Heads In Beds Show - The TRUTH About Running Facebook Ads For Your Vacation Rental Company

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellFacebook (Meta) AdsThe BuildUp Bookings guide to Facebook Ads🔗 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 Peds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. Hey there, Paul. How's it going today? Good. How are you, Conrad?

Doing pretty good. Can't complain. We are here today to talk about Facebook ads, meta ads. Let's see how often we make that mistake. I think we overrun that. Yeah, we'll see. I'll take the over. It'll be a drinking game type of scenario. So just if anybody is listening, please.

Every time I say ad disapproval, let's like, yeah, take a shot or something like that. We'll be toast by, we toast 20 minutes into this. So this is a big topic. I'm not sure if we're going to be able to cover every single facet of it within the confines of today's show. But let's at least do an overview of here's everything Facebook ads, here's like the basic account structure. Here's the benefits of Facebook ads. Here's the drawbacks of it. Here's what it does well, here's what it does poorly. And yeah, I think overall, this would be a good episode. But before we get going, did anything catch your eye in the last week? As far as the marketing

minute goes, any particular news stories, stories headlines anything like that had your attention you know this i've just been sucked into twitter overall so that's just one of those things that i think i don't know we've got the elections coming up as well so there's a lot of stuff happening around our space just not right in our space i think the blue verification could make things interesting on t, but anything you saw out there outside of the Twitter stuff or maybe including the Twitter stuff? Yeah, the Twitter stuff seems interesting to me. A lot of people, it's like, it seems like if you like Elon, you're like rooting for him and you want him to succeed and you have a lot of affinity towards him. If you don't like him, then you're like, oh, this guy's an idiot for making all this money. I'm probably a little bit more neutral

on Elon than most people I suspect. I see, like most people, I see good things that he does and bad things that he does. So I don't really have a strong point of view. I'm not feeling particularly optimistic, though, that he's going to be able to execute upon it. Because I just think most people, I just think most people aren't willing to pay for anything. I'd be shocked if there's a lot of stuff out there that I've seen where people are like, if 10% of people pay for Twitter Blue, it'll be a smashing success. And I'm just like, I don't know if 10% of people are going to pay. I just think like the broad average social media user of any platform, whether it be

Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, go down the list. I think that 99% of them don't want to pay. Like to my knowledge, they haven't released numbers or maybe they have, and I just missed it on like how many people subscribe to the previous version of it, which is like Twitter blue, which is like $5 a month. But I suspect it, it's the minority of users, people who are actively like using it for a certain they get some benefit of it or something. So I'm in the middle of it. I'm neutral. I just don't suspect that pay forcing people to pay regardless of whether it's $1 or $8 or $20 is a path to profitability. So yeah, time will tell on that,

but I'm not, I wouldn't put a lot of money on that actually, to be honest with you. Agreed. Agreed. I guess we can move over to the other social media giant then in our case. Exactly. Something that costs a lot more than 44 billion is the lovely meta. So meta is now, maybe we should start there because of course we're using these terms interchangeably, but these are in fact different things, right? Correct. Meta is different now from Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. So maybe you could just do a quick breakdown of what it means to be meta and then what these sort of subsidiaries, if you will, of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp play into general advertising or where a lot of eyeballs go in this ecosystem.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's almost an episode in and of itself, but at a high level, it is, everything is now under that meta business suite. That's where the highest level of operation is. And potentially in some user cases, I think it's the biggest pain point because they may not even realize that they have a meta business suite account

or a meta business manager account and everything's falling underneath there. certainly that's where everything is stemming from and then you have the obviously you know we work primarily in the ads manager business page area of things and that's where most businesses are going to have most that interaction there at that business page but that's now sitting under that meta business accounts. I think that's where, honestly, it's where the really have to, when we're having artists, when we talk about this discussion, it's a matter of, do you understand really where your business is managed, where it's owned? Did you create it? And did you create that meta business account over top of the business page and ads manager? I guess if you're looking at all the applications that are under meta, what where do you see that? Yeah, I guess it's funny, because

