Heads In Beds Show - The Most Effective Vacation Rental Advertising Channel: Google Ads!

Episode Date: November 23, 2022

⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellBuildUp Bookings PPC Guide🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Bets show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. Hey there Paul. Hey. Good. How are you Conrad?

Pretty good. Can't complain. We're into the fall weather here in the Carolinas because I had to put a jacket on this morning. I'm recording with a jacket on right now. It's 40 degrees. So for us, like, I put two jackets on my son this morning when I dropped him off for school. So is it the same up there or is it just a nice 65? We're supposed to be getting two inches of snow.

So I have my sweater. It's sweater weather for me. I've got the sweater on right now as we record. Maybe you've already referenced it, but I'm in the dungeon already, so it's cold. Now we have to actually layer up to be inside. It's a fantastic time of year to be in Minnesota. That's all there is to it. Do you have a fireplace?

We do. Yes, we do. We have an electric fireplace, and that is a game changer. Last house, we didn't, and it is. You just don't realize how much radiant heat you get from that and oh it is delightful when it on these snowy days like this it's i'm gonna say for the first month or so great fantastic february march that's when we start to have some issues with the snow still sticking around there but yeah you can speak to that from your you growing up and in the

northeast as well there so yeah oh man the fireplace was always clutch we had a wood burning fireplace and i do remember certainly many snow days as a kid i actually learned those kids don't get snow days anymore do they it's just oh we're gonna do virtual no they did that with a hurricane here recently yeah what a thing that i experienced that i guess other kids don't get to experience nowadays but yeah certainly though like real wood fireplace has a certain allure to it you throw throw the actual core wood in there, light it up, get it going. My dad would, of course, would always do this. Don't touch it. Like what I was told.

But yeah, good memories overall, which it's interesting, right? We're heading into this time of the year. We're heading into this. The holidays are coming soon. Next time when this releases, Thanksgiving is just a few weeks out for most people. And this can be a little bit of a slow time. I think sometimes in terms of like demand, like this is when you see bookings fall off in most markets. It's usually not snowing in the snow markets. It's usually not that appealing to be in a beach market. But we had some things that

we want to touch on. So let's do a quick marketing minute. And then let's do maybe a PSA that we discussed. Do you want to do the PSA on overall ad costs for new people who haven't been aware of it? Go for it. Are ads going to cost more the next few months? If so, why? Tell us what's going on, Paul. This is I think Google is the best price gouger out there. Whether you want to call it that or not, that's what it is. So every year, we documented this historically, looking at the traveler side, and I'm sure you've done the same. Every year, it's not just by happenstance that the day after Thanksgiving, when Black Friday rolls around, those Google ads prices go up in a hurry. And it's not, if it is, if we're a couple of cents or something like that, it's like 25 to 30% increases in costs.

Just get that. This is the time of year where I typically tell people, just ramp it down. Unless you have a lot of demand this time of year, typically, you're going to be paying enough over on the cost. typically, you're going to be paying enough over on the cost. You're going to inflate that cost enough that it's just not worth it to be overspending for the limited amount of clicks you're going to be getting there. So certainly you can chirp and chime in there on that and the feeling of being ripped off by Google for the next month and a half. But you can also hop into the news minutes there too as well. So real quick, I agree. Last episode was on Facebook ads. And I think that's actually where it can be pretty extreme as well.

Because on Facebook, you're actually bidding against other marketers that specifically and only and solely focus on these Black Friday holiday season type advertising. Obviously, in the vacation world, there is an element of it. We have clients that are going to run Black Friday stuff. We're going to have to run their marketing and advertising to the best of our ability. But we all know it's going to cost more. The people are in a buying mood. So that's kind of the logic is that people are in a buying mood.

So if we can stimulate them to book a vacation instead of going and buying a TV, I would argue that's a better overall experience for most people. So there's something to be said there. Yeah, the marketing news that I saw that kind of caught my eye this week, Twitter Blue. That's been such an interesting saga to follow, right? Elon Musk buys Twitter. We talked about it one or two times. And this is not a channel that necessarily is critically important for our overall marketing

efforts, but I feel like it's a car crash and I'm like glued to the screen. I'm just like, what is going on? So now there was a temporary pause, at least at the time of this recording, of people not being able to subscribe now. Because of course, there was impersonation going on. There's people purchasing these check marks for $8 and then claiming to be a pharmaceutical company

or claiming to be Joe Biden or something like that. So it seems like he doesn't really have it figured out. I know Elon is supposed to be this genius, but we all can get outside of our depth, right?

