Heads In Beds Show - Winning With Google Ads In 2026 For Your Vacation Rental Business

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

In this episode Conrad and Paul give an update on the ever-changing landscape of Google Ads and how we set them up (both homeowner and guest) into 2026 to get excellent results.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteBook A Call With Us🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads of Med Show presented by Buildup Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacational properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing, and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host, Paul. Paul, goodwill. Good afternoon for me.

Good morning for you. We're a random recording midday spot here. What's going on? What's happening? I said it feels like a Friday today. I, you know, just one of those weeks where you get to the end of it. you're really excited to get to the end or you're really pushing to get to the end. So I think that that's, maybe that is that's, this is what we get this time of year where

so much is going on and hard to keep that focus. I think sometimes, especially when we've got the families and the kids and then the extenuating sporting events and, no, it's just, yeah, it's a lot. But this is a good time. It's in a good way to wind down the week, I think. So how are you doing, sir? Yeah, pretty good. Well, we're talking about a topic today, too that I think is not like too

mentally overwhelming for us because it's stuff that we know pretty well. So that's a good thing. You know, we're not trying to weigh to waters that we're not comfortable in. You know, we know where all the, all the hidden reefs are and things like that. So hopefully that's a positive. But yeah, I'm doing pretty good over here. Cannot complain great weather. If anything, we need the rain, you know, so it's supposed to rain on Sunday.

And usually, I'd be kind of bummed by that. But I think we kind of need it super dry out there. We've had a drought. There's burn bands and things like that here in the Carolina. So, you know, a weird thing that we're hoping for rain because usually I'm like, oh, rain, stay away. We get too much of it. But right now I think we could actually use a little bit of it. So it should be a good thing.

You know, rain is inevitable. What do they say? Death, taxes. I feel like rain would have to be inevitable. You know what else is inevitable? Google making buckets of cash. And why does Google make buckets of cash? Because they have the best ad system on planet Earth, the best ad system that's ever been designed.

So see previous episodes we've done with Google Ads if you want the basics. We thought this was kind of a good check-in because I often feel like, you know, And it's funny, actually, the call of hatches before this, Paul was with my team, that we do paid ads management and several people in that team now. And we're talking about, oh, yeah, let's try this. Let's change this. Let's change this. And it's actually been a minute since we've done this type of topic where it's like,

hey, things change. Platforms change. Like I think the tenants and the basics of Google ads aren't that different, but there are unique campaign decisions that we're making now that we were not making two years ago. Some of these things that we're going to talk about today did not exist two years ago. There was no such thing as a PMAX campaign. Let's say it's three years ago.

Now it's like the most common thing we build. So anywho, yeah, the thought process is we're going to do like a little, you know, spring 2026 update, if you will, of how to build Google Ads. Maybe we cover, you know, a little bit more unique things that are happening right now. This isn't like a basic intro episode. Again, we've done some ones on those in the past, you know, and go from there. But yeah, what are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, this is, obviously, this is a topic that we both know pretty well. But I do.

I think that that's that, you know, when we talk about these PMAX campaigns, performance, Max campaigns. They have evolved from different iterations. We can ads expresses. We go back quite a ways and you can. You can take those back to people creating their own accounts off of building a Google business listing. And you could trace that all the way back to some of the campaigns that turned in PMAX campaigns here. So historically, if you do go back and listen to some of those episodes, you're going to hear us talk about we really aren't huge fans. And I'd say that they didn't work or they weren't effective. But I think our biggest obstacle to overcome was that you didn't know what was really driving

the performance. It was a big old black box. And to Google's credit, and we don't give it often, but to Google's credit, I think part of what we see with PMAX is a better understanding, better attribution, better visualization of what is actually driving the performance, what's driving the clicks. We actually get searched terms for PMAX campaign. It's a lovely thing. So we still live in the limbo of what privacy, air quotes, is allowed to give us and what Google gives us from there.

