle, do all these

things he's right. They did everything that they pushed last year is in Gemini Live, is in Gemini 2.5, is in a lot of these things. So I always hope that you know usually there's a few items where I hope it comes sooner or I hope something like that is live in production or in beta or in testing and things like that. But there's a lot of really really crazy stuff that we were talking about from Gemini 2.5 to Image Enveal Notebook.

So where do you want to start, sir? What caught your eye the most? Yeah, a decent number of things. I think that you started off on a good point here. So real quick, by the way, I took the YouTube video of the actual marketing live event, if you will, dropped into Notebook LM, another Google tool that I find has really valuable use cases, by the way. And it did a mind map that I put in our show notes here. So there's 12 branches of the mind map, which is

kind of like the different chapters of the different sections, if you will, of the event. AI is mentioned in nine of the 12 cards. So it's just like, I almost feel in a way about it where do we have to say like mobile? Like we, you know, it's like, no, it's just assume that things are mobile at some point. I don't know if you remember this, right? But this transition from like a desktop site to a mobile site. And now it's just like, no, like, like, we don't really tell clients in a way that like the site is responsive. It's just like, of course it's responsive.

Like do we need to even say that? It just almost becomes assumed. So long story short, obviously, AIs and pretty much every single piece, nook, corner, and crevice, if you will, of all the Google announcements that were made here. But I'll start with this one, and we can go bounce around a little bit. That's fine.

AI overviews are the traffic killer that you and I have been complaining about a little bit offline and online on the organic search side of things. And certainly, some people might think, well, there's now this AI overview that's going to kill organic traffic. How is Google going to make money off that? Well, it's very obvious. They're going to stick ads in the AI overview, of course, right? Obviously. And anyone who thinks that

things that ads aren't going to eventually come to ChatGPT and Perplexity and all these things are already in Perplexity, by the way, I think is a bit crazy, right? The market for people paying $20 for ChatGPT and using the pro mode is people like me who make money from using chat GPT or use it as a tool. The average consumer that just like my mom, you know, who I love dearly, but would never pay $20 a month for chat GPT. She's not going to pay 20 bucks a month for chat GPT. So she can use that as a replacement for Google and get no ads. They're just going to stuff ads in there, the free version, and she's going to click on them when it makes sense for her. So anyways, here we go. Let's start on this one. Ads and AI overviews, no shock at all. But obviously, what's going to happen is you're

going to ask Google a question, they're this one. Ads and AI overviews, no shock at all. But obviously what's gonna happen is you're gonna ask Google a question. They're gonna give you this AI overview response. This is how the AI mode works, by the way, kind of in Google now, if you're in that beta, or maybe it's out of beta at this point. And there's gonna be ads stuffed in there. So not a surprise, you and I are just sitting here like,

duh, but that was an official announcement. And now there you go, ads and AI overviews is gonna happen. I think the way they presented that was like talking about the productization of that. And I don't know, it's like not just answering the question, but assuming there's a product related to it. I don't think that's always the case.

Now again, Google's mine. Yeah, I can productize this. I can get some more commerce going. I can do all this. But I had the same note that it struck me that I don't think it's going to come into our space. It's going to take some time before it really reaches us here. But that concept of we're going to provide a product for just a general type of search. I think the example they gave was the traveling with, you know, how do I travel with a dog?

How do I fly with the dog? Something like that. And pushing you automatically into dog cold earth or containers or something like that, and pushing you automatically into dog cold or containers or something like that, something you can travel with the dog with. And it's just that's an option. And for that example, I think it works. But I don't think there's always a product answer there. So again, I'm sure a lot of it is they can monetize that more. It takes them less into the search side, maybe per se, where they're going to have some monopoly stuff to talk about over the next 12, 16 months.

I don't know what the ramifications there are going to be, but I feel like shopping kind of lets them off the hook there a little bit and being able to serve up some of those ads and things like that. So it's a no brainer. off the hook there a little bit and being able to serve up some of those ads and things like that. So it's a no brainer. They have to be able to get an ROI from being able to generate those results. And as more people are, as more of those AI overviews and more of the AI results are pushing those ads further down the page, obviously they're seeing some impact in there in the how much

ad spend they're getting. So it is, it'll be interesting to see how it's rolled out, how it impacts our space specifically because even again, some of the travel concepts that they were talking about, we're talking about products to travel with, like having a summer outfit or something for YouTube or something like that. So I do, I think it's certainly important and everybody's gonna notice it. I just don't think it's gonna impact us immediately here. And we gotta figure out when it does

because it's gonna be something to identify and understand is distribution a question of that and how are you getting your units into those placements there? I don't know if I disagree, per se, but let me just offer you a transitional point here. So two things I'd mention. Number one, when the AI overview pops up on a competitive keyword, so I just use email

CRM as an example, very competitive keyword, the ads come up first, right? So it's like Google's already admitting the ads are there first, then the overview is thereafter, right? So it's like, yeah, we're going to make our money first. And then sure, we'll give you a more organic result there. So MailChimp actually ranks for me, number one for email CRM, then it's Klaviyo, PipeDrive, and then Reddit, a fun little combination of how Google works nowadays. And that keyword result there, I would be shocked if MailChimp ranks quote unquote, number one for that search, beneath the ads and then beneath the AI overview section gets more

than 1% click-through rate. That would surprise me for that keyword. Now it could be maybe around that range, maybe a touch higher. And I know this because we have a client that we worked with for some time where we ranked for area name hotels, you know, so like city name hotels.

We ranked number one for them. We had more of a collection page of all the hotels. And we got, I kid you not, a 0.3% click-through rate when we ranked number one on Google for this because we were under ads and we were under the hotel search block, which kind of is a similar size and over as the AI overview block, right?