It doesn't really matter how smart you are. Like, I'm sure Bill Gates doesn't know how to build a car. That doesn't mean that he's the wrong person. So I'm not really optimistic about the future,

but I did buy my check mark. So I guess take it for what it's worth. And that's, there are advertisers who realize, or just people who are running businesses on Twitter that realize that's the cost of doing business now. However, is it going to be worth it in the longterm? I don't know. When you see, I think the other news article I saw was that 5,000, one of the large advertisers recommended, Hey, let's turn off Twitter ads for 5,000 advertisers. That's going to start to make a dent in a hurry there. Certainly that's something I don't know. I wouldn't have guessed the ship was going to fall apart this quickly. I maybe had some thoughts that it wasn't going to last so long, but the Elon Musk Twitter experiment has been

interesting, eye-opening, and certainly headline-bearing. So I guess we'll take that for what it is. Yeah, we'll take that for what it is. Yeah, we'll take that for what it is. But I think we're here to talk today about perhaps the old standard of the old reliable. Yeah, I think that's fair. Yeah, I think that's fair to call it old reliable. And that is the lovely, the high-performance, and the millions of dollars spent, at least in our MCC every year, good old Google search ads. So last episode, we talked about Facebook ads. Today, let's dive into more on the Google search side of things. And the reason I say old reliable, at least I feel that way, is that we've talked about this maybe at a high level before. But the reason that I guess I was so generally optimistic or interested in pursuing

search ads is that they tend to perform the best like a small brand can take a budget and perform well on search ads, even if you don't necessarily have more money. So let me do a quick rant real quick. People say this to me all the time. And it never really made a lot of sense to me. But I didn't have a good quick way to explain it back until recently. So a lot of people say, Oh, I can't do Google search ads, because surely Airbnb and booking.com and these companies must spend millions of dollars. And the truth is, they spend billions of dollars booking.com does every year on search ads. Yeah.

But let me be, your goal is not to outspend Airbnb or Vrbo or Booking.com or any large, any, even a large property manager in your market. They might have $100,000 a month budget. I've seen large property managers in single markets with 500 plus units that can spend $100,000 a month on payouts. That is not your goal.

Your goal is not to outspend them. That's a silly metric or way of evaluating it anyways. Your goal is to be profitable. So if you can run Google paid search ads, whether you have a budget of $100, 500, 5,000, 50,000, whatever the case may be, the goal is to make the ads perform and drive a result and drive a profit for your business, for your vacational business. So that's like where I wanted to jump off from, which is that don't feel like you can't listen or learn from this just if you don't have a huge budget. There's keywords and search concepts that we're going to talk about here in the next few minutes that I think anyone can apply. You can have one property, you can have one property in a single market, and you can use some of the branded stuff we're going to talk about on today's

episode to really drive results and get outcomes. So that's my first little thing that I wanted to say, which is that, yes, you can spend a lot of money on Google search ads if you want to. And the reason that you could do that is that a lot of people search on Google search and it's click can certainly slide up and be high. We just talked about it a minute ago, keep an eye out post Black Friday for that. Even your normal demand periods of the year, Google search ads can be a high, high performing channel for you, because it's often some of the best quality traffic. And you can get there. That's just my little bit. But let's talk more about you have experience both on the owner and guest side. But today, you're typically focused a little bit more on the owner side. What's kind of your assessment

of how Google search performs for homeowner marketing to get more owners into your program? And what's your evaluation of it as a marketing channel on the homeowner acquisition side of things? Yeah, I mean, on the owner acquisition side, that is, I always think that's the gold standard. If we can have clicks that are coming through Google, those are obviously going to be the highest performing clicks that we have for the most part. Generally, we're going to get quite a few owner management or vacation rental management, property management, Airbnb. Grow through the list. If we all use the same terminology, make my job a lot easier, but that's not how it works.

So I think it is, it's effective when you're managing those campaigns properly. And for our case, for our sake, because of the limited number of searches that are available, certainly we have to be a little more active in that management and making sure that we do, we have to turn on some more automated bidding strategies, as opposed to just being able to go manual and hopefully can ratchet up that cost per click enough on the manual bid side of things to be able to get some clicks through. Now, it is. Every account, every campaign, every strategy is a little different. So we certainly try to make sure that certain areas and in certain markets with certain business types, I guess, more rental types, you have to be more specific and really gear in towards really specific. The specificity is always going to be beneficial in Google,