I still always say Facebook ads, even to clients. And I feel this way, because when you go to log into the dashboard, though, you still get kicked to business.facebook.com. So there's, there's my little litmus test, like you're making me log into Facebook to run these ads. No, the way that I think about it, for the most part, is that it still always feels like Instagram is bolted on to the side of this, like the car came into the factory with this stuff on it. And then Instagram was like this, like third party enhancement, it doesn't quite look right, like in the dashboard and things like that. But yeah, there's certainly from a social like posting perspective, a lot of our efforts from a social management side of things have moved over and have migrated over to this meta business suite

to be able to post organical, whether that's Instagram stories. Now you can schedule through their organic Instagram posts, reels, videos, et cetera, as well as just regular Facebook posts. So I feel fine about that. I don't really have a strong point of view on it. Like I said, it's a language thing that we're joking about, but in today's topic that we're talking about, I think that the structure of the ads campaign is, I would say something that you have to understand really more so like where your ads are going to show up and then how are they going to look once they get there. So maybe we could dive more into the paid ad side of things. Again, I think we're jumping over some topics here that could be entire episodes in and

of themselves. And perhaps if people email us and ask, we could dive into just one of those individual topics. But maybe you could walk through, you had a list of things like effective ad placements. What are the types of ads that you could show? So maybe give like your overview into the process when you're considering setting up and running a Facebook ads campaign. What are you actually trying to achieve? Like, how do you actually begin that first process of telling people where to go? What's like your initial, okay, I have a new account. I'm setting it up. I'm setting up to

run ads. What am I hoping to achieve? How do I set that up? Yeah, I think really on the Facebook side of things, it's primarily we're using them with custom audiences and retargeting. We're really trying to run things off a very limited subset. But even when it was working on the traveler side of things, it was the most effective way that we use the Facebook channel, I think, is retargeting. I'm trying to go top of funnel. Certainly during COVID, I saw a lot of, okay, let's get a lot of those drive-to destinations, that one-hour, two-hour radius.

Cool. Facebook's pretty effective there, getting people there. I think we're trying to do some brand awareness on Facebook is also very effective as well. But it's also, on our owner side of things at Ventura, it is a very limited subset of what we're actually trying to hit. I have a very targeted audience I want to go after. So I'm making sure that it is primarily I'm going after those custom audiences and going after that retargeting list after we've hit a certain number of people. So hitting that,

using all of our omni-channel communication there, that's something that we're trying to get everybody speaking the same direction there, speaking the same language, going in that same direction. So we find the most effective placements to be those native ads. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel, I would say, in most cases. I really like the dynamic ads. I think they're effective from the standpoint of really getting some multivariate testing right in place. So we're testing multiple assets.

We're testing multiple assets, we're testing multiple images, multiple primary, primary text areas, multiple headlines, just to see what is the most effective? What is Facebook serving up most frequently there? And really, how can we get the most out of that messaging and understand what is the most engaged with creative element and really understanding that that reporting at a next level there. It is you going more on the traveler side, Conrad. What does your kind of typical setup look like for you? Yeah. So the way that I always approach it is that we have these three levels of creating a campaign. So we have the campaign level, the ad set level, and the ad level. And my frame on it is always

that the campaign level is what you're trying to achieve. You touched on it earlier, but if you're trying to achieve on the traveler side, on the guest side, or you're trying to achieve bookings, then that's going to be your objective on the campaign level. I see people make a mistake just even from the beginning there, right? The very first thing they choose is they choose awareness and then they're like, why am I not getting any bookings? And it's like, you're basically saying go left and go right to Facebook at the same time. So I would say my initial reaction is understand even how to structure the campaigns in the first place before you even decide what the actual offer is going to be or what the messaging or what the media is going to look like and things like that.

