Heads In Beds Show - Seeing Through the Marketing BS

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

In this episode, Conrad and Paul talk all things marketing metrics, misleading agency reports, inflated ROAS, broken conversion tracking, brand vs. non-brand performance, the numbers vacation rental managers should actually trust, building your own marketing scoreboard, 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 Bet Show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host, Conrad. And I'm your co-host, Paul. Paul, good afternoon. What's happening? What's cooking? Another beautiful day here. It's not sunny. It's Minnesota.

So it is what it is. No, we're, see, we, we, I don't know. I'm thinking the South Carolina State Fair maybe isn't as big a deal as we have the state fair up here in Minnesota. So we're kind of counting down. I think it's about two weeks away now. And we haven't gone with the kids. I used to go up for 4-H and do all the fun farm stuff. And now it'll be fun to take the kids and just gorge on some food.

So, yeah, I guess what does the state fair? Is there a state fair that you know of in South Carolina down there? Oh, boy. I'm 35 years old, okay? I've lived in South Carolina since I was a teenager since I was like 16, turning 17. And I've never been in a state fair. I hate to say it. I suspect it's probably somewhere up in like the Columbia, South Carolina area, which is far away from me to be fair down by the coast. So that's my excuse. But I will say when I was a kid, we used to go to this fair called the Big E. And it was in the middle of Massachusetts. I tracked a lot of people from all of New England, not just those and people who lived in Massachusetts. And that was a heck of a good time. But I don't think we have anything similar, unfortunately. We've got the beach and we've got other stuff. But we don't have the fair. At least the one that I attend, unfortunately. I guess the beach is the bad substitute for a fair.

Yeah, but there's not like funnel cakes at the beach. There is sometimes like a funnel cake at a fair is like a pretty positive experience, I would say, for a young. Yeah, exactly. Like you said, you go to a fair, but you're walking around. So can you just eat whatever you want if you walk around? I learned that at Italy. We went to our wedding anniversary now two years ago to Italy. And we ate whatever we wanted there.

But because we were walking so much, we didn't get any weight. And I was like, wait, is this how the Italians are like in such good shape? What's going on here? But I did that at home, I'd be like, there's a lot of food on a stick. Like that is a, usually 50, 60 items on a stick. you're walking around and I think it's I think yeah we average about 150,000 people a day so it's there's definitely how many like acres is this across how large is the like you can't see it all in one day I would feel like right like it just no oh yeah you can see it is you're walking it's you're

probably walking five six miles seven miles eight miles getting around but it's a couple it's I don't it's hard to say it's hard to paint there's there's a midway there's a lot of industrial buildings. There's a grandstand. There's some concerts that go on, live music concerts that go on. So it's, it is. I think it's outside of Texas and there's runs for six weeks. It's the biggest state there in the country. So it's like I said, it's kind of a big deal. Yeah, a big deal. People, you know what happens at Fairs, though? What can't happen at Fares, these little games at the boost and stuff like that? What do you have there? People are going to swindle you. The same thing can happen with your marketing. So today's topic is seeing through

the marketing BS. It is basically our attempt to try to explain all the logical fallacies, You got to realize, listener. You see a fraction of what Paul and I actually talk about, right? When we actually hit the red button, first of all, we probably already talked for 30 minutes beforehand. Just a little spoiler alert there. But you also don't see the pings and texts and chats and stuff like that to go back the fork between Paul and I.

But Paul and I have the same, for the most part, I would say it's pretty similar, BS meter towards other companies in our space that basically lie to you a lot. It could be big companies. We're talking the Googles of the world, meta's the world, we can rail them. It's also your friendly neighborhood, vacation rental marketing companies out there. It could be your homeowner marketing, could be guest, marketing could be your vendors that sell service small and large. And we're not in the business or in the habit of just pissing people off for no reason necessarily. But we can give you some

tools that will help you think a little bit better. So Paul doesn't get swindled when he goes to throw the ring on the whatever, that little milk bottle at the state fair. And you will not get swindled when you're investing your hard earned dollars or your marketing budget into working with a specific vendor or a specific software platform that's supposed to provide all these results to you. So we're going to try to help people tune in their BS meter today. I would imagine that's the goal, Paul. It is. I think, and this is the reality is that nobody's doing this to make you look bad.

There's no malintent here where this is the reality is everybody has to justify being a part of your text act, being a part of your marketing mix, being a part of your business. So I do. I think that's something that most of what is said is, accurate can be tied back to a number. There is. I think it is. It's understanding the value of the numbers and really making sure that you can see through the slop that some people put out there. And don't be maybe overly impressed or don't put too much weight on the numbers that may be shiny and bright and make the business seem like it's moving in the right direction, but ultimately isn't moving the needle like you think it is there. So that's, I think it is.

It's, but it is, the fact that we've worked with as many people as we have for the number of years that we have, it's a reality that we have seen the good. We have seen the bad. And once in a while, we've maybe seen a couple of uglies in there. So we can talk about that. Yeah, I'll push back slightly in the fact that some people don't do this with malintent. Unfortunately, I do believe that it is the case, that people will do this stuff with malintent and they know they're misleading you and they don't care than they do it anyways. But there's probably a fine line between intentionally misleading you, but trying to help you. along the way and just pure delusion.