So that's one thing. I will say the logical connection point for Google here would be to take the vacation inventory they do have on Google vacation rentals and stuff it in there, right? If you do a search for, you know, which they're kind of already doing because they have the block there,

but could they also put the block for vacation rental block and also an AI overview? And then within that, say click here and find more listings. You betcha. You know, they've done it before. They've done it on the, on other keyword sets. So, and then within that AI overview, could they stuff with ads? You betcha. You know, they could certainly do that. So, um, that wouldn't surprise me. You know, we'll see. I think, I think you're right in the sense that like, we're a small priority for them. Whereas like shopping is just a bigger pie that they can sink their teeth into. And they probably have more customers that are shopping customers who probably honestly just get better results than do their average

typical Google vacation rental customer. I'm putting that in air quotes here for the listener. Because the average Google vacation rental customer, they're not even making any money off anyways. There's no ad driven model. There's no CPC model, no CPA model, et cetera for Google. So it's kind of like they're trying, but as we did an update on the Google vacation rentals

episode a few, maybe dozen episodes ago at this point, you can dig back in the feed and see it. This is making no progress. They're not making any meaningful progress in Google Vacation Runtles anyway. So if they stuff it in there, it's just like, here, would you like to see 1 20th of the inventory without a better pricing structure or anything?

Here, click here and check it out, right? It's not very appealing offer. So that's where people go to the direct booking sites or they go to OTA platforms where they can get better results there. So yeah, that's, I guess, would be my take on it, which is like they could do it if they want to, but we're probably like number 85 in their priority list of people they want to extract more cash from. So they'll get to us eventually, I assume, but probably not in the short term. I mean, I still think the most interesting part, but last year they started with travel.

Like that, they started with the concept of travel. That was their opening video essentially where their first couple of minutes was talking about travel. Then they didn't talk about it anymore for the event. And then again, nothing rolls out. So I don't know. Right now we are still, the travel, greater travel is still held captive by the fact that it runs a lot of Google because there's billions and billions of dollars

in ad revenue. And I don't think they want to touch that. I truly like that's the those are the last advertisers they want to alienate right now. And then Hilton being one of their examples of Hilton is one of them right there and more directly up to those OTAs that they're the meta search and the OTAs that they're that they're facilitating or distributing through. So yeah, I Well, it's kind of like that share of wallet discussion, which I'm sure we haven't really talked about that with like the new summer Airbnb summer release. But that's what the move there is

like, let's go down almost like down the experience spectrum of like booking a photographer, booking massage, et cetera. But those are much smaller transactions, right? Like with higher levels of differences in quality, Like if Airbnb was not a public company, I don't think they would have done that. I think they did that because they were a public company and they have to now go tell their investors, hey, we're expanding, we're doing this, we're doing that. I don't think it's actually a good thing for Airbnb's platform to have that. I'm booking Airbnb, if you will, right? The Airbnb experience that's worked so well for a long time has been vetted quality short term rental inventory.

That's the big fish. Why are we worried about the small fish, you know, that is booking massage and getting 20 bucks off of massage, you know, when people are in the property. I don't think that's it. I mean, I could be wrong. Time will tell. Maybe, maybe they'll succeed there, but they have failed before. You know, I think that's one thing that people forget with these big companies is they fail all the time. I mean, look at Flipkid, which we talked about a few episodes ago. That's dead now. Look at, look at how competitive the SERP was. You know, again, this, this memories are all coming back to me because I recorded with Heather today and we talked about our first recording we did, which was in 2017. Back in 2017, there were people saying, how are we ever going to outrank vacationmentals.com and TripAdvisor and Flipkey and we're out going to rank HomeWay and at the time, VRBO and Verbo.

And it's like half those brands are gone now. Now it's like this big three of booking.com, Airbnb, Verbo, at least here in the States and North America is broadly where we see all the traffic. And the funny part is Airbnb doesn't even rank well in most of the occasional searches. We have a client we've worked with for three months who's now ahead of Airbnb for like destination

and vacation rentals, right? So the idea that there's some overwhelming amount of competition and it's so impossible to outrank these big sites, it's just straight up not true. Like the local competition is sometimes more stiff than outranking these big OTA platforms for search traffic. Now the problem is like going back to the core point here, organic traffic is kind of getting chewed away at,

getting gnawed away at with all these SERP features that Google is adding in here, thus increasing the need for ads. So that's good for Google, maybe tougher for the wallet of the average vacationable manager and they're building their marketing budget, but the traffic's still out there.

You can still get it. It's not the case for every industry. So I think we should take advantage of a while we can. The buzz the real the real big number which everybody's looking for that 5 trillion searches annually. Oh, so remember everybody LLMs are where you need to be focusing your wait, five trillion searches, trillion, trillion search. wait, five trillion searches, trillion, trillion search. If each search was a marble, it would what brings the moon and back 100 times. I like steps like that, where it just like puts your brain in a pretzel, you're just like, how is that even possible? So yeah, I mean, that's not that was the big one. But this is where I think this there was a reason they put this one in

signed in users 18 to 24 issue more queries each day than any other age group. I don't, I'm going to question that. But they're all on TikTok, Paul. That's possible. They're all on TikTok. I'm going to question that because I truly think that a lot of these people use TikTok as a search engine. So I don't necessarily think that's the case. That one was not, you know, they like to cite their sources in their slides. I appreciate that. That one was not cited. So I just think that- Internal data. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

There was a couple that were back to the Google blog and that is what it is, but that was a notable one. I mean, the other side of the visual search is a hundred billion visual searches this year. Not even the last 12 months, but just this year. And then one in five of those searches going to commercial intent. That's where I also think that as vacation rentals,

as an industry, we need to figure out how to be a part of those visual searches. Cause I think there are going to be more instances moving forward where we do have a great social media game. We have a great TikTok game. You have a great Facebook game. And people are gonna start looking at that. They're gonna do that circle to search.