So campaign, what I'm trying to achieve. Most common ones for me are sales, awareness, traffic, and engagement. So those kind of four different objectives. So sales would be like bookings, people actually booking on the website. We'll talk about the pixel and tracking here in a second. Awareness has its time and place, in my opinion, in the guest marketing context. It could be like new listing added. Do you want to run an awareness campaign to all your past guests or new listing added? Do you want to run an awareness campaign to all your email subscribers? Traffic. I think there's a time and

place for traffic, even though I generally have moved away from it. This used to be my default campaign setup that I would use. Now I'm trying to move more towards conversions when I can get that conversion tracking set up, because then you can actually optimize better for that outcome. And then engagement. I do think there's a time and a place for just pure engagement ads, which are typically like this post or comment on this post or give us an actual love on this post itself. Zero click type activity that you might want to promote as well. So at the highest level, I would say from an educational perspective, understand what you're trying to achieve. Like you're within the campaign structure, you're trying to get people to do something, right? Be clear about what that is,

and then make sure you have the tracking to live up to that standard of what you're trying to achieve. So if you're trying to get bookings, you have to set up that pixel tracking to actually track when a booking occurs that's tied with it. And yes, that is challenging. And we're not able to actually even, we're not able to do that on all of the clients that we work with. We're very limited by certain template sites at times. There's a lot of large PMS companies out there that give folks template sites and they do offer basic functionality for online booking, but they make it pretty much possible to actually set up. This isn't even a really advanced tracking. I wouldn't call it even to really set up basic tracking, like they can track page views and that's about it. So with any partner that we're working with that has the ability to generate more custom tracking

implementations, I think that's a huge benefit to actually running Facebook ads just as a kind of sidebar there, because then you can actually run booking campaigns and you're optimizing for bookings. So getting to that next level, you touched on this, but I thought you did a good job of giving specific examples. But what I think about that ad set level is who you want to show the ads to. So what I'm trying to achieve is level one, who I want to show the ads to is level two. And within that framework, there could be a lot of different examples of targeting we've done. I feel like we've used dozens and dozens of different targeting methodologies and combinations. And you could argue there's pretty much an infinite number of

audiences that you could create at the ad set level. But to your point, typically what we're doing is retargeting website visitors. The more traffic you have, the smaller a day window you can test with. For example, our largest client from a traffic standpoint, we can test look back windows as small as three days or five days or seven days and get pretty relevant audiences. So these are people who have been on the website in the last few days. They're probably going to be a little more relevant than someone who was on the website 60 days ago. Someone who was on the website 60 days ago, obviously they saw you in some context, but they're probably going to be a little more relevant than someone who was on the website 60 days ago. Someone who was on the website 60 days ago, obviously they saw you in some context, but they're probably not going to be or convert as well in our testing as someone that was on

the website within the last typically seven to 10 to 14 days. With most of our clients, we do 30 day look back testing for retargeting. And that typically is like a good middle ground. Email lists of past guests. That's a very common custom audience that we play with. But certainly we've done lots of interest in demographic targeting in the past with the ad set level of Facebook ads. So for example, people who live within, to your point earlier, a certain radius or people who have a certain interest, like some of our destinations that we market have their own interest inside of Facebook, which is useful. So they live in Tennessee, but they're interested in Myrtle Beach. Okay, great. Like that can refine an audience down of 7 million people down to 200,000,

300,000 very quickly. And there's a reasonable assumption of someone that might be interested in what a property has to offer in Myrtle Beach if they live in Tennessee and they have that interest targeting assigned to them. And we've gone away from this recently, but we did a lot of lookalike targeting for a long time. I just think that unfortunately, the performance of that has dipped as the privacy regulations and things like that have come into play. So at the ad set level, what I would say when people are considering running Facebook ads is I think of it like concentric circles. So the people closest to you are those that already know you, like you, and trust you. Those are probably your past guests, people on your website in the last few days. So that's like a

good starting point. As you like bring these concentric circles out, you get further and further away. You have to be a little bit more understanding of how likely that person is to convert. So someone who's never heard of you, they've never heard of your company, they've never stayed with you before. Maybe they've been to your destination before, but just once five years ago, that person's not going to book off of a one ad, right? That's not really how Facebook works.

They refer to Facebook as interruption advertising. And I don't mean that in just the negative way. I mean it in both a negative and a positive way. A lot of advertising that we interact with on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month basis is interruption advertising. You and me, we both like to watch our football games. There's a timeout that occurs, and what do they do? They immediately go to ads. I don't want to watch those ads. I want to watch the football game. But that's interruption advertising. And Honda or whoever pays a lot of money to get that message out in front of the people that are consuming that content.