There's probably like a, as the kids would say, DeLulu, there's probably some line in there where it gets crossed, where it's like they actually believe what they're doing is moving the needle, even though there's evidence to the contrary. So I think it's, and I've had to have many of these conversations over my career, and they all suck, but basically it's the conversation where what we're doing is not working well.

Here's the four different variations of what we tried is not working well. And I have other ideas of things that we can try, but we're not on a positive trajectory here. Perhaps it is best that we end what we're doing here, because I would rather leave on a sour note than a, brutally sour-nout or a screaming match, you know, which I think is very common. And it's not to get too meta and not to pat myself in the back. I know I don't deserve that. But a lot of vendors when I first started selling had these 12-month contracts. This is very common. I feel like that softened a bit as

things have gone on, but certainly when I first started back in 2016, 2017, everybody that I was pitching back then had this 12-month agreement with one of these big companies. And I was like, and they're, oh, we're in month nine of a 12-month agreement. And they won't let us out of it, was the common refrain. And I'm like, are you happy with them? Are they doing a good job? you getting a good return in your investment? And oftentimes the answer was like, we're not really sure. We don't really know. We get a report, but it's just reading off numbers from analytics. And it's been my constant battle now for 10 plus years, basically to say, okay, first of all, for month to months. So, and that's stayed the same for 10 plus years. If you don't like the

quality of the results you're getting or you're not happy with me, you do have to give me a month notice. That's it. But you can't tell me on the 29th. You want to stop on the 30th or the first. But if you give me a month notice, we can shake hands and move on. I give you everything that you've worked on before. So these are like agency red flags that I've seen like, if your agency is going to hold your ad account hostage, like such BS, such nonsense. There's no reason for them to hold your ad account hostage. If you cancel your services with the marketing agency, they should hand you everything you did for them.

If they bill ads for you, if they bill content for you, that is yours. If they built an ad account for you and then ran it on your behalf, that is yours. You should get that back. So I think anyone who kind of claims that they must maintain ownership of that is lying to you and misleading you. And no client wants, we don't want churn. Insurance sucks. We've had lots of churn this year.

And it sucks. And it makes me sick to my stomach when I think about it. But I, as the agency, I never want to compound maybe what that owner might have felt like wasn't a great decision. Maybe they didn't get the return that they wanted or the investment didn't match what they were expecting with adding more crap into the crap sandwich. I feel like that's what these agency owners do when they do this. And some of them are owned by private equity and they don't give a crap. It's just dollars and cents. And it's just a spreadsheet and they don't care.

That's fine. My suggestion would be probably don't work with those companies unless there's a very ethical leader in front of those people who are doing the right thing. And I think those do exist, by the way. I'm not saying that every single private equity company is bad. but that would be a false equivalence. It's not fair to those private equity back companies. And I'm not saying that. But I do think that having that relationship with your vendor on the agency side is important to say if we part ways. And it's almost a statistical guarantee. We will part ways at some point. I've had clients that have worked with for a super long time. But even some of my best relationships have started and ended and some of them come back in again. So I think that's another thing too. How often are you restarting work with clients that maybe stopped at one point due to business shifts, reasons, changes, mergers, acquisitions, whatever the case may be. And I think we actually have a decent track record there. So we could do this all day.

Literally, this is going to be like bitch fest episode of 1,000. We're going to have a good time with this. But what are the topics fall? I think the first in the note on the ad account, because that is. That's something that I have seen it. We've encountered it. We've both encountered it out there. I think agencies hide behind our intellectual property, are this, our strategy, this,

and that's fine. if you are churning an account, you did it poorly. Probably. Something, to some extent. You didn't match the results and expectations, whatever that looks like. I think there are many times when someone is holding account hostage because they don't want to show how poorly it was managed, and they just don't want to.

It's so tough to justify that. And it's, because I've been on that side of it, too, I have not wanted to show people, and I have not wanted to say and own up to the fact that long years and years ago, we weren't doing it. We weren't doing a good enough job. Now, it is, I can't, that's not, that's something I absolutely own up to, and that's the way it's got to be. But I think that's half the battle. And, again, you say which one.

I guess if that's not disclosed up front, then, yeah, the unwillingness to give away your business asset, It's always how I went into it when I talked to someone. I'm going to create a Google Ads account for you. This is your business asset. I'm creating it for you. I'm not holding onto it. This is yours. You can do with it what you please.

If you want to put this type of ad, go ahead. You want to put, fine. Starts to impact the performance. We'll talk about it. But ultimately, that's what it is. This is your business asset. Let's think about for a second. The kerfuffle that was 2018, 19, 1920.

of meta automatically starting to say, okay, we're going to require you to connect a business manager account in order to run retargeting ads, which was fundamental, let's say, 90% of what we were running into space at that point. You might have been doing a little bit more than that, but that is it. Yeah. So all of these agencies are all of a sudden creating these business accounts and then connecting them, and now we've got 40, 50, 60 of these little ad accounts.