They're gonna do the lens searches. They're going to do the reverse image search. That's a very fun function to have, but it's an important function to have. And having your images tagged properly, having these things that, you know, they are grunt work at best. They're not the fun SEO to do. But I think they're going to be important moving forward. So that was another thing that just the overall volume, get out of here if you think Jadgbt is the answer right now. It's not perplexity. See our episode from a month ago where we pulled, I painstakingly pulled out a bunch of data from analytics, seeing how few people actually come from these LLan to make these general sites. But yeah, and everybody wants to see some good results and good traction coming from those and you want to be prepared for that when it

does have an impact. But until that number has a much larger chunk out of it that like, we're not going to get a trillion searches out of Google. That's not going to happen. That number is not going to drop to 4 trillion next year. That number is going to stay about where it is. Now, I think Google is also cooking the game a little bit and the fact that they're saying, oh, well, our LLM is used and our Gemini is used more than anybody else. Well, you didn't give people that chance. And this is where we get into the monopoly side of things and everything like that. But whole nother point. They're just being very, very

excited about some big numbers that truly, I mean, even OpenAI can't tout right now. That's the reality. And really, you don't hear that many headlines coming out of OpenAI and chat GPT more recently. And I don't know, that's something that's not concerning, but it's just, you know, let's think about that. Let's extrapolate that out and say, okay, if the innovations aren't happening or we don't see here about the innovations, should we be focused there as much? I would argue not. But again, it's going to be part of the entire digital marketing spray moving forward here.

Yeah. Well, two things follow up on there. And maybe again, I know we're covering Google Marketing Live, but we can't help ourselves then to talk about the impact of these changes, I guess, broadly speaking. I'm still very curious. And some people have actually tried to articulate this, and I appreciate them trying, because I've had a harder time with this.

What would an LLM strategy look like if you're trying to quote unquote game an LLM and get it ranking better in the responses, right? It looks a lot like technical SEO, which is like quality content, making sure it's crawlable, making sure you've got good information, having it about us page, et cetera. All stuff that is in like our audit list

and has been for close to a decade now, stuff that I learned from probably like Ryan from Webris was the first one I ran audit stuff on or like I've copied his audit spreadsheet he gave away like a long time ago. And I've taken that and tweaked it since then. So it's like, okay, optimizing for an LLM is not necessarily, from what I can tell,

a massively different process than optimizing well for Google, right? And obviously in some cases, Google is the LLM gemini, right? That's one side of it. I'm with you 100% though on the visual search because we have a client who has signs in front of their properties

and we did QR codes on them, I think like a year ago. Might talk about some previous episode, but we looked at the analytics on how many people are scanning those QR codes, and they get hundreds of scans every single week. I mean, like people are walking by those properties, they scan the QR code, they wanna know the name of it, they wanna know where that property is located,

how they can book it, all this kind of information, all this data, and it's quite impactful. They don't often get bookings right away from that, but I'll look at like repeat visits from QR code visitors, and it's there. I mean, people will discover these properties just by literally walking by them in San Diego. It's a very tight, small community, which helps for this particular use case. And they're coming back from that. So it's a weird thing that was their

idea. Not my idea, but if you have homes in your program and you could put a QR code on a sign, I would say do that because you're probably going to get some high relevant traffic from it. And people are curious. They want to know the home, the location, the pricing, all that kind of stuff. Right? So I think there's some good pieces there. Now I'm with you. I'll kind of pick one here from the list. I guess we'll just kind of keep trading off here. One thing that my Google rep has kind of been adamant about too is giving Google better data on who your customers are. So going and uploading and getting this consent for scraping out email addresses and the contact info of people that are reaching out and making bookings. So in the doc that Google kind of sent out to us here, they have the NCA value mode,

which is basically new customer acquisition value mode, trying to bid and find new customers, or in this case, I would use the word guests for the most part, but trying to find new guests. I think there's a lot more that can be done there because obviously with travel, the one thing is like people go through this journey of travel, they think, they dream, they process, they then compare, and then they actually book, right? And I think our goal is always like, all right, how do I attack the bottom of the funnel as closely as possible to the end so I can spend as little as possible and then get the ideal outcome result? But it's like, in the real

world, that's quite challenging, you know, to do that. So we have to figure out like, what's our step of how far up the funnel should we go and get more awareness? And I'm hoping that Google will continue to get better at that and helping us be like, we're happy to pay for these brand awareness ads. I just want to make sure they're being seen by the right people. I think that's always the battle with Google, particularly PMAX, right? It's like, just throw it all in this big bucket. We'll sort it out. We'll give you some traffic and then the results come. And again, they made improvements to that as well, or they're announcing improvements to that too, which is a good thing. But right now it feels like a little bit of just like

a, I'm closing an eye and a half and I'm just chucking, you know, $10,000 in the furnace. And I'm like, hope a bunch of money comes out the bottom, which it does, you know, PMAX does work well. But at times it feels a little, you know, lacking transparency. So this idea of like new customer acquisition, getting more of a direct tracking path from like I put these ads in, where are they actually showing, what's coming in, and then what are we going to get out of it? Those two things stuck out to me as like solid improvements, looking forward to learning

more about how those are going to help us. I mean, I think that with addition to what they were calling the Power Pack. I mean, this last year was PMAX plus search campaigns. That was the power duo or power pair, whatever. Power Pack this year was PMAX plus AI Max for search campaigns plus the ManGen. The PMAX side of thing, again, that's the black box. We had that discussion quite a bit. Now, the one thing that they did highlight,

and I don't know if it's in production yet, because I haven't seen it in production on some of these PMAX reporting, is the ability to see by channel. The ability to see some greater detail in the reporting. You can find some of this stuff, but a lot of it you really have to dig to look for. And it's just, I think that's half the battle with Google is they've got so much information. It's hard to find it all. And it's hard to put it in a way that's