But understanding there are some good things that Google is trying to push us to do, there are some things still that obviously Google is really good at making that money. So I think this is, this is that next opportunity to just kind of update people on where we're seeing success, where we're not seeing success, and where Google's trying to push us into some bad. areas that we can try to avoid here as well. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, let's start with PMAX. So like for us, broadly speaking, we've shifted a lot of our, you know, budget into PMAX in many cases. Now there's, you know, I'm like kind of couching that a little bit because we're not 100% PMAX, 100% of the time. You know, so we're doing like a quote unquote standard new build. It

often includes PMAX. It includes brand and includes DSA campaigns targeting specifically property detail pages. So that's kind of like a boring plain Jane vanilla ice cream build that we might do for a property manager today. But PMAX will typically be the biggest part of that budget. So if they had $100 per day budget, let's say I'm going to be putting $50 to $75 that budget just into the PMAX campaign if I had that to work with. So that's kind of like my typical approach. Now, what I've, what I've still kind of playing with and trying to figure out here a little bit is it seems like PMAX does a little bit better in my experience. When you run a Google ads, a PMAX campaign, and you actually put the long tail concepts as separate asset groups in one campaign, I've had not as much success as maybe

I would like to in splitting it out and having a bunch of unique different PMAX campaign. So let's do an example. Let's say it's Destin, Florida Vacation Rentals. What I used to do was have like a Destin, Florida Vacation Rentals campaign, search campaign, then have a Destin Florida pet-friendly vacation rentals campaign and so on and so on, you know, maybe like group homes or, you know, Oceanfront, whatever, if that was relevant, that sort of thing. Now what I'm tending to do a little bit more of is make one PMAX campaign and then make

separate asset groups for pet-friendly, for oceanfront for stuff like that. So that's even a shift too because, again, the campaign structure looks really simple. One that I sent the other day to a client and it was like, we're targeting a lot of stuff. And he just opened the campaign view. And he's like, okay, just three campaigns in here. And I'm like, yep. And then he clicked on asset groups and he saw, you know, seven different asset groups in there. I'm like, let's try that. We've had success with that. We can always pivot and change. And maybe one of those will turn out to be a winner. We peel it out and change it or make it separate. But that's kind of one thing that we're doing is we're shifting more budget in PMAX.

And we're making PMAX a little bit of a bigger grouping of concepts. And then we're letting Google kind of match the intent and the, you know, click, et cetera, to the right campaign type there. And we find that that has been a little bit more successful. But how do you do it? Do you split things out? Do you keep things more centralized and single PMAX campaigns with asset groups? How do you handle that? Yeah.

I mean, I think that more I do try to keep things a little more centralized in that one PMAX campaign. Again, that I do. I use the top of funnel that we are familiar with there. And then I do get a lot of the brand inclusion there. Sometimes I'll build an additional brand protection just kind of depends on what we see the need for there. But it's, I think the most important time for a PMAX campaign is like that first 30 days. Because you are, you're really giving, that's your opportunity to take a look at what's coming in,

what is Google parsing through those key concepts that you're putting together and really trying to dictate at that point. Okay, negative keyword here, negative keyword there, making sure that we're really narrowing in that focus and narrowing in that intent to be able to say, okay, this is what, this is really the money that we're looking for. These are the trends that you can try to match to. That's with any campaign. I mean, that's with the search campaign. That's with anything that you're doing.

It's so important to do that monitoring heavy early and really, again, give the algorithm those fixes and say, this is close. This is what we really want. And I think that that was something that I probably have a few. more management campaigns than you do right now. So that's kind of my third day. And like I do, I will do the brand, do kind of those general search campaigns and some PMAX. But it is more on the management side. PMAX doesn't work on the management side of the things I tell you that. That is, that is. Still search. Yeah. Way too niche a concept for Google to really understand

what we're getting there. I mean, even on some of my best performing campaigns, a lot of the impressions I'm getting a lot of the clicks. I'm getting there generally for property management companies, which I know really probably only matches the intent that I'm looking for, 40 or 50% of the time. So to be clear, like they're searching for a competing management company and then they end up on the clients, you know, will manage your property page? Sometimes. Sometimes it's just like just just greater property management as opposed to vacation rental, short-term rental, Airbnb property management talking about that. Because even, again, within that property management space, there is a breakdown of probably 50% of people who are

looking for those terms. This is how I always laid it out when I was talking to people of Ventory. 50% are looking for long term, looking for something where they can be a tenant or they're looking for something in that realm. 50% of the time it is more short-term vacation regular Airbnb property management. So really understanding what that breakdown is, the second most common term you're going to usually see is rental companies or rental agencies. Again, very general. And that's when Google, you know, Google's trying to understand. That is, that's them, even with exact match, trying to understand what's happening, but not really having that great idea. So I think with anything that you're doing with Google ads, it's really trying to pin in

and show Google, yeah, you don't need to send me, in my case on the management side, you don't need to send me a thousand impressions or a thousand clicks. I need these clicks that are coming in specifically. I'm really trying to hone that in. But I think really, again, you're getting an understanding of that with any type of PMAX campaign search campaign that you're running, because especially on the PMAX side of things, you'll see restaurants dining if you've got that type of content on your site. Because Google's pretty smart at matching up that intent with an experience that's going to match what they're looking for. So if you do have a blog post with the top three things to do, and you have something similar to that in your keywords.