That's all Facebook's doing. You're consuming content about your friends, your family, et cetera. And then they're shoving an ad in the middle. So if you think about it at that level, you know, who you're showing your ad to, what you're trying to achieve. And then the last step of course, is the actual ad itself. What are you actually showing them? And you think about your ad as interruption advertising. I think you're probably going to have a different frame on it because you're going to realize, do you stop scrolling your feed and just be like, oh yeah, I'm going to go buy this thing right now. No, like it's passive influence, right? That you have on people. So I think that ultimately Facebook ads have a lot of pros, have a lot of cons, but in terms of how I structure things, we can keep going into the

details here on it, but it's campaign, what I'm trying to achieve. Ideally, I think bookings, ad set, who I want to show my ads to, website visitors, past guests are the more common ones. Although if you're trying to reach new people, you can do that with the interest in demographic targeting. And then the ad itself could be a short vertical video ad. It could be a photo of a property. It could be a lot of things, but you wanted to make that ad engaging certainly. And to your point, you can now do testing and things like that within the platform. So yeah, what, so transitioning maybe over a little bit into that's how the account is set up. What are some headaches that you have with the meta ads,

Facebook ads platform? I've got a small list here. I suspect there might be some overlap. I think I touched on it already, but at a fundamental level, it's getting access to a page, to a business manager. As an advertiser, this is something that I've gotten on more screen shares than I'd like to admit. Just walking someone through the newest version of Meta or the newest version of ads manager or the newest version of that business, the business settings, just so they can find the request to just give us access. So that's, I think that's the biggest pain point. And I know,

Conrad, you kind of have something built into your system, just to kind of remove that headache from you there. So yeah, access is often an issue, especially because people who may be posting on the page day to day would assume, oh, of course, I have the access I need to give you access to the page. And that's often not the case. Yeah. Yeah. It's almost always a screen share to get access. And I always say this too, about like making a new ads account, like within Google, I can make a new ads account. I don't know, 25 to 35 seconds typically. Correct. Right. With Facebook, they don't want you to do that for whatever reason. They want each person to own their ad account and then you get access to it. And that's fine, but that does add extra layers of

complexity to the process because access to a page and an ad account are completely separate. So you could have access to an ad account, but not a page and vice versa. And that also causes us, I would say delays and issues at times as well. So yeah, access is a great headache for me as well. I think we probably share that issue at times. Yeah, yeah. And I think in the VR space specifically, what we saw really start to hit us, and I think, and you can correct me if I'm wrong,

I think this was back in late 2019 even, but when housing policy came into place, housing, employment, and credit, and I think that at face value, that's important. We don't want to discriminate. It's not what we're doing. I'm always saying that we are not here. When we started that on a face value, that's important. We don't want to discriminate. It's not what we're doing. We're not here. When we started getting flagged for that and full ad accounts just go down, when that started going into place, I think it was incredible that I don't think it

was malicious by any means by Facebook at the time. But what they did was they really did a number on the vacation rental space because how many of the property managers that you work with either have a real estate arm or have a very good connection and relationship with the real estate side of things. And that's all they needed to do. Once these scanners were seeing that, they were crawling the sites and I got on with enough meta support people, Facebook support people, trying to ask, what do I have to remove? What doesn't need to be here on the website? Because we'll try to make every succession we can make just to get some ads going. And it's the real estate side. I mean, any mention of real

estate on the landing page, heck, it's in the main navigation for a lot of these businesses. So that was, I think that was the gut punch of all time. And I think slowly the industry has learned to work around it or kind of recover from it. But the fact that it's 2022 now, at least two to three years later, and there's been really no assist for the vacation rental side of things. What are your thoughts on that, Conrad? Yeah, it just seems like we're constantly fighting it. I don't really think there's a solution or a solve to it because to your point, it's completely automated, right? There's not a human at Facebook looking at ads and disapproving them. It's all just happening in an automated basis. And when we're promoting a vacation rental, that is not a housing product. We all know that. Facebook even knows that, right?