I think. The more specific you can get, the more long tail you can get, whether that's on the owner's side or the traveler's side. You can teach the algorithm, you can teach Google how to get the right results for you. But to really get the best performance out of Google, it is it's cannot be said and forget it. And that's something you and I have talked about many times over the last couple of years is that that is that's that's typically when you start when Google starts to take advantage of you, because it is there are so many ways to automate and there are so many ways to give Google a little more power to expand your offering to optimize when Google starts to try to optimize things for you. Yeah, air quotes,

big, heavy air quotes there, you need to be careful at the very least, because you're letting the advertising platform that's trying to take more money from you, optimize your performance for you. It is. It's just something that I struggle with a lot there. But in general, I've made up a little bit there. It is. It's where I want the most traffic to be coming from. But in order to get really good traffic from Google,

you do have to actively manage it. Yeah, this was the first channel that I really learned or tried to learn at a high level. So I think I still have the story on my About Us page. But the first Google Ads campaign I ever ran was for my father in law's business, fishing charger business. And it was so interesting. I think like, when I go back, and this was 20, this would have been like 2012, 2011, somewhere in that range, when I first started figuring that stuff out. And everything was so manual, everything was manual, you had to set your bids manually, you had to set up your campaigns very manually, there was certainly no like keyword selection, right? You had to define exactly what keyword you

wanted to bid on. And broad match actually wasn't terrible. It was actually generally, it could be good and you had to keep a leash on it to some degree. But now we're in a very different world. 10 years later, Google ads is basically trying to automate as much as they can. And sometimes they get it right. I don't want to just bash Google endlessly. When you're doing a dynamic search campaign and Google can match the keyword search for the name of a specific property to a landing page with like 90 plus percent accuracy. And you can do that. You can set up that campaign in 25 minutes and it's going to deliver 12 to 15 to one return on ad spend. That's fantastic. To your point though, you still have to go in there every single week, if not twice a week on a bigger spend account and come through the search terms and be like, basically, it's kind of like a isn't that a

Reagan thing trust by verify? It's okay to trust Google. It's okay to trust Google a little bit, I think with some of these automated stuff, we have to go in and verify that it's working how it should, you have to verify that your cost per lead is still where you want it to be, whether it's a homeowner thing, or the traveler side of things. And you can't just trust Google blindly. I think that's like my if I could give one overarching lesson, it wouldn't just be trust Google blindly. And unfortunately they now employ, or they have employed for many folks who will call you and they're from Google. And to be clear, most of them are, many of them are contractors, third parties. They don't actually work directly for Google, but Google has hired them.

And they're essentially for the most part, encouraging you to opt into as much automation as possible and don't control anything within your account. That's their general MO when they call you on the phone, these Google contractor types, or even actual Google employees, which we do have some accounts spending enough where we get actual Google employees for the most part. My general estimation there is that 95% of the time, it's a waste of your effort and energy, but it does feel, I would say from the client side of things, speaking personally, it does feel counterintuitive to ignore a client side of things, speaking personally, it does feel counterintuitive to ignore a call or not respond to a call from Google because

they think, what is wrong with you guys? This is Google trying to call and help us. Why are you not willing to take the time to go through it? And the truth of the matter is that it's just awkward to have the conversation like, no, I'm not going to opt into these recommendations because they're bad recommendations. And it's not really a fruitful conversation. To your point on automation, it's here. Is it worth it? Really worth it? Sometimes. But like you have to ultimately have to trust the person running the can make that judgment call for you. If you just trust Google,

I guarantee you if we launched two accounts simultaneously in the same market, and we one of them listen to everything that Google reps said, listen to all the recommendations and automations, and we had the same budget on both and I managed the other, I would put my bank account on the fact that you are I managing the account would be able to provide a better outcome. And it's not that Google is stupid. It's just that the automation is going to go off the rails, and you have to be able to bring it back into where it needs to go. So for all the benefits of Google Ads, you nailed it a second ago, which is that it does not set it and forget it. But that's our assessment of that. I don't think we need to keep beating that dead horse.

What are the campaign types that work well for you? So when you're actually, let's say we're to set one up last time, last episode on Facebook ads, we talked about the structure, right? What are you trying to achieve? Who are you showing the ad to? What does the ad look like? Google's structure is not completely dissimilar. You have the campaign, which is what you're actually trying to achieve. We're talking mostly today about search ads, the ad group, which is like, how do you want to organize the keywords that you're going after? And then the ad is what they see in a way, but it's more copy driven for the most part, as opposed to design driven with images and videos for them. There was an image extension. We can talk about that in a

second, but what's your assessment of that when you're building a brand new campaign, you're trying to get, again, whether it be the homeowner side, you're trying to get better results. How do you set up that like account, that campaign structure, I should say for the best results in your view? Yeah. I think a lot of it depends on budget, what you're willing to spend, what you're able to spend and how you're going to break that down. Typically, with the campaigns, that is, it's very similar to what you're trying to drive, how you're trying to drive some of the traffic. On the traveler side, I'm going to step on your toes here a little bit. That was always where we did different types of lodging or different activities, maybe branded account,