going to be easily accessible for that advertiser, for that marketer who is going to be going through and creating these campaigns and dashboards and reporting and all that. You know, PMAX is going to be what it's going to be. I will say the AI max for search, you know, I don't love the concept of keyword list targeting, but there is something to be said for predicting not just it is, I think it seems to be that they're taking it beyond broad match. You know, I like the fact that they're going to give us the search terms. I like the fact that they're gonna give us the search terms. I like the fact that they're gonna customize some headlines and based on the landing pages that we're going to there,

they say it's 27% more conversions. We'll see when that happens. But I mean, it is, that's the, I would say, the objection to having all these long tail keywords that are now proliferating because of the AI models and the AI overviews and this and that, and people feel like they can write a paragraph, and that's going to get them a better answer to their question. I think prompts are turning into search queries. Okay, that's fine.

So it is. If it finds better options for some of those keywords and search terms that maybe were not being caught by a broad match, no, but aren't being caught by a phrase match or aren't being caught by an exact match, those are the match types that they're referencing because they know. That's the advertiser taking some type of control while still giving some opportunity to expand beyond. So that is something that I am interested in seeing is how does that work, first of all, and what type of performance do we see?

What type of search terms do we see? Do we understand that, okay, we're gonna get a brand new keyword. If you run something like this, can we use that to generate a better keyword list moving forward? I hope that that's the case, but that was the exciting part, I would say. I don't like that they're including it with PMAX and DemandGen is what it is. You're going to do what you're going to do there, but if they're able to actually transfer that over and give us less of those gaps of we've all been in a search terms report and you see three clicks

from the selected and then 27 clicks or under a thousand impressions and we're only getting visibility into 300 of those impressions of what's actually happening with the search terms themselves. So my hope is that this AI max part of it is like a privacy protection or like kind of an enhancement of the privacy so that we can get in and see that more as opposed to being blind to 70% of where our spend goes. And I think that it seemed like that may be the case. It remains to be seen whether or not that will be true.

But yeah, I mean, are you going to be implementing the Power Pack for all of your partners moving forward or what do you think about that? I dream of words like Power Pack. When I wake up in the morning, I'm just like, I got Power Pack. Cold sweats. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. No, I'm joking. But I think, so a few notes there, broad match.

I want to touch on that one because I think it relates to this idea right now that like, so funny, the call I had just before this, I didn't say this before we hit record here was with my Google rep for one of a collection of my accounts that we work on. And she was giving me broad match recommendations, broad match recommendations a little while ago, and she's new to Google. So I'm not saying anything bad about her in particular. I'm just saying like, you do know that this used to be like when you put it on

broad match, it was like a nuclear bomb in your search terms, right? And I was like, this would destroy an account very quickly. And you know, I don't know if she just, you know, screened behind the ears, she seems like a nice, nice lady, but she just doesn't know, like, she just wasn't doing this five, six, seven years ago, where that's, that's the word I use nuclear bomb, that's what broad match used to do. So if you could control detonator in a place where you knew where

everything was fine, maybe you could use it. But for the most part, you know, broad match was almost always a negative thing. So I'm like, imagine my skepticism, right? When Google now says, no, we got to sort it now, like, go ahead to use broad match, you'll be fine. But in this case, I do think they have figured out some stuff. And she gave me kind of the PR answer of just like, yeah, like our AI capabilities have gotten better and stuff like that. And it's like, OK, like maybe, maybe not.

I, you know, who's to say, you know, ultimately, what Google wants is like they have to make more money through ads. The more keywords they show ads on, assuming it's relevant, the better it is for their bottom line. So that's where things come into play. And I'm sure what was happening is people were just like opting out of broad match over and over again, these skilled and more knowledgeable ad managers, they probably control the bulk of the budgets, right? The average small typical business owner. Sure, they might try to DIY

Google ads themselves, but they're also not spending very much compared to the sophisticated agencies and larger companies that are spending to your point, billions of dollars, you know, on Google search, there's old teams of people at these big companies, Expedia and the like, that their job is to programmatically run ads, you know, across tens of millions of different destinations. I did a LinkedIn post to this effect recently where I talked about the fact that like, yes, Airbnb has a big budget, yes, Verbo has a big budget, but it's also split across like the planet, like planet Earth, right? So like in your market, they might not have a big budget depending on where your market is.

So I think some people hopefully got some value out of that idea. But I'm more in on broad match now than I was before. I think they have gotten better. I'll give them credit there. And honestly, it's now easier for me to review search terms. That was my beef before was like, all right, I'm gonna have to go review the search term report,

go dig out all the bad ones. Now I can use an LLM tool myself and go in there once every week or once every 10 days or 14 days, pull down the search terms report, run it against AI, tell it what I want it to find, and then say, show me all the terms that are not relevant. I can take those, copy and paste them, spit them out, put them on my negative list. And it's like, oh, cool. That used to be like four hours. Now it's like four minutes, you know, to get to the same answer, which is kind of nice. So I think that I'm in on broad match. I'm open doing broad match now. I pretty much will do broad match now on brand builds or

Matt, my team will do the same thing when he's doing brand builds now for clients. So I think there is some upside there, you know, to be to be D. I read and always like trusting them with this kind of stuff, because it's like the moment you give them too much rope is the moment they start selling you mystery meat and calling it, you know, steak. Right. Like that's the that's about it with Google at times. Display being the one that you and I battled with the most over the years or when we first kind of got connected together on the on the homeowner lead gen side, it was like, sure, often this display network.