Meta knows that. And yet they constantly will disapprove almost any ad if you mention certain words or to your point, there's certain keywords on a landing page, which you may not be able to remove as it's part of a different part of the website. At times, I've just given up and I've accepted the restrictions. Because if you're doing retargeting, it's actually really not changing what you're doing that much. If you're filtering retargeting based on age, maybe you could make the argument. So that's one thing I've tended to not want to go towards. But almost even just to get ads approved, I've accepted the restrictions at times. And I'm just like, it doesn't really change what I'm doing. If I'm retargeting the past 60 days of

website visitors, whether you include the 18 to 22 year olds or not, I don't think that's like a massive change to our performance. So I've thrown my hands up. That's after my second appeal or third appeal, and I'm not getting anywhere. And I just accept the restrictions and try to move on with it. But if you're doing certain types of advertising on the platform, you don't want to accept those restrictions because they can be very detrimental to the accuracy of the demographic that you're targeting. You end up including a bunch of people that you don't actually want to show your ads to. So I feel like that's probably not what Facebook wants ultimately, but I think they have to show that they're enforcing these things. Because my understanding is this is like a federal law

that you can't discriminate for housing stuff. So to your point, I totally see where that law comes from. I think it has a very sketchy past if you go study it where people were excluding certain ethnicities or something like that from living in a certain community. So I totally get where the law comes from and that's a completely valid use case for applying some of these restrictions. But unfortunately, I feel like bycatch. It's like there's this net out there and we're getting caught up in the net and we have nothing to do with that problem or can't even really be a solution or an ally to the problem in the case of 95% of our clients that don't offer real estate opportunities. It's a really unfortunate thing. It's a constant issue.

Every once in a while, I feel like I have an account that's like dealing with a rejection after rejection. And then I seemingly just break through the plane and I get things approved. And then like from then on out, it can be smoother sailing. But until you get that, until you're in that stage, it's be prepared to fight and appeal and argue and submit tickets and submit messages and get through it. And yeah, there's little things that I could suggest to folks, like when you put out an ad, but put out three versions of the creative and try different images. This is good for AB testing anyways, but sometimes for whatever reason, one will get through and two will get rejected. So at least you have something serving in the meantime. I almost never, ever submit one creative, one, just one ad.

I'm producing new ad for a new campaign for Facebook because I feel like that's just asking to be disapproved and that's going to cause a delay in many cases. Yep. Ad disapprovals. We probably spent enough time on that, but yeah, it's a constant, it's a constant issue. My next one is that tracking is just difficult. It's not massively difficult, but now at least you need to be able to fire different codes based on the landing page. So if someone comes in on this page, they get a certain code firing. If they come in and actually convert, they get brought to a thank you page. That code needs to be there. But now Facebook is even saying

that really that pixel isn't sufficient, that you need to be connecting at an API level and passing back email address data, et cetera, to Facebook. And certainly no PMS that I've ever seen supports that data sharing. So the only thing you can really do is like manually export that data. You could download like a CSV or an Excel file, upload that, but like very few people are gonna go through that headache.

Or is that really a feasible path for a lot of people to go through? I suspect no, we've done that in very few cases. So unless you have the ability to write like custom code, like getting all the tracking proper, properly configured and firing is really challenging. But that's what Facebook is trying to push you to do, which is get this tracking code configured.

We've been able to have a decent success rate on getting the pixel codes to fire properly, depending on the website structure. But yeah, within the framework of doing API connections to just for conversion tracking, like that's outside the scope of most of the clients that we work with and most of the technical capabilities that they have. So it's a shame that it's so challenging to get that data in there. I know there's value in doing it. But I wish they would make that easier. I wish there was more simple ways that you could just upload the data or download it, or email it to Facebook or something like that would make it a little bit more attainable or

trackable. I'm sure you deal with the same thing from a tracking perspective. Yeah, that's it really is. It's a lot of it deals around the pick. If you can get the pixel in place that does the fact that works some of the time for us, it's great because it's really difficult to show that value on the Facebook side of things. I think that's because if you can't, if you can't get the custom coding in place, or if you can't get the tracking in place, you're really, you are, you're spending a significant amount of budget and not being able to show great ROI because ultimately once you get the traffic to the page, the engagement is not great. It is even the best Facebook traffic is not going to perform as well as certainly organic direct, anything like that. Probably even paid search in a lot of cases.