branded campaigns, stuff like that. On the management side of things, it is, it's more management. Sometimes we'll try to break down more by those short-term rental management, vacation rental management type of campaigns versus a property management campaign. Just knowing that property management can skew a little more long-term in general, but it is still primarily, it's just that's where we're breaking it down at the management side of things. At the ad group level, I like to take it down into kind of the location level, really breaking it down where we're really trying to target, especially in the vacation rental and the hospitality side of things. That's always felt

like the right place to start breaking down those individual locations. And then obviously the ads, we're trying to match up as closely as we can to the specific keywords. I think one of the underutilized metrics within Google ads is the quality score. And it really does contribute heavily to how much you're paying, how frequently your ads are shown. And it is, and a lot of that has to do with how you're building those ads out, what keywords you're using, what calls to action you're using. And then on the keyword level, I think at that keyword and ad level, I think really one of the most important metrics to consider when you're building out those ads is the quality score. And really that's helping you to make sure that you're really getting the

most engagement, that Google is serving those ads up more frequently. And your cost per click will go down when you have a higher quality score. So making sure you have those relevant keywords in the headlines, in the descriptions, it really does help to ensure that, again, Google wants to serve up your ads more frequently and people are going to click on your ads more frequently because they're giving the right calls to action to drive people to your website. And then it's what we've talked about in some other episodes at that point. Yeah, and I think big chunks of what you said, I think apply to the guest and traveler side as well.

But just to hit on a few points, you touched on them, but I think it's worth driving home. If you improve your quality score and your ads are the most relevant that they could possibly be, and your landing page is a great experience and the keywords you're bidding on

are tightly grouped and very relevant, you can actually beat the big guys. Like Google will actually show your ad ahead of the biggest companies in the world in our space, right? They will show your ad ahead of the Airbnb ad. Because guess what? Airbnb probably doesn't have a landing page for that one specific condo building that you're inside of. We see this all the time with our condo resort clients, which is that our landing page is a better experience than Airbnb, flat out, like better than Vrbo. It's that we have content, we have information, we have things to do, we have restaurant recommendations, we have the actual 15 units that my client might manage in that particular building.

So our page can get a 10 out of 10 quality score. Now, I've never been inside of the Vrbo ad account, I don't know what their quality score is, but they're probably bidding on some of that stuff. And they're sending it to the search results page that doesn't have any content, doesn't have a heading about that specific building and things like that. To be clear, we were talking earlier about focus on profitability, not more ad spend as like your metric of the thing, you can actually make a better page than Airbnb, like Airbnb, the problem with their account. And if I were to manage the Airbnb account or Vrbo ad account, we would both have the same problem, which is that how in the heck do we profitably spend $6 million a day?

It's very hard, actually, you can't, I don't care how big your budget is, you can't go and make individual condo building pages or something like that, or a pet-friendly search page. You can automate it, but you can't go and do restaurant recommendations that are pet-friendly. You can't go in and do all this stuff that the actual, that an actual small property manager can do. So again, don't look at your smaller budget and think,

oh, there's no way I can compete. You can compete on quality. And that ultimately Google is going to reward you for that. Google wants relevant advertisements to show up. That's what's going to keep the Google machine running right from an ad click perspective. And we have a non branded campaigns that we run to get 35% click through rates on search concepts that on condo building search concepts, because we're showing up at the very top, we have our ad is dominant has like the biggest headline has expanded site links, it has location extension has a phone number, it has a photo. We deck that ad out with all the trimmings, if you will.

And Google loves us for it. They reward us for it. And our client is paying $1 per click. I bet someone right under them is paying $1.50. So you don't have to bid more necessarily to show up at the top. You touched on quality score, but I think some people don't understand the impact that can have when you create that ideal ad click experience for the actual user on the other side of it i really do believe the google is always trying to this and this is i this is how i've always looked at it google's always trying to serve up the best result doesn't it is it might not makes if you build a better ad than someone else they're going to in a better experience once they get there i think that's the important part too we can build the best ads in

the world if we're sending them to a bad landing page or bad landing spot. Ultimately, Google is going to recognize that they're going to weigh that portion of the landing page experience quality score down. And it is it's going to hurt you there. So it is if I think that's where there is some benefit to having kind of that all in one agency where you've got the Web services side of things and you've got the digital advertising side, where you've got the web services side of things and you've got the digital advertising side because then there is control over that landing page or that website where you're sending the traffic to as well as when you're building out those ads.

And I think in general, it doesn't have to be exclusive where you're doing only working with someone who's working together. But I do think that helps really the ultimate performance of all advertising, but specifically with paid all advertising, but specifically with paid digital advertising, especially through Facebook and Google there. Yeah.

