Heads In Beds Show - We Predict: What's Going To Happen With Google Search In The Next Year?

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul have some fun with a predictions episode! They review what might happen between now and Google in September 2025 and what will change along the way. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101‘Google Is a Monopolist,’ Judge Rules in Landmark Antitrust Case🔗 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 Meds show presented by BuildUp Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacation 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 Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All right, Paul, how's it going? What's going on today? It's a day. You know the wonderful activity that is always going on in the house at all times. We have young families, we have young kids kids and occasionally we can commiserate on the, oh, let's say rambunctious nature of young boys playing together. And

it's, yeah, I think we've enjoyed the pre-show conversation and you've gotten to enjoy a little bit of the action that I have going on around the house. So how are you doing, sir? Yeah, you're doing more parenting than I am today, that's for sure. But yeah, all good, all good. My son, I believe, so we're recording this, late-ish portion of August. So my middle son, it was his first day today,

and my oldest son had been in school since Monday. We're recording on Thursday at this moment in time. And this is my belief. I think my middle son faked an illness today to come home early from school. I think there was a fake, a fake vomiting situation. Oh no, I don't feel good. And sort of, you know, appealing to the teacher,

hey, I want to come back. You know, I don't feel great. And he was dropped off at 7 AM by my wife. I was here watching my daughter. By 9.25 AM. He was sitting back in the kitchen table, smiling, laughing, having a great time. Not that sick. You know, we know when children are sick when they're not sick. That sort of thing. So yeah, it's, it's certainly one of those situations. Well, I guess what it speaks to, and this is today's

topic is you can't predict how a five year old is going to act. You certainly can't predict how Google is going to act. So maybe that dovetails us into what we're talking about today, which is a fun one. I think I think this was your idea. I forget whose idea it was, but we came up with a bunch of different episode ideas. What's going to happen with Google in 2025? Now we're recording this a little bit early. I mean, some of these things may happen in, you know, 2024. Maybe we can think about if we end up being correct, or if one of our predictions ends up being correct. And this is released probably in the beginning of September that timeframe. And it happens like December of this year, whatever we're taking credit,

let's just say things are gonna happen in the next 12-ish months or so. Obviously that'll include a little bit, the back half of 24 in the beginning part of 2025. But we've got a list, I think we've got about five each. So we'll spend a few minutes on each one of what we think the predictions are gonna be. Now we generated these ideas for the listener's benefit

without knowing what yours is. But I did take a look here before we hit record, just so we're not repeating ourselves too much and things like that. So we came up with each of our list of five without the other person's knowledge. Now we'll kind of share them, reveal about them, talk about them a little bit. And go through that today. So lead us off, Mr.

Manzi, what you got, what's your first prediction? What's going to happen with Google in the travel search results over the next 12 months? Yeah. So I, I still think this is the biggest and best opportunity for Google. And it is to have more of that personalized travel agent experience. I think it's going to happen within Gemini. I kind of bounced around back and forth between this one being, okay, they're going to have a

standalone app that's going to be just the Google travel app, but I do. I think they're going to keep it in line with what they're currently doing right now. You're starting to see some parts of this where once you're starting to put some of those prompts in, I want to go to on a three day getaway, I want to go here, I want to do this. It's starting to be there. But having someone actually having Google actually select the flights for you, you know, position the hotels and rentals, whatever that happens to be, correctly. And it is, I think right now what we were seeing what happened when those results came out, when it connected to Google Hotels is, it's okay, it's still working. And I mean, it is,

Gemini is still learning. The results are starting to get better. But I think that they have two good of a ecosystem in place on the travel side with flights with hotels and rentals and with Experiences and I mean, I think that's something that the travel guides. I don't know how frequently they're used I would love to see that data behind the scenes of how often are people actually going to the experiential of okay These are the top destination spots top hot spotspots, top tourist traps for whatever, for lack of a better word there. But I can see at some point that all being composed for you, that all being booked for you, and it being done right within that Gemini or that AI platform, whatever that looks like. So what are your thoughts there? You kind of dovetail into that a little bit with

some of yours. But what do you think about that? Yeah, I think I it's really tough to make these AI predictions, to be honest with you, because I guess we don't really know where it's all going to go. Right. And it feels like if you make a prediction now, certainly 6090 days from now, it might things might change, or this company might go out of business, or, you know, might get might get bought out or who knows, right, Or new these new models get dropped. And it's like, Oh, this one's better and cheaper and all that kind of stuff. So I didn't have as many AI predictions as you did. But I think this is a I don't mean this in a bad way, but a safe one or a logical a really logical one, you know, that might occur, right? It's kind of this further,