I think that's always, it's a tougher justification for a channel. I think, because of that. It's just, why am I spending money? And that's, I think, where really, as you're setting up your campaigns, when you really are basing how you're building out these campaigns based on that achievement of sales awareness, traffic engagement, then you're really looking at it in the right manner as opposed to, I'm just spending a lot on Facebook. What am I getting out of it? Because it's an uphill battle of how you're going to sell the value of that channel long term. And that's my third bullet point, which you dovetailed into nicely, which is that I feel like the costs keep going up and the quality of traffic keeps seems to go down over time. That's my sentiment. As I look at time on site, as I look at metrics,

conversions, data, et cetera, through the platform over the past year, the cost for us to get 1000 people to see our ad has gone up 20, 30, 40% on some accounts. And the quality of the traffic has gone down and people coming through are converting less. They're staying for short amounts of time. They're not converting as often. So that's a tough sledding as an advertiser to want to keep going down that path. It's not just inflation. You're literally getting worse quality for your money. It's like you go into the store and you order food and they give you back a half cooked sandwich, and they charge you 15 bucks for it. You're just like, what the heck, that's kind of what it feels

like at times to buy Facebook ads recently. And I get it because there's like, there's a lot of eyeballs that go there. And Facebook, the platform itself is very mature. And a lot of our let's be honest, right, the eyeballs that we're trying to get in front of are the same ones that are often being right now there might be being shown political advertising, right? And that could be someone who's willing to pay a lot more for that eyeball to get it in front of them as opposed to what we're offering, which is, hey, come book our vacation rental properties. That's a concerning trend for me. I would say if it keeps going in that direction over the next few years, I think Facebook is going to leave themselves in a pretty

tough position where they're going to have advertisers that really aren't basing their logic on profitability or actually making a return from the ad spend and the small businesses that you and I work with day to day, they don't have massive amounts of money to do general awareness advertising. Like they're putting that money in there because they want an outcome to come back quickly. So that's ultimately what they care about. And then, yeah, my last bullet point is that fundamentally this is interruption advertising, right? So when people tell me, and this question has come up a few times before, I have Facebook ads and I have Google ads running, but what's better? What should I be focused on

more one channel or the other? Channel A or channel B? Facebook ads, Instagram, or Google ads. And what I often say to them is that these are fundamentally different things. They don't offer the same type of traffic. They don't offer the same benefits. So the answer is, depending on what you're trying to achieve, the answer may be different depending on what your actual outcomes are. But for the most part, the reason that Google traffic is better quality is that search-based traffic always has a keyword tied to it, where people go into Google, they look for something specific, and then that's what they're actually hoping to get, right? So the downside of that is that it can be very competitive, right? Like you can actually get a lot of people going after that search term, and you have to pay a lot more to get that visitor

to your website. A Facebook click to go to your website might cost 50 cents. That same click from a search campaign might cost $5, but that's because that person is much more likely to convert. They're looking for something. And if you're delivering on them what they're looking for, you obviously have a decent chance at conversion. With Facebook, it's scrolling, you're showing me an ad, I can click over. Again, it's cheaper. I can get 10 times the people that come over, but a lot of Facebook traffic, certainly all Instagram traffic is mobile, right? So it's not really people who are necessarily at their desktop computer ready to book for the most part. And yeah, that's not what they were there for. With social, you're bringing a message to them. You're showing the

property. You're showing the property what it has, what it could offer. Hey, come stay with us. Here's all the benefits of doing so. That's great. You can create awareness at an unbelievable scale and benefit on Facebook. You could have a brand new vacation rental company that no one's ever heard about on day one. And on day 30, you could have thousands of people that have seen a video or your company website or things like that. So that's the benefit of it, is that you can put your messaging and your media in front of new eyeballs, new people that you can then future get benefits bookings from the future. But it's not something where people like go off Facebook and book right away. That's not really the modality of how the platform works. So that's in my mind, some of the drawbacks of it. But we can, I don't know,

we can keep beating it up if you want to, but what are some benefits of Facebook ads? How do you see it as a more helpful platform? Why would someone consider this part of their mix, even though we spent the last, I don't know, 10 minutes. I think at just a numbers level, it is the largest social media channel that we have, that's available to us right now. And Twitter being what it is, that's a whole, it's not even a discussion because even the times I've tried Twitter ads,

it's just, it's not the same. It's a very limited engagement. If Facebook is a limited engagement, that's going in a whole different direction. So I think it is. It's something that has to be in the mix. I think it is. As a retargeting channel, people realize it now. I mean, they realize they're being retargeted too. So I think there's almost a little bit of a joke to it. But at the same time, that joke is acknowledgement that, hey, they're marketing to me. And I've seen it happen dozens and dozens of other times. So I know what it is.