And you can be nimble in that scenario. Like some of the CMS platforms that we work with, we didn't build the site, but they allow us to make new custom landing pages easily so we can make a brand new. We made a seven plus bedroom page for a client recently who just picked up some new properties that were these very large cabin type properties. So now we're anyone searching seven, eight, nine, 10, 12 bedroom cabins in this market, we're sending them to that landing page.

And we've seen a few conversions come through for 25, $30,000, because it's a very high end search. So yeah, you can really dig into the long tail, whether it is on the owner side or guest side, there typically is much more search intent, obviously on the guest side, but you can dig into the long tail

and some of the stuff and really pull out some gems. Again, the big advertisers are just going to miss. They're not going to have that sort of nimble, flexible approach to actually targeting very specific search keywords. And that I think is a key part of it to your point from a second ago, which is that you have to bet on the right stuff that you have, that it matches your inventory, what you actually offer to the marketplace or the services you offer in the case of the homeowner side of things. You have to have the right landing page experience and you do have have to write written attractive copy on the ads and things like that.

I would argue if you're relevant, that's not like the most important thing, believe it or not, you can have like pretty standard copy. But if people see your ad, and it has what they want in it, they're probably going to click on it at a reasonably enough clip. With Google nowadays, you can do lots of testing, you can add a new headlines and new descriptions and like Google figured out to some degree, that I think is a benefit of some of their automation is that they're kind of doing some testing for you that you would not necessarily have the capability or bandwidth to do. Even on a relatively high spend account, you can't necessarily upload 85 combinations of an ad, but with their automation, they can.

Some of you think about when you're actually setting up the actual campaign, and I think your structure you went through a few minutes ago was completely fine. So the campaign is where you control budget. My only slight disagreement I have with, and we rarely disagree, but we might disagree on this a little bit, which is that the problem I have with shoving a lot of locations or different areas or different search concepts into ad groups is that I can't control budget. So let's go through that scenario. You have campaign one campaign one has a $50 per day budget. And then within that you have five ad groups, one of those ad groups might be crushing it and delivering a really solid, even low and

relevant cost per lead on homeowner leads, or it could be delivering you very inexpensive and high quality bookings at a low cost per lead on the traveler side. The struggle I would have there is let's say it's a pet friendly search concept that's crushing it. One of those ad groups, how do I give more juice, more budget to that one and maybe trim my oceanfront one that's not performing? That's my one kind of logic that I would consider there. And we've had accounts in the past that we've worked on. We worked with a luxury real estate company in Hawaii for many years, and they had

215, 220 campaigns at their peak because we were literally making a separate campaign for every single community, every single area, every single search concept that we could go after. So it made managing the budget significantly more complex, but it made controlling the performance a lot more straightforward for us. And I think we delivered good results for them. So just things to think about. There's different philosophies. And I've taken over, I took over an account recently that another agency managed, and I ended up pausing chunks of what they did. I didn't think it was bad. It was just like, they were seeing it this way, I was seeing it that way. And we're going to try my structure and see how it does. There's more than one way to skin the cat. But that's my one thing I might caution

folks against. And to your strategy, I might disagree with slightly, which is that if you put too much stuff into different ad groups, you can't control where the budget goes as effectively as you'd like. Correct. And that's and I think that's where on the management side, it's easier, it's easier to do it, because we're not focusing on as many things. And certainly I, on the traveler side, using your strategy was definitely the way I like to go more where you can break down more by property types, more by accommodation types, more really being able to break down there. And I think that's something where I think even when you take it over to the hotel side of things, it's even a

different conversation that hotel resort in B&B, that was one of the unique parts that I got to take a little more of a, we'll say a wide ranging look at things because we did, we had a lot of those smaller, unique niche businesses at the travel net side of things. So that's certainly something where it's fun to be able to just compare and contrast because there's a lot of people who are just running and they're running hotel keywords in vacation rental groups and vice versa. So just again, depending on that market, what are people searching for

and what's going to hit home? In some areas, you're going to be able to steal some clicks. And I guess that's the question. Have you tried that approach where looking at different lodging types, hotels and resorts in an area as opposed to vacation rentals

where most of you, I think most of your business is right now? Yeah, it's a good question. And this actually dovetails nicely into some other search concepts that I would say anyone can run. So I'll go through both threads there, which is that yes, we have tested it. And usually my logic is on my general approach on this is often the same, which is that max out what's working. So if your vacation rental search concepts are working, spend as much as you possibly can there until your impression shares are in the high 90s, you're basically squeezing as much search volume as you can out of it to drive into your