And not just that, but it was almost impossible to, unlink them. And so I think it is. These are the things that that was a huge pain point. Hopefully you're not letting them create meta stuff because that's just nasty. But overall, yeah, it is your business asset. See it that way. If you were going to sell off the business, if you're going to get, if you're going to put it up for M&A, that's part of it. That's part of your discussion. It should be part of your discussion. So why would it not be part of the offering from that agency. But that's a weird jail break point to be able to say,

hey, we're not going to do that. Anybody can go. You and I can both go back and put together a pretty sound strategy based on doing a random number of searches and say, okay, this is probably what you're putting out there for keywords. And this is probably where they're directing it. We can do it without going behind the scene.

So there's my first soapbox moment. Probably won't be the last. No, it won't be the last of it. That's totally fine. that's probably a fair thing to think about it. Yeah. And there's people in our space right now that are doing this where they don't give you access to the ad account. They run a lot of meta ads.

And I can understand why to some degree, if it is very software-driven. And I understand people are trying to like onboard really quickly. Like they're selling a platform. They're not selling a service. So I understand some new ones there. But there was early versions of reporting I've seen from some of these companies that are running ads on your behalf that just don't match up with what I've ever measured in-year-old in-house that just don't match up. measured in 10 plus years across any account. So I've looked at hundreds and hundreds of accounts, both ones that I've set up and managed

and ones that other people have managed, ones that are managed in-house, one that are managed with other agencies, in our space, outside of our space. And what's that, I mean, just so many classic expressions that we can talk about today. I've worked on one earlier, put one in the chat earlier. There are three kinds of lies, lies, damn lies, and statistics. Because statistics and analytics and data like this can absolutely mislead you if you allow someone to write their own numbers into it or explain what number is the thing to look at, that sort of thing, right?

So I think we all agree if we're focused on getting more guest bookings. The thing that matters a lot is the number of bookings made and the revenue from those bookings. We can agree on that. But there are metrics that are going to support those ideals, but they can be game. They can all be game. It's pretty darn hard to game number bookings made revenue from bookings. That's pretty hard to game. But it's pretty easy to game traffic.

It's we open a meta ads account. We open a Google ads account. And we click on, let's go by engagement traffic from Bangladesh and we'll get a lot of clicks for a penny. And it'll inflate our number of traffic. It'll invade our number of page views. It'll inflate our number of Facebook followers maybe if we did it on that platform, which I've seen people do it before. And very unlikely, no one from Bangladesh is ever going to come to Myrtle Beach and book a vacation.

I shouldn't say nobody, but it's a virtual statistical improbability. That's going to occur to high clip, right? So we all know that you could mislead someone in that way in a malicious way if you wanted to. Now within that, there's a lot of nuance, right, where it's like sometimes when we run ads, we'll run them nationwide, even though the clients say most of our ads come from, or most of our guests, excuse me, come from these core markets. I go, if we do that, if we limit these markets to this much smaller base, our cost per click may drive drastically to the point where it's less efficient to target a smaller area because your cost per click goes up significantly on Google. So it's a tradeoff, right?

We're having that discussion. But I think that's why ultimately, and this is a good AI use case too, I believe. And I see our client's doing this, so I know what's happening. And our CS team doesn't love it if I'm being transparent, but I see where they're coming from. They take our report. They drop it into chat, TPT, or Claude, and they say, I'm going to meet with my agency tomorrow. Explain what I'm seeing here. explain it. Here's a few more of our previous months that we've had together.

Here's some of my goals. I think having that little thought partner with you is great. Now, we've all encountered this person so far, and they're only going to continue a number as we go along here, there is someone who believes that the AI is right no matter what. And then the AI doesn't have a lot of context. My AI consistently gets confused when I'm helping it work on growing the build-up bookings business and then helping it grow my client's businesses because we essentially are different types of service offering. So it'll consistently say things that don't match up with what I need to be doing versus what vacation rental companies be doing, right? Or the one I had, I had one today where I was doing a CRM cleanup and it said, hey, you're trying to, claw set this. You're trying to find all the

vacation rental managers in this market, but you have other people in here. You've got your vendors in here, like a PMS company, like a streamline, a guestie, how do I? Should I delete those? Because those aren't vacation rental management companies. I'm like, yeah, but those are vendors in our space. Don't delete that. But if I just let the AI run loose, it was going to go delete a bunch of records for people that I collaborate with in the vendor space on the PMS side that would have made my CRM a lot stupider. So it's like this AI tools are great. that kind of stuff, but they're not perfect. We all know that. But I do think it's a good thought partner to basically say, what do you think about this traffic? What's the good? What's the

bad? What's the ugly? Give me some context. Give me some numbers. And then you can come to that call, maybe a little bit more briefed because I think you should essentially, I'm a big believer in this. You should have your own scorecard of like what you're optimizing for. Tell that to your agency, by the way. Your agency needs to know your goals. And we get leads all the time who are just like people who will reach out to us and say, I want more direct bookings. And it's like, that couldn't be less specific. Like at any cost. Is there margin amounts in there? How many you're getting right now. What are you currently doing? There's a thousand sub questions to spawn out of that to actually make a plan for you. But they just say, I want more direct bookings.