You're going to see that come through as a search and then come through as a click. And hopefully they'll have a good experience and they'll get over to the lodging side of things. But it is. The management side gets a little tricky and certainly not a lot of fun. But it's valuable when you get those. Yeah. I don't have as much experiences you do on the management side. We do them for some clients, but not as many as you do.

So definitely wouldn't have as much to say on that front. Like what I noticed to about PMAX, so like some downsides, right? Like they're like you've said, the specificity of targeting is troubling on the property management keywords. That's the most friendly way of saying that. On the on the, even the guest marketing side of things, PMAX, what I find sometimes is that everyone's tomorrow, we'll just see it get a ton of display ad traffic. Yep.

For seemingly no reason. Like we'll have two campaigns we launch in two different markets. One ends up getting 98% search traffic. The other one ends up getting 50% display ad traffic. And display ad traffic is generally speaking way less qualified, way less, you know, converts way worse, etc. So I don't love that because I end up just turning this off usually. And right now there's not a way to control it.

Now that's coming out soon. There's a steering. I don't know if you read that article that Google posted. There's like a steering function that they're introducing in the future. So you can steer, you know, Google towards A1MOSC here. But yeah, like DSA is going to go away. Search is going to go away. And inevitably, this will be the new campaign type.

And their logic is we want to show ads in multiple places, which there is a strong reason for that. By the way, if we didn't say this, we didn't say this before. If you don't know what PMAX is, it's ads that run on Google services, including search, display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail. Am I missing anything? Those, yeah, those. Those are the big ones, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So that's the shift that we're seeing. It's like, yes, Google search is where we've made our, hey, for the longest time, but we have all these other places that you could run ads on. It used to be you'd have to set up separate campaigns for them. Now you set up one campaign. It's just sort of this all in one type approach. And it does that. What I'm noticing, by the way, part of it is because some of these ad inventory places

that Google sends traffic out to are significantly less expensive to get clicks from. is that CPC are trending down. So like I sometimes will hear property managers complain or at Google outs costs are going up and up and up for a few years. I felt like I heard that. During COVID, I was hearing that, but it was solving it was because there was so much demand that they didn't mind that they were paying more per click because the conversion rate was better.

Now what I'm seeing is CPC's trending down. But unfortunately, for most of our clients, conversion rates generally speaking are trending down right now. Like I have some counter examples, but most of my examples, if I look across my whole portfolio of accounts that we manage, most clients are seeing a lower conversion rate on their site this year than, last year from Google Ads traffic. So now again, could we attribute many, many reasons to that or

causes to that, I should say, absolutely, you know, higher gas prices, more economic uncertainty, higher prices in general across the board for properties, or maybe you're having lower rates to feel like to compete, guests are shopping around maybe a little bit more. They know they've got options. They're going to check out OTA sites. You're going to check out your direct booking site. They're going to do their shopping and see what they feel like is going to do the best trick. And that leads to great for Google, I would imagine, right? Click, click, click, click, click on all these ads, you know, great for them out of it, right? Well, we should, we should buy some stock maybe and see if we can get some left on it.

It is. And I think you're right. I think that's one of the, and it's, I think at least with the PMAX campaigns, the display ad traffic is at least based on like visual assets as opposed to when the display extension was added to your search campaigns, all they're doing is run the text ads in a display space. And that's just a terrible experience here. So it is a little, it is a marginally better experience. But again, ultimately what you're getting from, display is a far lower intent. You might get some brand awareness and brand exposure, but that's not the true drive for the PMAX campaign.

You can do display campaigns for that. So I do. I think that that's something that they can be very effective, but I think it's important to understand what is driving that performance. And now that we have that visibility into that, this is the channels. This is the breakdown of the channels. These are the clicks. This is, you know, they've opened up the black box.