business. But I do think that it's worth considering, especially in a market that's very like lodging and accommodations starved. So we have a client that we work with luxury provider of two really high end vacation homes in the Bahamas, Daniel K. And we've worked with this client for some time now. And we've actually started to bid on the hotel resort keywords. Now I wouldn't typically do that. But we've maxed out our vacation rental search volume. If you search vacation rentals, we're coming up basically almost every time with very few exceptions of our target market that we're going after. So going after hotel keywords isn't I don't isn't I believe a bad strategy. And we've got some conversions off of it. Because we're looking for people who are looking for a place to stay. So even if they search for hotels and they find what we have to offer,

they may still consider it. Now, to be clear, the conversion rate on this stuff is probably five times less than the conversion rate on vacation rental. So let me hammer home my last point, right? Max out your budget on the stuff that obviously provides you the best ROAS, the best return on your ad spend first. But I think that you have to have in a scenario like that, if you take in one bridge as far as you can, you have to have the open mindedness to experiment with other search concepts, whether it's hotels, resorts, we've done places to stay as like places to stay in area. And that's not necessarily looking for a specific type of lodging or accommodation. But it's the same thing, right? They don't know exactly where they want to stay. So you're offering them, hey, come check out what we have to offer, which may apply to both the rental side or lodging or hotel side. But one thing that I wanted to touch on too is the idea of branded search. We've talked about this a little bit, maybe in the past, but just go down this thread a little bit more on the paid search side of things. Branded search, most people think the name of the company. And that's true. We often set up those campaigns. Actually, a small diversion

from this story. The number one question I get when I say that to people is why would I bother to put it on brand name? And this is the exercise I would recommend that you take if you thought about this, which is to go into search console, look at your branded search terms and search console and see what your click-through rate is. So I did this with someone the other day who was trying to tell me he didn't want to bid on brand because some guru expert told him not to do it. And I said, okay, cool. Let's go and search console. Let's look at the click-through rate. And if it's in the nineties, then I will agree with you. Let's not bother to run branded search. You're getting almost all the traffic of people searching for the name of your company to come in and click on your website.

So we look at the number was 64%. So I said, you know, look, only 64% of the people who search for your brand name actually make it to your website today from Google search, at least organically. So let's run paid search, look at them together and see what happens. Now that can occur to be clear. You will end up with branded clicks on your branded company name, PPC ads that would have gone to organic. That's a completely fair. And you might be shifting a little bit of revenue attribution from one to the other. That's fair. But the overall pie is bigger. So for the small price that you pay to bid on branded search, you might pay 20 cents, 30 cents, 50 cents, maybe a dollar per click if things are depending on your name and how unique it is. We talked about that a few episodes

ago, but if you have a unique name that people are not confusing with other brand names or other areas or something like that, you might be paying a 20, 50 cents a click and you're driving in a few hundred a month. Like it's, this is a pretty modest ad spend level and the overall pie that you're going to get from that search traffic is going to grow. And I've seen it over and over again. So definitely bid oned. That's the first thing, name your company. However, there are multiple brands within the context of your company. So most of the clients that we work with, they have a specific vacation rental naming structure set up for the name of most of their properties or many of their properties.

But it could be something boring and simple. It could be like Ocean Breeze Condo 123. That's a brand name in a sense, right? People are looking for that specific condo unit within the framework of a condo building. Or it could be the name of a property, right? Conrad's Cool Cabin could be the name of a property that's listed with a property manager. And that can also drive results too. We typically do this through dynamic nowadays, but you could certainly set up manually, like when people search for the name of this property, make sure they come to my landing page, don't send them to the Airbnb property detail page, don't send them to the Verbo landing page. These are campaigns that take very little skill to set up. Anyone could really set them up. If you're doing it manually, it just may take some

time depending on how detailed you want to get and how many units you have or properties you have. But these are very high leverage keywords that you're focused on. And all the keyword tools will tell you, by the way, that some of these searches get no volume, but when you go and run them, you'll find that they get a decent amount of volume. It's just not enough to be, you know, firing off and getting a significant amount of search volume in some of the keyword research tools. But I love this strategy. We've been doing this pretty much for everybody nowadays.

And you'd be shocked how much long tail demand there is for name of condo, name of building, name of something like that, plus a unit number, plus the name of a property that is going to convert really well. If you can make sure they click on your website and they're not clicking on the, you know, the big OTA channels that are going to just take that booking away from you that you would have been able to get otherwise. So if there's a low hanging fruit on

direct booking strategy when it comes to PPC, I would say it's brand and then brand is presented in different ways. Brand is at the property level, brand can be at the unit level, resort level, and of course it can be the name of your company. So I just wanted to dig into that as well. Yeah. And I think on the branded side of things, there, there are certainly other businesses out there that are bidding on your brand. Now, that's might not be there are some people who might be doing competitor campaigns and literally bidding on your brand. But here's the other thing is that Google kind of creates a little bit of brand, I'm not gonna say a little bit of brand competition for you,