It's like, okay, there's a lot of nuance in there. But having, forcing you to go through the thought process of what I'm doing, here's how things are going, having the AI help you a little bit to form some questions. I think can be a healthy relationship between you and an agency or a partner or a team member. Maybe you don't have an agency or someone that you're working with like Paul or myself or whatever. That's totally fine too. Maybe if someone on your team, it's like, let's build a set of a set of metrics together that we can work on that are measuring our success, are focusing on what matters, and you're going to be held accountable to it. And I'm going to know what you're doing and how the results of what you're doing is impacting

our growth going forward. And that's super fair on both sides. So I think there's a lot of positives in this. Now, can you also send someone down an infinite loop of questions and basically drive them crazy? Yes, you can. And I'm dealing with that right now. And I am going to pull my hair out over this stuff. But yeah, there's also good uses for this as well. It is. I mean, I think that's something that I did LinkedIn post on it a ways back. But it was was like AI hasn't failed. AI hasn't made the mistakes. And even if you feed the results in,

they're not going to know why. Then let's start this, what is it, Simon Sionics to start with why. There's no why really there at a deeply institutional level for your business in AI. It doesn't matter what kind of, first of all, please don't upload your entire business into these things. Also fair.

anything, but you can give it the most exhaustive profile of your business, and it's still not going to understand the nuance. Peggy from accounting did this, HR, like, there's so much more behind the scenes in a hospitality business than there is in the general, I don't know, executive business space. And again, one business is one business. That's the reality. So I do. I think that's that is the difficult part is that when we do see these incredible things that happen and see these cool assessments and feel like, oh, this is very powerful, it's a powerful tool to help you get over,

get more out of what you're doing right now. Yes, I think that's the key. Have better conversations. If you're sick and tired of just seeing our page views are here and our users are here and our conversions rate rate is here and our purchases, it's great. have a better conversation, have a stronger conversation, don't just have that conversation. These are the numbers. How do I make these numbers do what I want them to do? And I think that's where

the nuance of the conversation begins to change. And you can. I think you can ask AI how they would phrase a question to get more out of these. I think that's where, yeah, you can maybe leverage an understanding of marketing that AI has that you don't have. Okay. That's, something, but it is. We've talked about attribution is not a fun thing to justify, and we are all incentivized to help you perform. What is your definition of performance? That's what we have to define up front, because if we're defining that X amount of the way through the partnership relationship we're never going to be satisfied with what those results are. And I think that that's a sales versus marketing conversation as well because a lot of the

headaches, pain points that come from reactions to performance are from interpretations of things that happened far before accounts were switched over or accounts were given or access was given or anything like that. And I think that's, especially, especially with a new partnership, a new relationship, and I think where you get a lot of this fluffy material, some of these fluffier numbers and see things like that, is more sales-driven.

Now it is. It's up to operations and the actual customer success. We'll go through the list of what those teams look like, but they're the ones who have to deliver on those expectations that were set by a team that this is where that malicious may come into play a little more there, where sales knows X, Y, Z, but we're going to get the job done and we'll loop it in and it'll be part of the greater conversation. This is the

great part and not so great part about all of the mergers and acquisitions, everything that has happened, all the consolidation that's happened over the past five years, is that all of a sudden you have fewer voices and everything is lumped together and it seems like a really good thing, but maybe this solution doesn't match with this solution with your business. So it's, I don't know, it's, that's the more painful part is that when we do think about that,

it's, I've seen a lot of vendors in the space who have 90% of their offerings at A plus material. That 10% being at C plus the area can affect the whole business. And it's not, and unfortunately, it's a, It's incumbent upon the property manager to understand what they don't need or what they don't like, because we're going to keep trying to solve it as a full book. That's how it works now. Yeah, I think you bring up a good point with respect to, like, you, it's your responsibility, ultimately, to hold everyone in your team internally and externally accountable to their results,

right? So let's say, and I have not, I've cleaned my own house, but like, I've never cleaned a vacation rental. I have a vision in my head of how it should go, but I've not done it myself. But I'll tell you what, I've been a vacation rental guest before. I've worked in vacation rentals for many years. I could tell you if I walked into a property, if it was clean to a reasonable standard of what a guest would expect or not based on my own experience. So I would be comfortable having a conversation with someone that goes,

I'm your name housekeeping manager tomorrow. There's a lot of things I don't know about this side of the business and what you struggle with and your problems. But I know this. You shouldn't leave a broken piece of glass container inside the fridge with food dripping everywhere. Like we know that, right? So that's an unacceptable outcome. So I think the same thing applies in our world, right?

you have the ability to go get more information about what your marketing is doing. And then, yeah, you should be demanding what you want out of it. That's always what I believe, which is, and I say this in our kickoff calls, and everyone in our kickoff calls seems to nod along and say, yep, that's it. But I'm like, you're going to get the best results when you communicate frequently with us. If you're not communicating with us frequently, you're going to get the best results. You're still going to get some level of results, of course, but you're not going to get the results will not be as good as if you just communicate with us regularly.