you know, I guess, like, cross pollination, I guess, we thought that was all going to happen with API's is kind of how I'm thinking, but it seems like it's not going to be APIs. It's going to be AIs, right? It's going to do some of this where, you know, in theory, someone could have built an API integration to like, oh, Expedia could have like gone into your Gmail inbox maybe and pulled some of this stuff out. But it wasn't really something that was actually desirable to get done there. So, you know, it didn't happen with nearly the same clip or nearly the same rate as it was before. So, yeah, I mean, I think this is a really logical one. I don't see why that wouldn't be the case. I guess the question would be, do we end up seeing some sort of net benefit from Google's end

where it's like people would want to use Google Services or book through Google Services, for example, if they do have some kind of benefit in doing so? That's kind of one thought process that I have there. So I'm imagining something where I booked a flight on Google Flights or through the Google Flights portal, and that information will be more accessible to my little travel agent

than if I did book directly in American. And it kind of is maybe Google trying to exert more and more control. I guess we'll see. This whole antitrust ruling, maybe that's going to change things or not change things. I got one prediction on that. So we'll see where that goes.

But yeah, I think ultimately it makes a lot of sense for Google to go in this direction. And I guess in my visioning, and I guess Matt has done this a little bit. If you open the Facebook app, I think ultimately makes a lot of sense, you know, for Google to kind of go in this direction. And I guess I'm envisioning and I guess Matt has done this a little bit. If you open like Facebook app, I guess there's now like this little bot at the top. You can kind of talk to it and it knows more about you and stuff like that. So it seems like that's the direction to go in. You know, you're going to have an iMessage thread soon enough with these like smart, intelligent thing that Apple's coming up with here in the new version of iOS, I think in a month or two. So I think that's where we're going. I think Google will do a version of it.

I think integrating it into those experiences makes a ton of sense. I guess the question is, how smart will it be? We'll be able to like scrape out stuff from your emails if you book directly with the property manager will be able to like read that stuff. Or we'll get to do some kind of formatting. Or is now they are smart enough where it's like, No, like if it just makes sense, like if it says check in date, whatever, check out date, whatever, it can just go and

read that text. And it doesn't need to be like formatted in a specific way like JSON used to be that way. It had to be formatted very precisely. I think what the AI has done over the past few months is that you can sort of be imprecise with AI. I notice when I'm typing to the AI or a prompt nowadays, I don't worry about making a typo, because it always understands when I make a typo.

I used to be, with code, we think it has to be so precise. But the AI is not really that specific. You can just kind of mash the keyboard, and it gets the right output there. So I think you're on the right track there. I could co-sign this one. It's your prediction, but I could co-sign this one. This one happening, for sure.

All right, so I'll kind of go a little bit of a more practical direction. So my first one, Google would have it will have a core update or some kind of noted, planned, announced search engine update in every quarter of next year. But none will be clear what they're actually trying to do. So the way I kind of wrote this prediction is that Google as constantly, and it feels like this has happened a little bit more regularly this year, making these changes to the search

results. Okay, that's fine. Like that's Google's right search engine. They can change whatever they want. The trouble is that I think as I go look at them, I don't actually know what they're trying to accomplish. There's been so many updates over the past year, in particular, like this year in particular, that have just straight up nuked sites that were highly valuable,

highly useful sites. And then there's been updates that have actually benefited sites that don't seem to deserve that traffic. And then a lot of stuff stays the same that maybe you should deserve it. So I just don't know what Google is trying to accomplish. I don't know if they're trying to lean more towards the big brand sites, like the large OTAs in our space,

or if they're trying to give little guys a shot. I feel like sometimes the update seems to benefit more of the little sites and keeps the larger sites somewhat neutral. In other cases, it's been the other way. So I guess what's the funny part of the prediction is I don't really know exactly what Google's trying to accomplish.

But I do know they're going to keep tweaking. I don't think they're going to stop tweaking. And I think they're going to have named announcements a lot more regularly than they have before, potentially where there's one every quarter minimum. And it could be that there's six or seven, if not more core updates over the next 12 months is my prediction. I mean, I think it seems like if you look over the last two, three years, it has been

about three ish, four ish. It did feel like for a while it was maybe two core updates, three core updates per year. But I think you're, you're spot on. And the idea of SEO marketing professionals not actually understanding what Google is trying to do immediately made me think back to someone online, who's I think on LinkedIn, who just said, the worst thing that could have happened to the internet was SEO. Because at that point, everybody started trying to, we had the blueprint, everybody starts gaming the system, and we're not actually getting any better value. And there's no better value to doing the searches on Google. So I think this is 100% spot on.