And it's like, there's quote unquote clicks and quote unquote conversions coming through. And then you look, it's the worst garbage possibly imaginable. And that's, I feel that way about Google, right? Like they unfortunately break our trust a lot. So once you break our trust and I waste some of my clients money, I feel bad. The client doesn't like it. And then I have to be like accountable for those results, right? So if they're doing this the right way, then all for them, I'm all like it. And then I have to be accountable for those results. So if they're doing this the right way, then I'm all for it

and I'm hoping that that will be the case. But the moment they sell us a mystery meat and call it why goo steak is the moment we get really angry and we don't want to do more of these ads. So we'll see where it all shakes out. But that's always my concern is like, am I biting into something that I'm actually gonna enjoy or not?

I mean, yeah, we've all been burned by Google ads in some way in that way. I think it's kind of like an abusive, you know, relationship almost a little bit. It's just like sometimes it's good when we're happy and things are going the right way. Yeah. And then sometimes they just like beat the hell out of us. And we're just like, why? So I'm not sure if you caught this quote, but this was probably one of my favorites. And I think you'll be able to figure out why AI overviews is one of the most successful launches in the search in the past decade.

That's like saying the pavement on this road is the most driven on pavement in the entire state. And it's like, isn't this on like the main highway? And so, well, of course, if you just shove AI overviews in there, like naturally it's going to get a lot of quote unquote engagement. It was there. Well, it's like, um, when people realized this was a thing on Reddit a while ago, if you used a curse in your search query,

the AI overview would never show up. So if you just search like best effing socks or whatever, then the AI overview would not show up. And people were like, oh, I figured out how to get rid of AI overviews. I actually don't know if that's still the case. But if you do that, then it doesn't really change the search results that much,

but it changes the AI overview from triggering. They probably fixed that at that point, but people were so mad at it that they said, oh, I figured out how to get rid of it, which is funny. I mean, I had to pause. I had to pause the video. Are you kidding me? And I was sitting next to my five-year-old,

and he's just like, what? I saw something else. You can't, no, here's the thing. You can't argue with a million and a half, a billion and a half users a month. That's something. But again, like I said, it's like owning the highway, right? Like if you when you own the information super highway, what

do you say? But when we look at AI overviews, and then AI mode, yeah, my contention continues to be these are zero click results. Yeah, when the clicks, they say when the clicks get over to you, they're more powerful, two to three times more converting and more engaged more everything like that. And I'm sure that's what Google Analytics says. But it's how many of those searches aren't only those clicks aren't happening, because the search is happening right there. And not only that, but in AI mode, I hate this, that when you're clicking on the links in AI mode, all it's doing is creating a new tab, and you're

going right back into Google results. So here's the thing is that Google's but now we can sell ads against that Paul, you gotta understand we can stuff in there. But that's like, the successful launch, whatever it is what it is. But truly, but truly you are I think every user should kind of understand You're not going to the places you used to go even when they're talking about some of the purchasing and you know All the Merchant Center stuff, which doesn't quite apply to us, but I mean going from YouTube shorts

Well what they were showing in the videos is you're pulling up kind of a modale of your website, but it's still saying in Google, you're doing all this in the Google Merchant Center ecosystem. I don't like it. Like we're giving away brand equity to Google. And you've built, you've taken a long time to build that out. And I mean, it is, that's probably an oversimplification. And well, one thing, do you remember AMP? Do you remember AMP? Oh, yeah. It's like accelerated mobile page articles.

I mean, that was, this is getting back there into the history of how Google operates, right? But at one point, they're just like news organizations rely on Google to get traffic. You have to use our format in the pages in order to get traffic to your news organization content. You have to use this format. And it's like no ads or very minimal ads.

And it was clickier. You get these little instant articles that pop up. And all these news articles or news publishers were like, you just killed us basically, like, I guess congrats, like, you know, we used to get this traffic from you. We write news, you send us traffic, that's the deal. Like, that's the fair deal on both sides. You're not producing content, you're just indexing it. And then yeah, they went down this crusade for a while of like, you must use AMP, you have to use it has to validate. I remember putting AMP plugins on client sites, because I'm like, maybe we'll get more traffic. You know what

I mean? And now it's gone. AMP is over. It's all abandoned. But again, this idea that Google can strong arm you at any point. And sometimes it's for the better. Think of the HTTPS switch from a while ago. That was for the better. We should have been using secure connections. We were lazy and not doing it on non-checkout pages. Now every website you visit is secure and it's nice and easy to get an SSL cert. So I'll give Google a thumbs up there. But to your point, stuff like this, it's like they try a lot of things that it's like, again, they own the highway, they're making the rules of the road, they can do whatever they want. I'm like, I'm a capitalist through and through, right? If they want to change it,

you and I probably see it a little differently in the whole monopoly thing. Cause I, there are other choices. You don't have to use Google. You can use Bing, you can use DuckDuckGo, you can use ChatGPD, you can use perplexity. If anything, their case for monopoly is probably weaker now than it was before, because they have all these different, you know, quote unquote competitors that are getting some level of market share. But yeah, back to it. It's like they're gonna make whatever rules benefit them.

They're gonna set this up in a way that helps them, you know, get more market share, get more revenue, make it more useful. And they have to hope, the expression that I love, right, you can she or she forever, you can skin them once. They have to hope that what they're doing is not turning a user off from using Google, because I think that is what's happening. When you see the angry Reddit threads on the AI overview content, or you see these people who are like,

I'm leaving Google, Heather this morning on the podcast that we recorded said she doesn't use Google anymore, she uses Proplexity. Which I believe Heather 100% through and through. There are people who have done that. The convention that Paul and I will make is that that's not as many people as you might think. And that's more of this early adapter type thing that people are leaning into.