It doesn't have to be a one-hour meeting all the time. In fact, sometimes those are, those can be a poor use of time. but if you're telling us what's going on and you're keeping this in the loop and then we're changing our strategy based on what you're learning within your own business, we're absolutely going to get this to be a lot, a lot better. So I think that those are absolutely key parts that the puzzle to understand. I'm going to go back for a second, because I think we, I hinted at this earlier, but just kind of go into it. If you do this test for fun, you'd find some really interesting data from it, which is you open your ads dashboard in Google. You open your ads dashboard and meta. You then go to your PMS of choice, streamline, guest, do you host, whatever? You go download your bookings. And you go, wait a second. ads reported 27 and then analytic or meta ads reported 14 but only have 34 like how is that possible it doesn't make any sense right so that's another piece which is that all these different third party data sources may be using have their own methodologies and own ways of measuring so the big guys in the world here that were running ads on google and meta and those sorts of places they want to take credit for as much as they can so they're going to bias their algorithms their measurement systems their attribution models to be as friendly to them as possible meta loves view through conversions i did a linton post on it recently where basically a larger resort group that I work with did about 1.1, 1.2 million one month in direct bookies from meta if you count fee through bookings. If you filter down and only count click through conversions, the number was closer to 300,000, 300,000 and some change. So we're talking a 3 to 4x reduction in conversions if we believe that in order for a booking to come from Facebook or Instagram,

they had to click on the ad. Now, I don't believe that. I don't think the number is actually 300,000. I think it's more than that, but it's not a million, right, in terms of like they were actually meaningfully influenced by this ad during this particular time frame. And this was a busy man for them. So it was good to get some data because their ads are served very broadly. So yeah, these platforms, like that is where I think an agency can provide a lot of value. And if you talk with one of these reps from Google, if you talk with one of these reps from meta, they are very much not aligned with your interests. I really do believe that. I know we're talking your own book here, but when you go talk to a Google rep, they have

incentives given to them from Google, not from you. So they don't really necessarily act in your best interest that often. I went down this rabbit hole with a client of mine doing a ton of demand gen ads because we were told that is something that's going to help this account really grow. And it didn't. And I had to go to the client and say we spent a few thousand dollars here, and we really didn't have a lot to show for it. I'm turning these off and I'm putting this back into performance max, which is what I'd set up originally. And it has provided much better return on their investment. But I don't regret testing it because we need to test things to figure out what's going to work well from marketing perspective. So I don't have regret outside of it. But it's an example

of these platforms, big ones, meta, Google, a lot of these ones that you're going to run ads on don't necessarily have your best interests at art. And their numbers or data, their dashboards that they bring up are intentionally going to make it look very favorable to them. They're not lying. Back to the earlier thing, there's not malice and meta reporting of user conversion. There should give you that data, then making the default and then making you dig to get to the click-through rate attribution model is maybe a little bit intentional. But I think it's a good example of knowing what you're looking at and then having the nuance like to working with someone that knows what they're doing in-house agency, external

contractor, whatever the case may be, and say, ah, that's what this means. That's what this is measuring. And that's why these numbers don't match up because there's overlapping elements between these two out of platforms. So I'll just say that because I was going to get out at some point. I think it's so spot on. Everybody's trying to get the piece of the pie. That's the easiest way to say it. And because these systems don't talk to each other,

it's really difficult to make all the conversations or make the numbers seem like they fit there. But we've learned to grow as. Traffic is up here. We're ranking for X number of keywords. Now, here's the thing. Have I also looked to the contrary and say, oh, you're not ranking for these and used that in the same manner?

Yeah, yeah, I absolutely have. But I think it is. It's your traffic is up. In the last eight months, you and I have both seen direct traffic spikes from China, Vietnam, Singapore, across a variety of accounts. Now, if we're not pulling that information off, we're not taking that up and we're just saying that overall, I hope all of the agencies in the space are not doing things like this, but who's to say that you, here's the difficult part is how, yes, the international traffic that we know is not traffic needs to be filtered out somehow.

But then what about the rest of the direct traffic? Because it's not all from the mess. And some of it's still good. And some of it is. It's just such a very difficult thing to justify at that point. And it's this channel and this versus this. And just saying your traffic is up is not enough. Because I think that traffic being up is good.

Traffic being up to specific pages is good. Ranking for 300 keywords is great. Do you rank for the local Starbucks? Or do you rank for vacation rentals in your market? Because both of those could carry some weight. And in some cases, I've seen the Starbucks, bang, boom. Again, is that a value to your business? I think we can fluff a lot of this stuff up.

On the owner side of things, we generated X number of leads. How many of those leads closed? How many of those leads were qualified? How many of those leads matched the profile we were actually looking for? Oh, those were my least favorite conversations to have with property managers because we couldn't quite get them to the finish line or wasn't a fit for our portfolio. Those are, okay, I guess we're going to keep generating the volume and hope we can do what we can. there. It is. What are some of those other, the ones that still are nails on a chalkboard for you

when you hear them and just want to cringe up and curl into a little ball? Yeah. No, I think you nail them. I think traffic is the most common one. But I do believe, I will say this about each of the ones that you list it out there. There is elements, and I always feel this way about SEO, for example. Yeah. The impressions come before the clicks. So if you look at search console and you're starting to do SEO for a site, and I've a site that I'm working on a case study for a client that we had in Arizona, and they started working with this genuinely on page 10. I know sometimes people say that, but like genuinely they were on page 10 when we started working with us with their area plus vacation rentals.

It's a town in Arizona. Now they're ranking number one for that keyword. So that journey was almost two years, close to two years. It was closer to two years than one year. That's for sure. And yeah, the whole process along the way was like content links, fixing technical pieces, content links, fixing technical pieces, content links. Like there was a very clear playbook that we've talked about at.