And probably I'm probably going to see an ad or I'm going to see something. I'm going to see a discount. I'm going to see something that's of value to me that might want to draw me in further. So I think if you haven't realized and you haven't acknowledged that you are being retargeted to on Facebook, like consistently and constantly, that's maybe a whole different discussion for the individual user there. But I do, I think just again, from the numbers perspective, and the fact that that's that tongue in cheek little acknowledgement that we're all getting advertised to and let's let's use it to our advantage a little bit. And I think some Facebook users do. Yeah, to your point, it's this is where your target guests are spending time, right? So whether you have a lot of people who say they don't like

the platform, and I'm just like, Okay, yeah, that's fine. You don't have to, you don't have to feel the most positive about the platform. But the truth is, I think the average US adult is spending 42 minutes a day on Facebook somewhere in that range. Now, I think if you were to sum up Facebook and Instagram together, combine them and made them one monolithic thing. And of course, with backend system, you can run ads to both platforms. I'm sure it's probably in excess of an hour, right? A day that a lot of people are spending on these platforms for you. We love email marketing. I'm sure we'll do a future episode on email marketing, but guests aren't spending 55 minutes a day in their email, looking for your message or like seeing your message, right? They might see it when passing

amongst looking through work emails and other obligations. But the truth is that people are spending a lot of time on there so that your ability ability to get to my point a few minutes ago, your ability to get a message out to your target guest is really unparalleled and unrivaled on this platform. You can get a message, you can get a video, you can get a property shown to them in a way that would be maybe not feasible or possible through email. If they haven't opted in and don't open your emails regularly, it also a way that you can put it in front of the target guests that matters to you. You can also get in front of new potential guests. So again, we talked about that earlier, but like you could literally build a company. There's companies not necessarily in the vocational space, but companies in the marketplace

who have built their company off of Facebook traffic. Like you could look at these direct to consumer e-commerce companies. And the only way that they get traffic for the most part is through social advertising. And they build these multimillion dollar, sometimes 100, $200 million businesses, mostly off the back of just paid social advertising. So obviously these ads can convert and they do work if you set them up in a way that's conducive to conversion. But you have to obviously be very diligent with your cost structure and what you're actually showing to people to see if there's a way for you to actually be economical with your investment there. But there's no doubt about it, right? The problem with

search is that we're relying on someone to go search for something. So within the context of people going onto Google and looking for Destin, Florida vacation rentals, there's only certain amount of people that do that each and every month, right? And there's people, there's more people that go to Destin than search on Google for vacation rentals for Destin, right? Or any destination. So if you can put your message in front of them and say, hey, we have, we just had a post actually go viral over the right now. It's just organic. We're going to go put some paid behind it. It was basically like, here's this latest property. It was an amazing property. What are these with the murals on the wall? And you know, it was 30 people. It's a huge property. It looks awesome. And it went viral on Facebook.

I think at this point, 15, 20,000 people have seen the post because it has showing people something they didn't know existed. They're like, Oh, I didn't know I could book a place like this in this community, in this area. It's like, now you know, hey, check it out. Here's the link, go book it. So it's an awareness thing that really you can't do that in other social channels, whether they're paid or organic. And then my last bullet point about the positive benefits of Facebook ads is that you'd be very creative with your actual ad itself, right? You could do video of your property. You could do drone shots. You could show, you could have text, you could have images. You could put an offer in front of people. You're really not limited, but you're limited, I guess, by the ad size to some degree. But as far