It's not the broad public is not doing that. Obviously, the data bears that out. But yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, when you again, when you're on the highway, you can make the rules how you want to make them. And that's what Google is doing with this kind of stuff. For sure. I would agree with that. Here. Now, you contribute to this next. Yeah, so you're contributing to this next step. How many hours of YouTube are streamed

on a daily basis? Do you remember that? I do not remember that one. I was looking at all that stuff and that one came in. I mean, geez, I mean, it has to be 2 million hours. Am I way off there? A billion hours of YouTube streamed a day. Oh my gosh, I was off by a factor of 500 there. I mean, it is. It's you don't think I mean, that is I think that is the differentiation of now having its own streaming service with live TV and things like that is that. Oh, okay.

Yeah. For including YouTube TV in there and use it and stuff. Really hard pressed to think that that's not that's not a part of that. But even looking outside of that that and it's on TV, that was the other notable part. I mean, it's not not on desktops, not on anything like that. That's where, again, it makes sense that you I mean, if you're subscribing to YouTube TV, you're a part of that. And that's something that I 100% believe that shorts on the other side of things, 2 billion monthly active users and growing.

And I think the one part about that, we talked about shorts on and off here, but what they really like to say is that it's not just, I mean, this is where you need to be because 45% of shorts users are not on TikTok, 65% are not on Reels. Now, again, whether that's accurate or not, it is what it is.

I would love to know that. Did they have any demographic breakdown of that data? Like, because one thing, okay. Because one thing we always say is this idea that like TikTok is young, you know, it skews younger and people always misinterpret when I say that there's every generation on every social media platform. There's young and old people on Facebook and TikTok, et cetera. But if there was a distribution of people, again, TikTok skews very young, but I'm curious where YouTube lands. Because like, I think it's. Because I think in a way, it's been around a lot longer. So it's funny that it would skew younger, even though it's a 20-year-old company, right, at this point. Whereas TikTok we see as a much newer phenomenon or a much newer trend, which is

interesting. Yeah, maybe they'll update that down the road. Or maybe we have other data we can hunt out on that. Because I do think that YouTube in particular is this amazing discovery engine. There's people that use YouTube as a search engine in a way, or they look for interesting things in a way. There's people on YouTube that have done like vacation rental, you know, walkthrough style content. We're trying to get some of them on the podcast, the art of hospitality feed.

And it's like, that's its own discovery engine in a way, but it's a very different set of skills than I would say the typical vacation company has with regards to like filming and storytelling and video production. Those aren't things that most people understand well, but it's absolutely a place where people put a lot of attention, you know, to Paul's comment here, myself included,

we'll watch YouTube recreationally a lot, more so than we might watch, like, I watch YouTube if I'm not watching non-sports television. So I really have YouTube TV for sports, and then I don't really watch any, like, fictional TV shows or anything like that, I watch YouTube outside of that, right? So it's like, I am the target demographic in a way,

and I'm sure I fit neatly in that bell curve of, you know, my age and my demographics and all that stuff. Yeah, it's YouTube is, we talked about video is important. If you're not considering like, YouTube is probably the place where you're going to put your video or you can put it on TikTok, you can put it on reels and some of these other places. Like the key is that you have to be where the people are. And if

it's 2 billion people that are using it on a monthly basis and growing and Engage Views grew 20% over quarter over quarter then yeah you probably have to be considering being on you know the stuff that you just put on social media probably should be going on a YouTube channel and if you don't have one that's probably something that you should be at least considering moving forward because I think you have to create the video before you think about creating the channel but now that we do have a lot of people who are creating a lot of video clips and doing things like that you do you have to have that place to kind of house it and Google provides that for you YouTube provides that for you so I think it leads to a better, more brand equity, a better chance to engage more directly with that brand

and view the whole site, view the whole repository that you have a video. So. And one thing I'll add in there too, I think YouTube is unique in the way that there's both an activity feed on the homepage that works more like a social network where I'm seeing recent content and it works in a way like your typical search engine where you go and search for information about the

best things to do in the Outer Banks. And you could see a video that was posted two months ago, two years ago, 12 years ago, maybe not quite that old. That's rare, obviously. But you see stuff that has some staying power. So I do think having, we have clients in the past that have done these kind of walkthrough tutorials or walkthroughs of properties. Hey, welcome to 123 Main Street. It's in Conrad's school cabin rental program. Here's the kitchen, here's this, here's that, here's this. I actually saw Wander did a $50 million raise the other day. Congrats to Wander.

And when I got a chance to review some of their stuff, one thing I think they do really, really well is those video model led walkthroughs where they actually have someone walk through the property and showing the property very, very well. And people will watch those eight, nine minute videos. So this idea too, people have no attention span, oh, I have to put everything in a 30 second clip

or a YouTube short, it's just not true. If they're interested in the property, they will watch a seven, eight minute video of someone walking through everything in that property if they're actually interested in booking it and they feel confident in making the reservation once they know that data. And I think those are ones where you don't have

to be an expert. I mean, you have to have a certain level of quality to the camera and video itself. But if you have any decent microphone, you can buy an Amazon for a hundred bucks and you have an iPhone and a gimbal, you can make a walkthrough video of every the camera and video itself. But if you have any decent microphone, but you can buy an Amazon for 100 bucks and you have an iPhone and a gimbal, you can make a walkthrough video of every single property in your program.

And then to the point here of ads, you can run ads against that, or you can run ads against people that have watched that video. And that's going to be a much wider and more, you know, a deeper relationship you can have with that audience versus just like random people searching on, you know, Instagram, maybe for something that might be tangentially related to your property.

