Listen to the podcast episode
Or listen now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Key Takeaways
Lock Google location targeting to people actually in your markets: Google defaults to showing ads to people ’in or interested in’ your locations, which is how you end up paying for clicks from other countries. Nobody is flying from India for a weekend in Myrtle Beach. Switch every campaign to presence-only targeting, and make it the first thing you check when you inherit an account — most are set up wrong.
Target DMA regions, not just states or the whole country: DMAs — the same regions TV advertisers buy — often fit a drive-to market better than state lines do. The Minneapolis-St. Paul DMA reaches into Wisconsin, so a state-level target would miss real drive-to guests. If you’re a drive-to destination, build around DMAs; if you’re a true national brand, go broader with evergreen messaging instead of dozens of state-by-state campaigns.
Don’t exclude demographics until you have 50 bookings of data: Google is guessing at age and income off search behavior — it never sees a W-9 — so early exclusions just bake in bad assumptions. Conrad waits for roughly 50 bookings before touching those boxes, and the data often surprises people: in high-spend accounts, women 55 to 65 book vacation rentals at the highest clip. Past-guest geography is the more reliable signal — export your last 100 guests and target the radius they actually come from.
Run audiences in observation mode with bid adjustments, not hard targeting: Layer in-market and affinity audiences as observation so your reach stays intact while you learn which segments convert. Then bid up 15 to 20 percent on winners and down 50 to 75 percent on losers. Hard targeting shrinks a hundred-million-person pool to a sliver and starves the algorithm; bid adjustments educate it instead.
Expect the housing flag — and fight it when it’s wrong: Since 2018, Facebook and Google treat anything that smells like real estate as housing, employment, and credit — and vacation rental sites trip the sensors constantly. Accept the flag and you lose age, gender, and income targeting; on Google, gender targeting zeroes out entirely. Conrad’s stubborn play: launch multiple ads in the ad set, let one slip through, and appeal the rejects. The platforms also killed tiny lists — you now need around 1,000 people in a custom audience for it to serve.
Treat display and video as awareness-only mystery meat: Topic, keyword, and placement targeting won’t stop Google from spending your money wherever it wants, and placement quality runs mediocre to low — think your ad on a kids’ YouTube channel. Cap this at about 10 percent of budget as a brand-recall play, comb the placement reports, and exclude ruthlessly. The bookings happen on search.
On Facebook, put your money on the warm trio first: The best-performing audiences are people who already know you. Retargeting them is a brand-awareness play, not a direct conversion machine — but it’s the highest-ROI awareness you can buy.
- Website visitors captured by your pixel
- Past guests uploaded as a custom audience
- People who follow your page by choice
Build lookalikes from past guests — for guests, never for owners: A 1 percent US lookalike seeded with your past-guest list is the right discovery play: people one layer removed from guests who already booked. But skip lookalikes for owner acquisition — you’re chasing dozens or hundreds of absentee owners, and Facebook can’t model an audience that small and specific. Scraped custom-audience data beats a lookalike there every time.
Retarget video viewers to reach Facebook groups you can’t target: You can’t target group members directly, and scraping them is a developer project. Instead, drop a genuinely watchable video into the groups where your audience lives, then retarget people who watched 50 to 75 percent of it. It’s a top-funnel nudge, not booking intent — but it’s the cleanest workaround the platform allows.
What We Cover In This Episode
Conrad and Paul walk through what ad targeting actually still works on Google and Facebook after years of restrictions — location settings, demographics, custom audiences, lookalikes, and retargeting — plus how the housing flag keeps kneecapping vacation rental advertisers and what to do about it.