just by really how they're taking in your business information on the Google My Business side of things. And we talked about this offline just before the episode here, but it's something that I've really been thinking quite a bit about because on the property management side, on the owner management side specifically, where we have such a limited number of searches available, and predominantly I do a lot of phrase match and exact match because I'm really trying to refine specifically, where we have such a limited number of searches available. And predominantly, I do a lot of phrase match and exact match because I'm really trying to refine the actual clicks that are coming through. But on the phrase match side of things, we still get a lot of branded searches for competitors in the area. And my first thought always goes to there's no,

none of this phrase in here. And even with broad match modifier, there's usually some type of relativity to the keyword we're actually going back to. But in thinking about that, we've already given them all these businesses that are online that have Google MyBud business profiles have given Google the insights that yes, I'm a vacation rental management company, or I'm a property management company. And that's how they're able to say if whether locationally, they're in a specific area, and they're searching for that term. This is the property management company in your area. This is what Google, my business, this is what the algorithm, this is what the AI is telling us behind the scenes. more competitor searches come through, but they're branded searches. And it is, I've had to unpack that quite a bit now, but that's how Google is creating that branded search competition. It's that no, Evolve isn't necessarily, Vakas isn't necessarily bidding in your area or on your brand,

but because they've considered themselves a vacation rental management company or a property management company, they're showing up in searches when we're looking for property management companies in X area or something like that. So I think it is. Branded search is one of those things that it's important to having all the real estate possible. That's what a search page is. It's real estate. And you want to have as much real estate as possible, whether that's your Google My Business listing, whether that's your organic placement, hopefully on the first page, whether that's an ad placement above the fold

or in the local pack, you just want to have that exposure. And the more exposure you can get there, if you can do it with a branded search, it's a good way to do it. Yeah, I like that. Real estate is a perfect analogy for ultimately what we're talking about here,

which is that those clicks are super valuable. To be waffly about spending $200 branded to play. I call it sometimes I call it playing defense. Yeah, that's exactly. Let's not leave the goal. Let's not leave the goal unattended. Let's not leave the wide receiver running down the field, right? Let's play defense so that other people don't come in and snipe our branded like it's so valuable.

So yeah, brand protection is just the lowest thing. And another search concept that we've talked about in the past is this idea of mini sites, or I posted about this on LinkedIn a little while ago. And many sites could actually be a way where you can play double the defense. So if you're trying to go after a certain concept, I've we talked about condo resort building search phrases a second ago, I have clients are going after those search concepts. If you're bidding on the name of a condo building, plus rentals or plus vacation rentals or something like that. And then you not only have your landing page set up there, and it it's well optimized and it has all the content and all the stuff we talked about a few minutes ago. And you have a mini site with its own unique content and you have

that in a separate Google ads account. You can run the serve by the client who's, who has the Google My Business listing. They have a landing page, a regular organic landing page. They have a mini site, and then we're running paid ads on both of those. So we take up five of the first, like seven or eight links on the top of the page. And this client absolutely dominates this building, dominates it. And these are really high end five to $7,000 per week condo rentals in this market. And this is something that doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to do it. I saw many sites first when I got started in 2013, people doing many sites stuff. And it used to work, to be fair, it used to be easier from the SEO end of things.

There just didn't used to be as much competition. And depending on the building, you may find it hard. If the building has their own website, that's going to be one slot that you might not be able to take over, but you never know. If you do SEO the right way, you build that relevant content on the website, you do a good job. Again, I would stick to my earlier phrasing of work on your site first. But if you're in the top one, top two, top three, pretty consistently, consider the mini site. It can be both in a PPC play and a bit of an SEO play as well. And if you can run branded search and take two of the top four ad slots on a specific search concept, and you could dominate, we have a client, we've done that for snowbird searches. So you search the area plus

snowbird rentals absolutely dominates. He gets tons of snowbird leads to the sense where he charges five, six, $7,000 per month for the snowbird rentals. Now, a few years ago, COVID, he wasn't able to get more than $2,000 a month from it. Part of it's market trends, but part of it is we're capturing the traffic that's coming in. We're driving into a specific landing page with paid search. We have two, we're stacking the SERP to the best of our ability. Like you said, it's that valuable real estate. If you could go pick up your best performing property in your rental program and pay a nominal fee to buy that property, wouldn't you? Of course you would, if you could afford it, right? So same logic here. If you can figure out a way to make it profitable, then there's so much money to be had with improving your overall paid search results,

