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Key Takeaways
Send the report ahead and bring two to five researched questions: A 60-slide deck read aloud is a wasted call — send it in advance and handle basic questions async. The best questions come after two minutes of research: Conrad skipped that step with his own accountant once, missed an S-corp election, and lost $30-40,000. Prepped questions get strategy; cold ones get explanations.
Get the person who actually knows the numbers on the call: One client took five calls before the person who really knew the reservation data showed up — until then everything arrived second-hand, like a game of telephone. Bigger companies distort information between departments without meaning to. Share seasonality and OTA context too: your agency is guessing at your seasonality without it.
Own every account — your agency gets user access, never admin: Your agency should not own your Google Ads account, Meta ad account, domain, or Facebook page — Meta is the most punishing, where Paul watched a manager spend six months fighting to recover access to their own business page. Be the admin, grant user access, and keep logins in a password manager. ’I don’t know who has that’ burns 45 minutes of every call it touches.
Ask where impression share caps your best campaigns: Past spend and ROAS, the good paid search question is: my best campaign shows half the time — what happens if I double it? Usually more results, but never linearly; there’s meat left on the bone until there isn’t. Paul took an Alaska fishing lodge from $15 to $150 a day and watched cost per click jump from $5 to $50.
Mine search terms and new inventory for campaigns you’d never guess: Conrad negatived out a landmark keyword, mentioned it on a call, and learned the client actually had cabins there — that conversation became a new page and campaign. Another client’s new glass house on the lake became a one-keyword campaign that put their direct booking ad above Airbnb bidding on the same property. Calls surface what keyword tools can’t.
Be skeptical of paid social attribution — Meta grabs the credit: Meta counts view-through conversions aggressively, so retargeting on an already high-converting site claims bookings that were coming anyway. The question is what’s additive, not what the platform reports. Give social credit for nudging people along — just not all of it.
Rotate creative regularly, but never kill an ad because you’re bored: Clients tire of their own ads long before audiences do. Check frequency: at four or five views people may barely recognize you yet; at 15 to 25, fatigue is real and a refresh is justified. Feed the agency new raw material constantly — videos, fresh property photos, new specials — so there’s always something to rotate in without shutting off what works.
Count engaged followers and subscribers, not totals: Accounts in this space have 100,000 followers and videos that can’t crack a thousand views, and you can buy cheap page likes that will never book a beach house. Same with email: a 10,000-person list that opens beats a 100,000-person list that’s dead. Watch list growth against unsubscribes and bounces, and resend to non-opens for extra reach.
Numbers say what happened; session recordings show why: Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity recordings and heatmaps tell the story behind the analytics — where people stall, what they ignore, why conversion sags. If data isn’t driving a decision, it’s decoration. Hold the whole call to that standard: less reading numbers aloud, more time in the strategy layer, because that’s what compounds over a year.
What We Cover In This Episode
Conrad and Paul walk through the monthly marketing review call — how to make it strategic instead of a slide read-through. They cover account ownership, the paid and organic search questions worth asking, paid social attribution and creative rotation, email health, and the session-recording data that explains what the numbers can’t.