So do you have any more control over it? Probably not, but at least you have an understanding. It's like an opaque box now. You know, like, I was going to say, like, it's not black entirely where you can't see anything inside of it. It's like the smoke, smoke glass mirror box. I can kind of see a little bit, but like I can see a little bit of it. It is. I was opening, I was opening a few campaigns to kind of hammer your point home there too.

And it's interesting because when I do some year over your comparisons on some bigger spending accounts too, that's kind of what we see. right? Like we see these trends upwards, you know, on, or trends downwards, excuse me, on conversion and cost per click going that same direction. So it's funny, right? Like, if you're Google, would you rather sell a thousand clicks at 30 cents a click? Or would you rather sell 200 clicks at a dollar a click, right? Like you're going to make more money selling a thousand clicks for 30 cents than you are 100 or 200 for 50 cents or a dollar, whatever the math works out to be there. But hopefully you get the just of what I'm saying, listener, you know, is that the best thing for them to do is get many clicks, add clicks as possible. And this is

the core standard of Google ads originally, right, that are relevant. That's the key, right, is that no one wants to see an ad. And I have to tell clients that sometimes, they don't want to see an ad where they search for oceanfront vacation rentals. They go to your page and these properties are an oceanfront. That's just going to make them mad. And Google doesn't want ads like that. Google, the only reason that Google makes all this money is that people will say they don't click on ads, which is, of course, absurd. They click on ads at an extremely high clip. But the part of it is they don't even know they're clicking on an ad. It's not an ad. They're just navigating to the page they want to get to. And then they get there and they see what they want

to see. That's why these ads work so well, ultimately. on search. I mean, we've talked about what Google could do better on the travel side of things. But this is, this is one part of the business that they clearly have a pretty good understanding of my dream is that someday we can just put all of our rentals into Google vacation rentals and do Google hotel ads. Very similar to, you know, bid on a per stay basis. This is, this is building winning Google ads in 2028 is my dream.

But, you know, 2026, well, we can keep. done going going down our list here. What do you think about video? Like when you put, do you do straight video ads? Do you add video to your PMAX? Do you add, like, what does that look like when you're trying to? Because this is, this is such a thing.

I mean, yeah. Oh boy. How boy, here we go. There's clients listening to you, so I got to be careful. I mean, I think that ultimately, all right, here's my, here's my take on it. Video is additive. It seems to be a positive lift when I put them in there, if they're good videos, you know, which is sort of like, ah, duh.

you know, duh, insight. But you'd be surprised often I get video assets that are no good. So it's like, I can't turn,

what's the expression chicken salad, you know, chicken, S-H-I-T into chicken salad. Like, you just can't do it that way.

So if you're not giving your marketing agency good assets to work with, if you're giving them very shaky, you know, filmed on an iPhone 4 video content or you're giving them video that's already been shot

and it's done. It doesn't have any additional edits that you can do to it. It's a fixed output. There's not a lot that you can do to work with that. And honestly, what makes a quote-a-good YouTube ad is very different from like almost like there's no

copying from another thing that you've done. You can't just be like, oh, let me do this thing that I did over here on Facebook and just copy and paste that and put that over here on YouTube because it's a totally different medium. YouTube has its own style of presentation of content, of format. So to do YouTube ad well is really hard. So a lot of our clients will give us assets and we do what we can with them. But I feel like sometimes we're just not given the best assets to work from. And it pops in there and we get a video active, right? But like, is it actually a video that's set up in a way that's going to be successful, you know, if you will, on the platforms.

That's a little bit more rare in my experience. We have a few of them. There's some example. Some come to mind. We have a client that we do these like resort style campaigns for and they have these like video tour style videos they've done in the past. Those have been adapted to YouTube and I think they work quite well. So it's like, let me show you around resort name in two minutes.

And then they show the amenities and location and stuff like that and why it's a great spot to book. And those are those are strong. But the data, honestly, like we have, we have a lot of campaigns to put a bow on it. without video that do awesome. So I don't think it's a requirement. Now are you going to get nagged in the interface every time you log in at Google Ads?

Yes, but you get nagged about a lot of bad ideas. So you just have to ignore them if they're not going to help your business ultimately or your ad performance. This is one where I think if maybe you were tapping more into like YouTube TV. And this is something where I just, I don't see that happen very often.