just by tracking things better by setting up the campaigns a little bit using best practices that actually deliver results. And this can be a really high performing channel for you. And then we'll touch on just the very end, you think of those four or five slots that you're taking up for that partner. Think about that we We live primarily on desktop, but so I do, I get blind to the fact of on a mobile device of any kind, four or five slots, that's as far as anybody's going. So I think it is, it's, I always get sucked into the being mobile blind, but yeah, sure. You take up the first four slots in a desktop. People are going to still scroll down maybe that first page, maybe page two. You you get four or five placements, organic or paid placements in a mobile device, that's 50% of the scroll depth that people are making, maybe 60% total. So I wish, that is one thing I do wish

behind the scenes, we could see a hot jar or a Microsoft, I'm not thinking Google's got Microsoft Clarity installed, but some type of, on a SERP page to see just how frequently to get some of those insights of, we've seen the math of X click through equals position one equals this one to click through position two, position three, but to actually see how people are engaging with Google SERP pages, I think would be really a fun exposure to be able to understand and get a feel for what happens behind the scenes there. No, this will have to be a future topic of an episode, which will be maybe if we get some extra subscribers coming in, we'll do a user testing study. So we can't obviously we can't like record everything.

But if we could record like 10 or 20 or 30 people using Google search on their phone and we make them search for a vacation rental and tell them, hey, find a vacation rental for your family in Destin or in Myrtle Beach. And we make them go on the SERP and actually find it. That would actually be a fascinating thing for us to break down, I think, in the future. But yeah, to your point, I think this would be the piece that I would end on too. Yeah, 30% of the traffic is probably going to paid ads. If you've got this far, and you're like still ad curious, but you haven't got that next step of, okay, I'm ready to run Google search ads. Even if you rank number one, I've had clients who have actually, I've had this conversation. It's been a little while since I had this conversation, but it's happened to me in the past, which is that, oh,

we rank number one for that keyword. Why would I run paid ads on it? And like, you're missing a third of the traffic. Like even if you do rank number one organically in Google, a good huge chunks of the traffic are not going to click on that. They're going to, to your point on mobile, they don't even see the organic results when they have a mobile serve. They see only ads in many cases, if there's enough advertisers targeting a certain keyword concept, search concept. So this is the call what you want, right? Call it the Google tax, call it an investment, call it paid media. It doesn't really matter what you call it, but ultimately Google search ads, the reason that we have clients spending multiple five figures a month on these ads is that they do

work, they perform and they deliver a great return on your investment when you set them up. And when you optimize them properly, we've shared some tips today, hopefully that are helpful for folks, as far as how to set up the campaign. Trust but verify. You know what Google tells you, right? Don't just blindly trust what they say. You got to keep an eye on this stuff, like whether it's you or someone on your team or an agency, whatever.

Like someone has to be going through and evaluating this performance frequently, probably weekly, depending on your ad spend level, maybe every other week at a lower ad spend level, but reviewing search terms, looking at the performance of the clicks, looking at the performance of the traffic, and then consider both sides of it. I think that we did a good job of touching on that,

which is that the ad and the way you set it up in Google is one thing. The landing page experience is something else. If you really want to perform well, they both have to be excellent. They both have to be set up in using the best practices to have the best outcome for you. Otherwise, it's going to be challenging to get the best results that you're after with that paid ad spend. And what I always joke about with clients too, is that Google is rich enough. We don't need to make them richer. So the only reason that we should be giving Google money is that it's making you richer. It's giving you more performance for your company. We're not just shoveling money into the furnace that is Google search because they make, oh, I don't know, a few billion dollars a day or whatever

on these ads. And this is ultimately, by the way, this is the best business of all time from Google, right? They're selling essentially traffic and they're just selling clicks that cost them marginally almost nothing, whatever server costs are and things like that. And they're selling clicks for a dollar, $10, $300 in certain niches that they're selling them for unbelievable things. So this is the most profitable, the best business of all time if you're at Google. But the reason for that, if you think about your side of it as the vacation rental manager, is that these ads perform, is that you're buying high intent, quality traffic that can convert when you use the best practices from a landing page

perspective and from a bidding perspective. And ultimately you put more heads in beds and that's what we're all about. So yeah, anything else you want to, or you want to button it up? You got, you buttoned that up perfectly. I can't do any better. Awesome. Thanks so much for listening. We really appreciate the review slowing in. I think we're up to like 18 now or something like that on, at least on iTunes. We begged last week for Spotify. So we'll beg again for Spotify. That'll help us a little bit. We'll call in some favors. Really appreciate everyone. If you have any questions, as always, you could email myself Conrad, C-O-N-R-A-D at buildupbookings.com. And I'll make sure that gets routed to the proper

place for us to discuss on a future episode. Reviews help us, ratings help us, anything helps us. Just let us know what you think. If you have feedback or comments, we appreciate it. And we will see you on the next episode.