I'm a nausea on this podcast for a long time that brought him there. But along the way, there was progress made. I truly believe that with SEO. Someone's selling you SEO services. And it's here's what we're doing from a tax perspective, from a content perspective, from an on-page perspective, from a link-building perspective. If they're telling you those things, then you should be able to see progress along the way. It's not a guarantee they're going to snap your fingers and rank number one overnight.

That's an unreasonable standard for an ASA agency to hold up. I don't care what you're paying them. But if they can't show you the progress, then either what they're doing is not working, number one, or they're not doing it, which is sometimes it's a bit of column A and a bit of column B. And either way, you should be comfortable firing them. What you shouldn't do is say, I'm seeing progress, but not fast enough. I'm impatient. I wanted to, I wanted to rank right away. What I always tell clients there is, of course you want to rank right away. That's a reasonable thing to look for. But if it's easy for you to just click a few buttons and me to click you

buttons and get you to rank in Google, then there's actually very little value in ranking in Google because then someone else can come behind you to do the same thing. So the fact that it's hard is what makes it valuable, right? The fact that this client is now getting several 100 clicks a month from Google search on this keyword or related keywords that they weren't getting before is leading to 1 to 2% of those people might convert or fill out an inquiry form or whatever. And this average booking value is a few thousand bucks. Like there's return on that investment and they're not adsman, I should say, through that time frame. So I do believe every single one of these metrics you talked about, traffic is up or ranking for 300 keywords.

We generated leads. Usually they are an indicator that you're at least headed down the right path. The one exception I would say with leads is certainly homeowner, right? If you're running ads and you're getting homeowner leads and they're not actually even homeowner leads by the way, which is a very common thing that you would have dealt with over the years talking about. Google wants you to flip on display out traffic and then you flip on display out traffic and you get leads that are just complete garbage. But we added a gate for a client home page recently or a client property management lead page recently. They're really big company and they're getting guests that keep filling out their homeowner form and it was frustrating everybody. Like it's frustrating me because

it's polluting my data, frustrating the client because they're getting guests filling out the homeowner form. But it was like in our retargeting outset. So that's why. So anyways, we add a little gate now where it's like you click a button that's, I'm looking to book a property or I'm a property owner. You like a little, and before we even see the form, you have to click that button. And our homeowner leads drop like 50% overnight, 60% overnight. So on paper, it's if someone were to go look at that data later without knowing the context of it, it'd be like, whatever he changed back on June 1st was dumb as hell.

Like, your leads went way down. And it's like, no, our leads are basically the same. There was no difference at all in the lead volume of actual qualified leads, right? Like the number of qualified leads is about the same. The number of unqualified leads went from half the freaking leads to none of the leads. So as a result, things went way down. So that's kind of that nuance of like understanding what these.

things are and building it. But yeah, things like impressions, things like reach like inputs, not really results or not really like your outcome. Like your goal isn't necessarily just have impression and reach. It's to actually get the right people in the funnel, which is interesting because people will love the idea of going viral on social media. And luckily, I've been able to work with a lot of clients. And this isn't our doing, but they've just been viral on social media. They get these huge spikes of traffic. And it's awesome. It really is for 36 to 54 hours. Like it's a few day and a half, two days of a lot of traffic, some messages, some bookings come out of it. Like, it's great. And then a few days later, it all dies off. And

we don't really know anything about it. And there's really no long-term upside unless you can just go viral all the time, which some brands do, but it's very rare in our space. So we had a client who did like a collaborator with an Instagram kind of content creator, whatever you want to call them, influencer, et cetera. And her whole angle was like deal seeking. So like looking for a good deal when you're traveling. And that's the type of real that she did with this particular person. And maybe they could have done a better job of vetting this person. That's up for debate. I don't know. But they ended up having this piece of content posted about them. And again, huge spike in traffic. We got two, three bookings out of it.

It was great, and then we moved on. But if someone looking at traffic later would be like, you got 100,000 sessions or something absurd from people going to your website. And I'm like, yeah, but it really, that traffic wasn't qualified. Like we got more bookings over that window from Google Ads, which was just chugging along at 100 clicks a day than this huge spike of organic reach from this viral post. But I'll say company owners love their stuff going viral. They love the idea that a million people saw their piece of content on Facebook and Instagram.

And it is cool. Like, I'm not disputing that. Yeah, if we could get a bunch of more downloads in the podcast, I'd be happy for it. but ultimately like if someone's downloading it, it's not going to hire us, it doesn't really actually help. So again, just one of those things that I think it's easy to fall in that trap and why you have to understand what someone's selling you. If someone's selling you like a viral strategy,

it's probably not a very good strategy, unless they're mapping it back into that intent of travel and bookings and homeowners and all that kind of fun stuff. I just don't think the traveler, the ultimate, maybe the touch points of the traveler journey or the traveler booking journey have changed that much. yeah, how we get there and the channels we use and do all that. But ultimately, we covered it.