If you were kind of tapping into that actual programming or CTV type of option, I think maybe it would have a little higher value. Here's the thing is that I do, I will admit that I see when I'm watching replays of Hulu shows or something like that. Like I know I'm getting very targeted ads specifically because one of them is a like digital agency for like TV ads. But I think that's the type of video that's really going to connect. Like again, you almost have to have a commercial experience. And that's what's most effective on YouTube as well.

And I think you've nailed it on the head where for. the most part, when you're creating video right now, and as I think you should be, it's for social media. You know, it is for Instagram. It's for Facebook. And like you said, those video types, that content type is just very different than what you're going to share on Google. You can say maybe on Google, what is it, Google shorts? Like YouTube shorts, maybe? Yeah, it's more akin. I would say you could have a video to certainly do well on YouTube shorts and do well on social. I think that's fair. But most ads that you're served on YouTube are a desktop.

Or like the main. If it were just that, then fine. But that's the way. Your YouTube ads are your 4x3, your standard operating performance. And that's just, it's a different push or pull to actually get that content, I think. It is. It just requires more to, you feel like you need to do a little more production behind it. Do a little more.

You can ad hoc social. That's just not something you can or maybe you want to do. I think with the Google ecosystem. system, it's not to say it's more professional, but the places that you're being served up, when you see a really bad ad on YouTube, you know it. So you can't put that really bad ad, because people will remember that. They might not remember the good one, but they're sure going to remember the bad one there. I think the main problem that I think most people face with YouTube is that they want it to be easy, whereas like the best YouTube videos that people watch

organically. And like, we don't need to go on a rant on Mr. Beast and sort of the absurdity of some of these scenarios, but like Mr. B says the king of YouTube attention, he puts, and he brags about how much effort he puts into a YouTube video, how we'll spend millions upon millions of dollars to make a YouTube video. And I think there's a lesson in there, not because you need to go do Mr. B-style videos for your vacation rental business. You probably don't. I'm just picturing a scenario where it's like everyone, everyone has a stay in this house. The first person to leave or last person to leave gets keep the house, keep the vacation rental. I'm now coming up with these like Mr. B's ideas in my head for a vacational industry.

But anyways, skipping that for a second. I think it's because you just, you just, also, we've talked with this before, is its own platform. It's not a social network per se, although there are little elements of social networks to it. There's comments. There's people you follow, but it's almost like a parasycial network, right, where you follow a creator, you follow a topic that you're interested in. And then you might watch their videos weekly or biweekly and you find something interesting about what they're saying.

And that's the thing, too, with YouTube. There's people that are super successful YouTubers that put out four-minute videos and 14-minute videos and 40-minute videos and four-hour videos, you know, essentially. And those people are all successful. So it's a very unique format in the way. that people consume it and it does become a very personal thing like i think if you're going to do a youtube ad by the way to like make this more actionable i think you do like presenter led property tours like i you know i used to say model but model or presenter led property tours it's hey um everybody

conrad here uh ceo of conrad's cool cabin rentals i'm going to show you today blah blah blah cabin and this is our awesome cabin located in blah blah blah um here's you know five reasons why it's the best spot for you and your family to come explore then at the end it's tap link below to check out this cabin and go to our website and look at 85 more cabins we have just like this in beautiful blah blah blah blah blah right like that's the kind of format that would work well and that could be a two-minute video one-minute video depends on how in depth you go how the big the property is but almost nobody that we work with is giving us assets like that to run in pmax campaigns to bring it back to google ads so as a result we kind of cobble some together it's there but when i go look at our

data on channel performance in google you know youtube is rarely in the top few you know as far as clicks and impressions and things like that so i think that's just a smaller piece of the pie for us right I think that is more of a brand awareness, brand exposure type of place. So if that's what you want to do, I think that that's a perfect example of an effective video. But that's an effective video for one very specific property. So, you know, transit, are you going to try to, can you do that at a building level? Can you do that? You know, how can you do that to be effective?