So I would take someone watching a YouTube video, like almost over anything, even some Google searches, right? If someone watches a video of a specific listing, a specific property, they really like it. Then they're served an ad at the end, or they see a call to action link underneath it to go ahead and book that property right now. That's going to work almost, I would argue, better than a search result because they've actually spent five minutes, eight minutes watching, watching walkthrough videos. So I'd be quite bullet-charm. What were your thoughts on the AI agentic capabilities there? There, they definitely, second half was a lot of domination by that. Yeah. So when we're both out of a job, Paul, and we're on the streets begging,

perhaps in the, you know, in some mutual study that will land on here, we can blame the AI agents, I guess, for taking our job. But no, I'm somewhat joking there a little bit. I do think that the... I've said this a few times before. You know, we talked about this idea that, like, your low-level support rep at Google was so useful for such a long period of time that an AI is not easy, it would not be a hard feat to make an AI agent

that's better than, like, your typical Google Ad support rep that was overseas. And I'm not saying negative things about folks that are overseas. We've had some great people on our team that are overseas that do a great job, but your typical average ad support rep that was overseas. And I'm not saying negative things about folks that are overseas. We've had some great people on our team that are overseas that do a great job, but your typical average Google ads rep that was calling it literally just reading

off a list of recommendations, they don't understand your business, they understand nothing, was honestly a waste time from Google, and I'm surprised they did it as long as they did. Obviously they have some, I would say, there's some financial reason right away. Like getting a call from Google feels

like a certain thing to people, even though it's all outsourced and contract with a third-party company. So I do think that at that low level, like the idea of like, it's almost funny that Clippy's back. I think we made this joke before with these AI things. And now it's like really feels that way with AI agents. It's like Microsoft had it in like 2004, and then they abandoned it. Honestly, if Microsoft does AI agents, they have to re they have to bring back Clippy branding, like I would buy like a Clippy AI

agent t shirt like tomorrow and wear that shit. That's cool. But anyways, I think that imagine an AI agent that does what I talked about a few minutes ago with search terms, where it clicks a button. It goes and says, okay, here's the search terms that you're running. These seem kind of less relevant. Hey, what do you think? Do you want to change this? Do you want to go through it? And I do think that it's probably bad news for some agencies that are managing as accounts, ourself maybe included. Maybe some clients may look at this and go, I can do it myself plus this little agent, maybe it's good there. I do think it's probably solid for it's probably better for Google because they can get rid of these 10,000, you know, agents, you know, actual agents they have not AI agents that they have overseas, who are, you know, I'm sure it's just a really

bad experience for most advertisers, they probably don't love it. I know I never liked it. They get bad recommendations. And again, I think it's that whole thing from earlier of just like, it puts a bad taste in your mouth. Like, you know, Google is good. And then you get a call from this person who has you turning on display and has you turning on, you know, broad match. And as you're turning on everything, and then a month later, your account's doing poorly. And you're just like, why am I doing this? Right? So if the agent is actually good, I'm all for it. But you know, obviously, time will tell once we actually use it and put our hands on it, we'll see the recommendations that actually gives but I'd be more bullish about this than Google doubling down on these like people calling you

You know cold calling you trying to get you dropped into more recommendations The fear I have and I hope that you get with everything else AI powered it is an improvement The examples they were giving is I mean, they're essentially what they say in recommendations. Hey, your CPA is this, you should use this. Hey, you should do so until there's something that is actually moving the needle in a positive way. It does it feels like they're just putting more automation behind recommendations. And that's in analytics and Google ads. That's, I think that's something where I haven't used the analytics insights that often. And that's funny. I use that a lot. Like, like how many bookings did we get last year? And I just, yeah, yeah, that's

a simple, I don't know, that's always been something. And maybe that's just, that's my unwillingness to adopt stuff that's going to be easier, I don't know, making it more painful for myself. But I do think that like, there are some people who just prefer that. And with myself. But I do think that like, there are some people who just prefer that. And with the analytics, I do think that can be that can be beneficial because they did. I'm just a natural language person. Like, I don't know, like, um, when fantastic all came out, that's what I use my calendar. And like, fantastical came out and you do things now where I click in

that fantastical little window. And I say meeting with Paul tomorrow at 2pm. And like, it basically does the event for me puts in the dates, puts in the times, and I just say enter and then I have to invite you to whatever. That works so much better for me. Maybe that's my own personal little quirks of how I use natural language. If you're looking at recommendations tablets and you don't understand it, again, that's one thing that is amazing about AI. You can ask it over and over again to explain it to you and it will sit there, never takes a sick day, keeps going. If a business owner doesn't know why they're opting into search partners, Google can explain it in a little agent. Where it's like, hey, I'm Clippy, opting into search

partners today. I can't get over that visual. Here's the benefit of search partners. I imagine an agent that's actually good would be like, you know what, Paul, let's turn on search partners. I'll email you in 20 days with the results and we see how it's going. And that could be- That was something that, I mean, it is the example, the example they're giving there was you, the evaluating in Google ads campaign

or something like that. And the first evaluation point, and I think it was, I'm running these campaigns, but I'm not seeing any conversions come through. It noticed that it's a Wix website and the tag wasn't enabled or installed or integrated or whatever. So going through the process, it did.

It went through the process. It went over to your Wix site, it enabled it, did all of those things that connected. And then it tested it and said, and the question, follow-up question was, well, when am I gonna see conversions? I will, you know, nothing yet, it's usually takes some time, but I will check back and let you know when that happens. So I see that's

awesome. I see the value there. That's something that certainly that agent powered experiences is a positive and looking at just the shopping side of things. That was the other pretty cool example that they gave of, okay, let's compare this. Now you can set a price that you want to see. You know, if it drops below 235, then notify me. Okay. Go through, do the payment, do everything like that as an end user, as a buyer.