It's kind of those seven touch points of inspiration, dreaming and inspiration, narrowing things down to a location, getting things down to then a property manager, then you get into pricing and dates, and maybe we get down to the booking side of things down the road. Like, there's kind of a structure there and how we market the people along the way and how we tap into them earlier in that process,

I think is what sets people, apart a little bit, but ultimately that's still how people are doing it. Now, AI may change that on its head in the next 18 to 24 months. I don't know. None of us knows right now, so all we can do is maybe not wash, rinse,

repeat, but make sure that we're focusing on the things that are going to be attributable back to what we're actually doing. Increasing the conversions on your website is great. Increasing the right

conversions is better. I think what's another thing that we've seen in the space is where we get, someone will say they G4 analytics to their conversions, where when Google went to G4 analytics, they went more event-based. It was great. But we went from having four events per session to 11 events per session because we have new sessions, start, scroll, this, that, the other, in between. Are any of those actually helping us to move the needle in our space?

probably not, or we start to create custom conversions that maybe are going to move the needle and that some people find very valuable. Some people may not find this valuable, and if you're actually tying some type of conversion value to it or you're trying to have people optimize for these events, conversions, that maybe are not conversions, then we can. We can paint a much different light. It is. I think that's something that, again, what's a vanity metric? What's a true opportunity to show a good experience on the website? And you do. You want to measure as much of what matters as possible, but at the same time, I have, I've been guilty of it where I started to put in, this is going to be this X amount of

time on this page, X amount of time on this site, this, making it to an ultimate destination page, but is that actually a conversion? Is that actually the event that we want to have happen in order for them to fill out a form, make a phone call, get the lead, whatever that ultimately is, get the booking. So from your perspective, when you have, like, because again, we've seen the funnels that look a little wonky based on what people are putting into them, how are you making the path, making the visibility of the path, making the visibility of the funnel as clear as possible so that there isn't this gray area.

You're not coming into these conversations and saying having to justify things that maybe feel like half-truths. It's a clean, it's clean data that is kind of bulletproof. Yeah, I believe going back to the event thing, these multi-step kind of funnel systems are the way to go. So it's view item for property pages. It's begin checkout. It's complete checkout, of course, purchase events. It's looking at that behavior because it cuts out we were talking about. I forget if we were recording or not when you were talking about blog traffic, I think we weren't recording yet.

but I was like that's getting 20,000 visits a month, but is mostly blog traffic is can be good in a way. You might be reaching some objective with that as far as like more reach. There are some positives to that. I've learned you can rank better when you have blog content on the site. That's what I've learned over the years. But yeah, if it's not moving the needle and you're just writing hundreds of blog posts and not really getting new traffic, new traffic to the site, and it's not really mattering. And then you'll see this when you go and look at your actual funnel of date search results,

property page you begin, check out, finish checkout, as you've talked about recently on the funnel episode, then you'll notice those numbers shrinking. even as your overall traffic is growing. So it's like someone listening may be like, okay, I've gone through the obvious things you guys said. It's not traffic coming from China. It's legit traffic. It's from the U.S.

They're researching. They're looking to come to Destin, Florida, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, whatever the case may be. But they're reading an article on best restaurants and they're not clicking through. And that content is not helping our core rankings. That's when you've got a problem in your hand.

So I think that's where you look at your booking flow data and your booking flow data tells the story, right? Even though the other stuff is not actually telling the story. So I think that's a good way to go about it. And I think we didn't quite say this yet, but maybe this is a good way to think about it. Look, you're just total marketing spent. Your total marketing spent, your total number of direct bookings and come up with a blended cost per booking or even better, probably a blended percentage of costs per booking.

So if your marketing team is saying you're paying them $3,000 a month to manage everything, and then they're spending $2,000 a month, you're spending $5,000 a month. Just make it nice and simple. And as a result, you drove, let's be honest, right? If you're spending $5 grand a month, your ROAS on Airbnb, you'd have to drive $34, $33,000, so more $1,000 in that range of direct booking or bookings in Airbnb to pay $5,000 for that same privilege. So if I were to say you spent $5,000 and you got $35,000 of bookings directly, you're probably in the green a little bit on that metrics just right there.

If you were to drive, if you were to drive closer to 40, 50, somewhere in that range, direct bookings on $5,000 of that spend, you're actually better than Airbnb. Again, I think we have to anchor it against, I do believe this in this business, and we've talked about this recently. What is your alternative? So if you stop doing direct marketing, you stop doing direct bookings, that's okay. But like, what is your alternative? Your alternative is Airbnb 15.5%. And there's a whole, by the way, host of numbers underneath that we didn't even dive into. And I think it would build everything we're talking about, build on everything we're talking about here with like the BS detector, which is that if I went Airbnb only, I would

simplify my company a lot. Actually, there are some upsides. I can acknowledge that. There are some upsides to being, quote unquote, Airbnb dependent and having a simpler tech stack on the backend, doing less marketing, not needing worry about those kind of things. But are you going to get a great rate when you only have that one marketing channel to lean onto. Let's just say you're reaching your occupancy levels. Let's say you're happy with that. Let's see you're happy with happy with the number of bookings you're getting? Are you actually reaching your occupancy goals? Or by only having one channel, are you having to do what so many of our clients have told me in the past, which is that I can get the bookings in Airbnb. I just have to cut my rate all the time.