And I think that that's where it is. It's not as effective of video, maybe more effective. as an ad, but it's the, and I think this is part of the problem of trying to run those ads is, what do you really want to talk about? Well, it's probably a brand overview or it's a location, destination overview. It's talking about some of those things that are going to drive that inspiration and associate it to your brand as opposed to we need bookings that are coming through. I mean, that's where you go with, stick with your PMAX, you stick with your search, you stick with kind of those tried and true, not saying you don't want to try,

some other channels, try some other mediums. But I think this is also where we get into the conversation of what should be more organic and what should be paid efforts. And I think video right now for most businesses, certainly on the social side of things, but on the Google side, it should be organic. That's the way you're going to be most effective. I think that's where you're going to be most cost effective, certainly. But unless you're trying to build that brand or you've got that specific key,

opportunity in mind, I think organic is a better way to do that right now. What do you think about that? Well, you mentioned the word brand there. And I did when I was doing my long drive back this week. I went to a client offsite visit in Georgia, a six-hour drive back. I queued up a bunch of podcasts. And I listened this one from Hermosie, and he was talking about defining brand, like what his brand actually mean.

And it was really good because I'm like, everyone will not our head. And we know what a brand is. We know what Honda is. We know what Coca-Cola is. We know what Apple computers are. blah, blah, blah. We could list 10,000 brands if you put us in a room and gave us a piece of paper and a pencil, right? But it was like the way he described what makes a brand valuable was really interesting. It was basically the premise that he had was a brand is valuable because you will pay more for a commodity product.

So because it has that logo on it, because you have a positive trust association with that brand. So in vacation rentals, if we think about that for a second, it's there's a lot of different property miniatures I could choose in insert market here, San Diego, Gallenberg, Galveston, Texas, Myrtle Beach, Destin, Florida, blah, blah, blah. But I'm choosing this one because of my perceived likelihood of basically the stay being a success. So price is part of that. Maybe the stay being a success is getting a good value for your money to some degree. But it doesn't mean they want the cheapest price. Like properties book every day that are not the cheapest, obviously. So we know that that's not the only motivation that they have.

It's everything that you wrap around it. It's your reviews online. It's your website the way it looks. It's the video. Go back to what you're saying there. The reason I say that is like if you're watching video ads nonstop of a someone doing cabin rental tours and you watch them every week or once every two weeks over the course of six months. Of course they're going to think you first. And when I go in our client's data and I always

say this, you know, when we bring up a dashboard report and we say, all right, we had 25% of your traffic this month was coming directly to the website. There's no referral source or anything. And we did 87 bookings for $124,000 of gross rental revenue. And then I just moved past it. But I probably should spend a minute on that some cases to be like, that is the cumulative effort of so many different things that have happened before. That's the brand. The brand is when people go on, do they go on Google and search for us directly and click on a branded ad it converts? And yes, that's not complex to do from a paid ads perspective, nor is it always giving you 100% of net new bookings. I can acknowledge that. You also should be doing

it, unfortunately, you have to do the branded campaigns. But anyways, if someone's doing a brand search campaign and finding you, looking through Google ads, or just going straight to your website and finding you that way, what I always tell everybody is like, no one woke up this morning and said, I'm going to type Conrad Schoolcavins.com and the Google hit enter and they give them five grand. Like, no one ever did that. Like there was a marketing event that preceded it beforehand. They were past guests. They had positive experience before. They followed you on social media.

They saw an ad. They clicked on it. Then they came back 25 days later. Blah, blah, blah, blah. We could do a thousand things. And I think those sort of GMs, owners, you know, people that don't see that are just missing the forest through the trees and clients that just trust in the process of like, that's what brand building actually is.

That's the manifestation of it. Because if you say something, this was kind of part of the Hormozia video, if you say something or has to be a proof point to that. You have to be specific. You can't just say, like, we have a powerful brand. You have to say, we have a powerful brand because we can have a powerful brand because we can have a condo in the same building as another property manager, and people will pay a higher rate to book that condo from us. We have a better brand than our competition because people search

us on Google at a higher clip. There's more volume of searches specifically on Google. When they come into our website directly, they convert at a very high percentage. They convert at 1%, 2%, 3% of those visitors coming in directly who do a date search end up converting on our website. Those are all proof points of what that looks like. Now the hard part is, you know, okay, to your marketers. How do you prove that, right, with advertising or anything else. And that's where things fall apart very quickly because despite the tracking we do have, none of it's perfect, none of it's going to exactly distribute everything perfectly. So you have to be essentially investing ahead of where you are, to some degree, in many cases. And I think people are uncomfortable with that. And

