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Key Takeaways
Make one Performance Max campaign the centerpiece — 50-75% of budget: The standard vacation rental build now is PMax plus a brand campaign plus DSA targeting property detail pages, with PMax taking $50-75 of every $100 per day. And instead of separate campaigns for pet friendly or oceanfront, run one PMax campaign with an asset group per theme — three campaigns and seven asset groups has beaten the fragmented old structure. Peel a theme into its own campaign only when it earns it.
The first 30 days of PMax decide everything: That’s your window to see what Google thinks your key concepts mean and correct it — negative keywords, narrowing intent, killing junk queries. Paul sees property-management campaigns pull generic ’rental companies’ and long-term-rental searches that match intent maybe half the time. Monitor heavy early; the algorithm learns from your fixes.
PMax finally shows its work — read the search terms and channel data: The black box is now an opaque box: you get search terms and a channel breakdown across search, display, YouTube, Discover, and Gmail. Use it. Two identical builds can land 98% search in one market and 50% display in another, and display traffic converts far worse. A steering feature that biases delivery toward search is coming; until then, watch the mix and cut waste.
Falling CPCs are hiding falling conversion rates: Cheap non-search inventory is dragging cost per click down while most clients’ conversion rates from ads traffic run below last year as guests shop around more. Google would rather sell a thousand 30-cent clicks than two hundred dollar clicks. Judge the account on booked revenue, not on cheaper clicks.
Skip video ads unless the asset is genuinely good: Plenty of campaigns do awesome with zero video, and YouTube is its own medium — a shaky repurposed social clip won’t cut it. What works is presenter-led property tours: ’let me show you around this cabin in two minutes,’ essentially a commercial. No assets like that? Ignore the nagging in the interface and put the money elsewhere unless you’re deliberately building brand awareness.
Brand spend shows up as direct traffic — learn to read it: Nobody wakes up, types your domain into Google, and hands you five grand without a marketing event preceding it. When a quarter of monthly traffic arrives direct and converts at a high rate, that’s cumulative brand at work. Attribution will never be perfect — the clients who scale are the ones willing to invest ahead of what tracking can prove, while still holding their agency accountable.
Guard your brand terms inside PMax: PMax will happily grab your branded searches. Sometimes that’s fine — brand-only PMax builds have beaten standard search campaigns because the ad unit renders richer. But decide on purpose: add brand exclusions and negative keywords, and check search terms for variants like your two-word brand name searched as one smushed word that slips past the exclusion.
AI Max is broad match rebranded — test it on a leash: The one test worth running: let it customize your ad text but never your URLs — no indexing your whole site and firing traffic at random pages. Small text tweaks, like working ’oceanfront’ into copy to match the query, have lifted conversion rates. Only test with real budget, a few thousand a month and up; on a small account it burns spend before it tunes in.
Steal the housekeeping wins: Smaller changes paying off across accounts right now:
- Track conversions with the Google tag instead of GA4 imports — run both, but set the GA event to secondary so it never double-counts or drives bidding
- Feed 30,000+ search terms to Gemini or Claude for negative keyword analysis; it flags junk Google itself chose to serve
- Use a budget-pacing tool like Optmyzr to manage larger accounts
- Never enable auto-apply recommendations — they exist to raise spend, not performance
What We Cover In This Episode
Conrad and Paul deliver a spring 2026 update on Google Ads for vacation rental managers: why Performance Max now anchors the build, how to structure asset groups and read the newly opened search-term and channel data, when video is worth running, how brand spend shows up in direct traffic, and the settings that separate profitable accounts from spend leaks.