Hey, that's pretty cool. I do like that. What is it going to do for us as marketers? Well, we'll have to see about that. Book this vacation rental when the price goes under X dollars per night. That's pretty much what they said. It was a different product,

but essentially the same thing. So we're gonna counter our revenue management tools with an AI powered agent that's going to ensure that everybody knows when our prices are as low as possible. Awesome. We're using AI to set the prices and then we're using AI to book at the time where the prices are the most optimal. I will say one Google feature that I'll give them credit on is, I don't know if you've looked on Google flights recently and they have that, this has been the case for a while,

but they have the like, is the pricing good or bad right now? And they tell you like, hey, we scraped all the rates for the next like whatever, 365 days. And like, you know, the tip, the low end is like 300 for this flight, the high end 700, here's 400 like that's pretty good, you know, basically. So I like features like that. And I think that, yeah, ultimately, you know, it's giving the consumer more information. If the consumer is getting more information in a more digestible way, I'm for it. And then again, it's kind of back to that capitalism discussion, right? Of like, may the best man win. And I do think that in theory, like the more quote unquote middlemen that can be cut out, the better, you know, so we can cut out the H the Airbnb middleman, right, or the verbal middleman. And we can tell

clients like, hey, when you go on Google, you search, you're finding our stuff, you're running a little AI agent tell you what the pricing is, or whatever. I think that could be a good thing, potentially for now we're giving in a way new middleman is now in the fold, right, Google, and who knows what they want to extract as far as ad dollars go. But I could be bullish on these AI agent things if they're done well. But I guess, yeah, my concern in the short term is that it's mostly just like running recommendations and wrapping it in a more friendly little layer

for you to kind of ask questions about. So as long as I'm just like, no, that's not good. You know, like, I don't want to do that. And I'm going through the next things like that, that's fine. But I almost wonder if like the agent will be more convincing than just a list of recommendations because it's like justifying it and explaining it to you that honestly I could see more business owners,

small business owners running their own ads, just opting in the stuff they don't even understand. And then again, tanking the performance of the account 60 days later, we're like, what's going on? This isn't going well. So I'm letting my take on it. Well, I know we're kind of a time here, Paul. Any other bits and pieces we want to wrap in

or any other things we didn't get to that we should have? By the way, the doc that Google sent us that I put in our show notes, or I put in our file here, is 50 pages. So we didn't get to everything, obviously, but I think we hit some of the highlights of kind of what happened. Yeah, I mean, they ended with their top five.

Be where your customers are in real time with the best returns. AI is giving Google search superpowers. There's only one YouTube. Maximize your ROI with the Power Pack, of course the Power Pack, and fuel your AI. I like that branding. I mean, I think if you haven't adopted some type of AI, you don't have a choice anymore.

It's in there. So now you have to learn how to use it, learn how to get the most out of it, learn how to ensure that you're using it effectively and not just taking Google's recommendations and what it is. Nothing has changed too much, but there are a lot of cool enhancements that appear as if they could help us all out. So I'm going to look glass half full for a while, at least for this month here and see what happens. But what I mean, what is like, I mean, overall, what, what were your takeaways? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it, what is it?

I think it's good. I think ultimately, you know, the, the way that we're gonna head with Google is always just like, how do we appease the user and give the user a good experience? If Google will fail in the future, it will be because something better comes out, we can agree on that. Because to unseat Google, you have to come up with a better product. So if the chat tbt products is better for certain use cases, which it is, by the way, and Google loses some market share for that, good and well, that's how it should go. Right. But, you know, this idea that Google is just going to lay over

and get chewed away by AI is one thing that you and I obviously just don't at all agree with. Or if that happens, and it's on such a long time horizon, right, that people just, you know, again, everyone wants to be the first one to claim like, I figured it out, I got it right on the death of something. So I'm not putting any dirt on the Google grave. I would hold the Google stock if I had any, I'm sure I do, mutual fund or something, right? But I would hold the Google stock. I see things going pretty solidly for the future, and they're not sitting on their laurels. Maybe they don't move as fast as they used to when they were a smaller company. But Google Store, people are going, high-intent traffic is still there, and show me their alternative for what we're focused

on. And the answer is that there is not one. There's not a real, legit alternative to Google anytime, and there will not be anytime soon. There's new things that have emerged. There's new ideas. There's new methodologies, new systems, obviously. Being more of a ChatGPT fan, that's obviously the case. Great for them. I did the example I gave Heather this morning

was doing a search in Google, finding the documentation for something that I needed, grabbing that documentation, then pasting it into ChatGPT, and then asking a question. So into chat GBT and asking questions. You both have a quote unquote search there. Someone will say you need a chat GBT but I need Google to find the article in chat GBT to give it the right documentation for a problem I was facing. Just a funny example. I'm bullish. Call me thumbs up for right now. As always with these things, Paul, it's like what's the expression? Trust but verify. Test and verify should be the word with Google with all things ads. If Google is recommending something on the ad side, you should look at it, evaluate it, see

if it's right for your business. That may or may not be depending on what they're recommending tested, see if it's actually working better. If not, then roll it back and don't roll with it. And ignore kind of some of the flash and marketing hype, because you're going to see some wins there. And you're going to see a lot of stuff that you go, wow, I just burned $4,000 on that or $2,000 on that and it didn't work and that's okay. That's unfortunately how we work now in the world of digital advertising and you got to figure out what's going to work for you in your business. So I think that's a good, good one to place a bow on that one at the end. Paul, this podcast isn't a business per se, but we do need something to keep it going.

And that's more reviews, you know? So if you made it all the way to the end, dear listener, thank you by the way, 52 minutes and counting it looks like or so on Google Marketing Live recap. You are a weirdo and a bit of a sicko, which we appreciate and we love, by the way. That is not an insult. That is a term of endearment that I'm using on you. But I want one thing from you. I don't want to dime from you.

I just want to review. Go to your podcast, have a choice. iTunes, Spotify. You're probably in one of those platforms because the data tells us. That's where most people listen from. Go to the app, hit five stars, leave us a friendly comment or two, email us or you can follow us on LinkedIn. We post new episodes, new stuff there, and we'll catch you on the next episode of The Heads and Beds Show. Have an awesome day. Thank you.