frankly, most people who are really uncomfortable with that, to be really blunt, have really small businesses, usually. They don't really scale to get very big. And the biggest clients we work with, it's not just that they have more money. It's that they have more, almost like, faith in spending money on the advertising and you should demand your agency partner, your vendor, your in-house team member be accountable to the advertising results, of course, but also knowing that like you're never going to get some button white glove answer into like this is exactly a number of bookings that came from this campaign. Like do your best to get all the data you can, but at some point you have to recognize like we're throwing money out there to get the swearness and it'll come back to us in

this ways and we can measure some of those ways. So that was a long rant. No, no, no, that's, but it is. I think it's a great point. And it is when we've talked about variations of that being, you know, is social effective? Is it not effective? Well, turn it off. It is. That's the last way you want to figure something like out is turning it off and realizing, oh, yeah, it did have a pretty big impact in the direct side of things as well. And all of the other pieces of the business. So as much as you can, you want to try to measure that. I mean, use search console. Use all these things to kind of connect the dots and really tell that user story and that user journey. Use that attribution path. It's hidden, but it's still.

still back there and you can. You can tell the story of, okay, this person actually had multiple touch points. We were following one this past week. It took 47 days and we saw 11 different touch points on that attribution path from different sources each time. It was pretty incredible. That story is out there. And when you do, when you have Google ads contributing, it's kind of interesting to kind of track that as well because they could come in through a PMAX, but it came through a search ad initially and kind of seeing how that search pattern changes even in that individual user there. So yeah, I do.

I think that brand obviously plays a big part of all this that we're talking about. But, you know, Google ads, organic, tying it all together here, this is all we're trying to do is paint a picture. All we're trying to do is put together a strategy that, yes, ultimately your paid search ads, branded search ads, your top of funnel search ads, all these ads are going to drive more brand awareness. They're going to drive more traffic to the website. They're going to drive all these different, probably the one thing that we haven't gone into as much detail outside of maybe some of those intro ones is, why are we using these specific types as opposed to

some of the other campaign types? You know, why search as opposed to discovery? Maybe that's for a little later in the year here. But yeah, yeah, Exactly. It's always fun to talk Google ads. You know, this is the stuff we nerd out about probably more than anything else. I don't know. I see always certainly in the discussion, but the Google world, the Bing world, the LLM world. This is where we live. So we're like going down this path.

Let me grab a few other things that we can probably put it about on this one. So next step, PMAX is going to grab a lot of branded search keywords. So be aware of that. You know, just realize that if you have a brand campaign and you have a PMAX campaign, and the PMAX campaign could be, again, Destin's Lord of Vacation Rentals, just know it's going to grab a lot of, you know, whatever the name of your company is. So you may be okay with that. You may not be.

What I've found honestly is that I'm not, I don't hate it. And in fact, we've done some PMAX brand only builds that have proven to be really effective to the point where we've turned off some of the search stuff because it seems to grab a little bit more relevant searches. Or I think it does show like the PMAX ads look a little bit different visually. So I think sometimes they might perform a little bit better because the ad unit actually looks different, even in search like it pulls in the local business and stuff a little bit stronger. So just be aware of that, like going through PMAX search terms, see if you're getting a lot of brand there. If you are and you want to test it more in a pure way, you know, separating the two, then do that, you know, add negative.

You can add bring exclusions in your PMAX campaign. So do that. And then you may have to add negative keywords as well, by the way. I have a client where it's like a common two dictionary word side by side, but they're spelled, they're spaced out in the brand name. So it's like the word, it's not what this is, but it's like ocean front is like the names. But people were searching the two words smushed together. And then it was, like, I thought it was excluding the brand and I wasn't. So, yeah, you got to go through your search terms.

Google is not perfect at capturing these negative brands. So be aware of that. Again, we talk about video. Google actually, you may have seen this, Paul. Google can actually auto-generate video ads now, too. So you could give it actually photos. And it turns into kind of like this Ken Byrne style, you know, AI-assisted moving video.