Yeah, of course, I can get you 100% occupancy, right? I'm not a revenue manager. Here's what we'll do. Every listing is a dollar a night. Great. I've now reached 100% occupancy, right? Oh, great. Now, you make no money, but hey, it's a buck a night. I've reached out a person occupancy. And it's, of course, a dumb, facetious comment. Everyone knows them not really being serious with that. But at some level, there's a clearing point where you can book anything on any listing site, Airbnb, verbo, whatever the case. may be, right? I almost wonder, by the way, at some point, if you make it so cheap, make it so cheap, make it so wait a second, this doesn't look real. So I actually think

if you put it a dollar night, ironically, you actually wouldn't get very many bookings because people would think that it's like an error or not real or whatever the case may be, at least not as many as you as you, as that joke might entail or might make you think. But to bring it all back to like what you're, like, you're always measuring it against what the, what's the alternative? What is the best alternative to what I'm doing over here? I can try this over here. And so you need to be judging your metrics against that. So honestly, I've had clients, and I've talked about this before, that have let us go and stop poor doing and then come back later and said we were wrong we stopped it we saw this huge

reduction in dark bookings we had to come back and do it i had someone that i worked for a long time let me go earlier this summer and it stung badly because i thought we were doing pretty good work for them their company has shrunk a lot in terms of number of units they started with about 130 when i was worked with them in the past they're now under 80 units they've lost a lot of units so as a result the numbers do look bad every year because i'm like yeah like your company's way smaller than it is from last year we're spending less you have less units the numbers are going to look pretty darn bad to be honest with you right because like the number of bookings you're able to generate, even best case scenario was going to be down at least 30, 40%.

So when I show you your poor that's down 20%, it's almost like, dude, that's an adder boy. Like you did better than you could have if you lost so much revenue. And I kid you not, the guy who took over managing the PPC ads for me, I was getting like 9 to 1, 10 to 1 row ass somewhere in that zone. This guy's getting 1, 1.5 to 1, like 2 to 1, less than 2 to 1 row ass, but changing everything I was doing. And I'm just like, I'm going to reach out to him and I'm going on. Now everything's going, even though I still have access the account.

I know how it's going. And I'm just like, that is one that just stings in my heart. But I understand why he did it. He felt like things weren't improving. There was problems. He's having churn. You know, we're going to try something different. So I'm not going to sit here and cry over it.

That's the world that you and I live in. That's the space that we're in. And it's fine. But you also have to be you hopefully willing to look back at yourself and say, I messed up there. That was working well, whether it's working with an agency contractor, whether it's something that you were doing that you stopped doing. I think I've been in meetings like that before.

We were doing this and we stopped doing this. Why? Because like it seemed to be working, whether it be guest marketing, homeowner marketing, follow up, reviews, etc. I have a client that does the, if you get your name mentioned, in a review. He gives you like a $10 or $20 bonus. And then some reason that fell off and they weren't doing that. And he's, I'm like, what happened to your reviews? Paul, you were getting 100 reviews a month on Google. Now you're getting like 15 as it's been six months of just straight

decline. He's like, what happened? Diggs in, office manager killed that program. Oh, no, we don't need to do that anymore. We have Google reviews. And he's like, yeah, but that's, that was a ton of our inbound. So anyways, there's a lot of new ones there. But yeah, all good things to think of. I know we're coming up against the time wise, Paul. What else would you want us to slip in the end here before we put about in this one? I mean, I think because we're thinking about Yes, we want to, I think a lot of what we talk about on here is trust but verify. I think there's good ways to do that without being a jerk about it like it does. If you are constantly questioning, we need a trusting partnership.

Otherwise, if you're, if the agency is always trying to justify something, which I think there's maybe we have to be. I don't know. It's being on guard the whole time is a bad spot to be. it's just you're always going to be trying to push that needle. So I do, I think, a trusting partnership where you can look at the data, know the data is accurate, feeling like you're being pointed in the right direction strategically, I think that those are the keys, the numbers, being able to justify the numbers that are out there.

When we think about SEO, yeah, let's give people the credit that SEO is not an overnight game that can be gamed right away. and if someone is trying to game it, it's not going to work for you in the long term anyway. You may see this bike, but she's coming right back down in 30 days or something. So that's... Mount a limit. It is.

I think there's... I think you can be a great client, a great partner, a great customer by coming into a conversation, like not being ready to be read something. It's not a review or anything like that. It's a conversation. Think about these review calls as conversations. not being spit at for 30 minutes because I think that's what they turn into often.

And the numbers are not the main part of the call. I never think they're good to know. But sometimes I've gotten to the point where I push them to the end of the call. Like that's the last thing we talk about. We got sucked into it and, you know, me, I'm a long way. So I'm going to get sucked in and talk to and talk for too long about the numbers anyway. But it is. We have better conversations when we're,

we're getting the strategy out of the way up front and then touching on what we know to be accurate. What we know is the numbers. We know that numbers are good. We know that is exactly where we needed to be trending up, down, wherever it is. We're confident that is an accurate reflection of the business and that we're going to do everything we can on the front end of that call strategically to make sure those numbers are still going the way we want them to. Could not agree more, Paul. One number they need. to do before they depart. It's a number. It's a number between one through five. And if we had to pick, I know what it's going to be five. They need to go to their podcast app and leave us five stars

for the awesome listening experience we just gave them. iTunes, Spotify listeners, we get the most downloads there. Click five stars. We appreciate it. And we'll catch you in the next episode. Happy you have an awesome rest of day. Thanks everybody for listening.