as your creativity goes, you could really be really creative with Facebook ads, Instagram ads, et cetera. You can do funny memes. We've done memes as ads. Those have done well before getting a high click-through rate. Oh, I need a vacation. And it's a funny joke, meme template or something like that. People click through, they get a discount code. They apply that at checkout that can convert as well in a retargeting audience. So there's a lot of benefits I think as well to this platform that are worth highlighting. And that's why we're all shoveling at least some amount of money to it, or I'm often suggesting to every client, at least have a retargeting campaign running. If nothing else, we don't have to use it for prospecting for branding. That may be a little

bit of effort and energy to figure out what's going to convert best there. But at the minimum, people who visit your website to your point from a few seconds ago, should at least see your messaging, your media, because guess what, if you don't do it, and then they go to five other websites, all the other competitors are going to get that brand in front of them. Exactly. So if you don't have a least, and you could have a $2, $5 a day budget on retargeting, right? You don't need to have crazy money to run retargeting campaign. It's not really that difficult to do. And you can get some benefit in that platform from doing it that way.

So those are some of the good parts about Facebook. And we don't want it to be just negative here. We want to talk about the good and the bad of what this platform has. Correct. Absolutely. Where do folks go from here? So if they're trying to get started with Facebook ads, is there anything different that you think

they could be aware of as they're going to build their initial campaigns? Or is that kind of what are you trying to achieve? Who are you going to show it to? What are you going to show them? Is that a good way to get people started? I really think that is just laying it out in that manner. If you're really looking at it through this, Conrad gave you the great, the guidebook there of really how to set it up and really giving you the framework of how you should be looking at the value of Facebook ads, because it is, there's certainly value out there. You just have to find which message is going to match, certainly which intent you're trying to drive there. And then it is, it's about, I think,

then ultimately what I always go to is look at the data behind the scenes, see how you can make it better and make sure that you're spending an appropriate amount in the channel. And when you've got the data behind the scenes to make those decisions. That's what it's all about there. Yeah, no, I like that. I think that's a good place for us to put a bow on it, which is that know what you're trying to achieve, know who you're going to show your ads to, or at least have ideas of how to test different ways that you could different people you could show ads to decide what you want to show them. And then again, encourage you to do a lot of testing there. Think about the user consuming that content, why would they care about it? And then to your point, I think that's maybe

a critical follow-up piece, which is that once you have these ads up and running, have a system of methodology, et cetera, for tracking your results and not over a day or a week or something like that, right? Like you're going to need a long time period probably to measure and evaluate because people aren't going to look at your Facebook ad today and come and book today, or even tomorrow, right? There's a longer curve time there on the guest side, on the owner side, you may have to show an ad to someone for six months or a year for for the actually click on that button and fill out a form. So the owner side is always going to be a little bit more challenging from a tracking perspective. But you can at least see how many people are clicking over and get some sense of how maybe your landing page

is converting, which might help you inform your strategy, your strategy there to you can actually grow on the owner side from Facebook advertising because you can get that message in front of the right people if you target things correctly. Yeah, I think that's a good place to end it, which is what you want to achieve, how you're going to do it, and ultimately give more to Zuck

because Zuck needs your money to buy more. He definitely needs your money right now. He's spending billions of it, so he needs more of your money now. Oh boy. We're in this, so we got to, we're in the real verse, but there's a lot of people out there in the metaverse, Paul.

So we got to shovel, we got to shovel their R&D resources their way. I do. Yeah. Thanks, Paul, as always for this deep dive and at times venting session on the wide, wonderful world that is Facebook ads, meta ads. I think we went over on our Facebook meta

like combination there. If you're getting any value out of these episodes, we really appreciate these reviews. I think we're up to over a dozen now on Apple, maybe we should turn our attention to Spotify. If you're a Spotify user, and you leave us a review, a screenshot that send it to me Conrad conrad at build up bookings.com. Maybe I could give you a thank you in some way. I don't know, maybe goodbye dinner or something like that. That'd be fantastic. We're trying to get more reviews. So more people can hear the show. If you have ideas for future episodes of shows or other

things that you want to hear us talk about, dive a little bit deeper into from a marketing standpoint, we'd love to hear it. Same email would work as well. And then I'll make sure that gets into our show note process and Paul can see that message as well. That's all I have for right now. Thanks so much for your time and attention.

We will catch you on the next episode.