So, I don't know. TBD is that helpful? Maybe in a retargeting context, like, they're seeing you. You know, if you don't have that, then I'm not going to see you on YouTube. So I kind of above the camp of like, give me good video assets, but in lieu of good video assets,

you kind of take what you can get and you can't be too picky, I guess, you know, on that side of thing. So, yeah, that would be something else that I would say there. Other than that, you know, some other odds and ends out of cleanup here, if you can use the Google tag tracking

instead of importing your conversions from GA, analytics, that seems to be a positive trend as far as attribution. You probably are, that's probably worthy endeavor for you to explore if you can do that with your agency or with your technical web partner. What I would suggest, by the way,

is that you may want to run the Google tag and then analytics side by side, make your analytics conversion, version, event secondary. So it's just they're measuring things, but it's not actually bidding based on that data, nor would you want to report on that data as being profit, because, or revenue, excuse me, because that would be double counting. We don't want to do that, as it were. So one other thing there, I'm trying to think of any other, you know, odds and hence here, search term analysis. I think we touched on this in a previous podcast, Gemini, I actually

find to be the best search term analysis tool or Claude. Clod or Gemini, they're both really good. So it's sort of a bit of irony that Google's AI product is really good at finding negative search terms that Google itself in the ad engine decided to bid on and run your ads against. So definitely big fan of that. I did a batch yesterday. And you know, you go click run. This was like 35,000 plus search terms. Gemini's context windows bigger.

That's why I tend to prefer it sometimes over like chat chit for example. You know, you go get a coffee or a soda. You come back and all of a sudden, you know, everything's all done. And it's run this whole analysis and give you all these negative keywords ideas that you can put into your account. So big fan of that makes our lives a little bit easier. Budget pacing. We've used a tool for many years now called Optimizer.

Still big fan of that tool. If you're looking for a tool to kind of help you or help your team manage a large Google Ads budget, couldn't be a bigger fan of optimizer and helping you kind of manage budgets. I guess I'm digging for you, reporting, et cetera. So big fan of that.

But just some other odds and ends. Some of those things are new. Some of those things have been around for a minute, but all stuff that's on my mind as we, excuse me, continue to manage ads spent for the rest of 2026. Any other little things on your side that little hacks or tricks people love those things?

I would say be cautious when you get still recommendations. they're not recommendations to improve your performance. They're recommendations that get you to spend more. So just keep that in mind. You might pluck into some better performance. Yeah, but sometimes extra spend is better performance. Sometimes it's not. So I agree.

Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, it's just like it's a mystery box. You know, you click some of those buttons and you get whacked in the side of the head. Yeah, I would never again. If you ever see auto apply, never have auto apply in place. AI Max is something that I have admittedly. I have not experimented with as much, because I'm scared of it.

I mean, yeah, we've had some good experiences. That scared me. And like when I look at the things that they're trying to do with AI Max, I'm not seeing, I mean, yes, using some historical context and conversions, maybe that's something that down the road will get better. But right now, I'm good with AI being everywhere else and not necessarily behind the scenes trying to move the needle on my campaigns. I'm with you. Honestly, though, it's just a rebrand of Broadmatch. That's all it is. You know, yeah, it's not new.

It's just, you know, broadmunch. I will say this on AIMX, one quick test I could say for you is do AIMX consider flipping it on? Let Google customize your text, but do not let them change your URLs. Correct. That's been the little path that has led to the most success with our testing so far. So, hey, find me some new keywords. You can still use the URLs that I've given you. So don't go and, like you said, index my whole site and start firing off random stuff that I don't want.

Right. But you can change the text a little bit. And what I notice is the text changes are very minor. Like we have a client where it's like they change the text that they search ocean front. They go put ocean front and some of the copy and tweak it a little bit. So I'm like, okay, that's helpful. And it matches a little bit better to their search intent. Boom, the conversion rate that we have is much better.

So I would say it's worthy of considering testing. But don't do it if you have a tiny budget because like it'll just run through stuff. This is like a this is a two, three, four, five thousand dollar type of month thing. And up where you're like testing. And you can say I can burn a few hundred bucks here through some bad stuff, add some negatives, get it tuned in. now I'm benefiting from all this new stuff that I didn't know was there before. So if you're small, then you need to be hyper-focused on those stuff that's going to convert best. I always say, like, get your ads profitable first before you spend more.

Like, don't come out the gate spend in 10 grand a month if you're not feeling like that's going to be profitable or close to profitability. And that's where you're going to get the best results with the Google ads for sure. So I agree. All good. We'll put a bow in this one. Paul, the listener made it all the way to the end. Probably a pretty interesting person because they listen to 30-odd minutes of us talking about Google ads specifically in the vacation rental industry. Yeah.

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