And I think it's something that Google needs to do. I think they need to be more transparent, especially with how the last, let's say eight months have gone from the monopoly. They are a monopoly. That's official. As of recording, that's been the case for a while now. They need to be more transparent. AI overviews was not good. It was bad. They rolled out some things here. And you can go back to the end of 2023 with helpful helpful content update there are a lot of people that aren't super happy with Google it's not just the SEO people which I think that's that's a big majority of it but I think people have truly seen the experience on

Google go down and Google's not going anywhere yet. I mean, it is still too big. I think we're in that too big to fail mode still, but they also can't get complacent where they're just assuming that either there's not going to be a better search product out there, which I think at some point there will be, and that people aren't going to, that they still have that user behavior of they have to adopt a new platform. So don't rest on your laurels, Google. I'm going to say with regard to that prediction. But yeah, that's right. So all right. Number two.

So let me hop into mine. Let's hear. So something I've seen trend, I've seen a lot more frequently is hotels having a lot of presence in the vacation rental results. And that's something I I'm not going gonna say that's a bad thing for hotels because any way you can increase your exposure, even if it might not be giving people that desired end result of, oh, I thought I was getting a vacation rental

and this is an onsite hotel room or not even an onsite manage, maybe it's just a hotel room that people are using the OTA for and the Metasearch for. Yeah, it is. This is something where I'm not exactly sure whether it's Google manipulating those results or if it is if it's always the the hotels, you know, opening the channel up and saying, you know, I want to go through the vacation rental side of things as opposed to the hotel unit side of things. I would be especially with some of the results, more general results such as lodging and accommodations where Google

is already trying to mix in some hotel and some vacation rental results. And I've seen on vacation rental side too, it starts with vacation rentals and then you have a hotel room. That's clearly a hotel room because it says the name of the hotel right in the property description there or the name of the the rental itself. So I just think that hotels eventually are going to overwhelm the vacation rental units in the vacation rental directory because they're going to see it as an opportunity to get in front of maybe some fresh faces that they haven't gotten in front of in a few years, or just again, get getting more exposure out there because everybody's feeling the booking crunch right now. I mean, as the economy waivers will say, we're all trying to

fill rooms. So if you can fill fill hotel rooms in the vacation rental side of things, I would certainly do it. So what do you think? Having a little bit of mixed portfolio, I'd say right now. Yeah, I do for sure. I have kind of a foot in both worlds, certainly more in the vacation rental world than the other one. But yeah, I mean, it's ultimately I think, you know, vacation rentals have gotten more like hotels over the past few years in terms of how people might think about them or the amenities they have or whatever the case may be. And certainly, many of the hotel brands are very vacation rental curious. I mean, as we record this, it was about a week ago or maybe less a few days ago that Marriott and Sonder partnered up. Maybe

Sonder's original vision was we're going to take out the Marriott's in the hotels of the world, our product is so much better. And then they kind of ended up in this hybrid land where it's well, it's kind of both now you can book a Sonder property on Marriott, right? So much just another one of their brands now from a distribution standpoint. So very interesting to see those kind of things happen. So yeah, I think the lines are a little blurred, particularly when it comes to like, let's just say smaller condo type inventory. So what is the difference between like a, you know, a condo and a large hotel suite? I don't know, like we're kind of splitting hairs at that point, honestly, you know, staff, not staff, you know, check in desk, no check in desk, and so on and so forth. So I think a lot of guests depending on the destination, depending on what they're after, you know, it's certainly a little bit different. Now we'll say this, though, that that whole home market kind of conversation or that's, you know, single family freestanding home, that's a bit different, you know what I mean? And it's interesting, because like, I was thinking about Verbo recently, too. And like, they do all this advertising that's like, against the shared room concept. I saw some data from Jamie Lane over at airDNA that I think he posted this on Twitter. And maybe I can have this down pretty

quickly here while we're chatting. But I think he posted something to the fact that like, shared room listings are like less than 1% now of Airbnb's inventory. And when you go do a search on Airbnb, like you don't see a lot of shared room listings showing up in the search results. Like I don't believe that's the that's the case. So yeah, if I can hunt that down and reference it here in a second, I certainly will do that. But yeah, if the majority of the inventory is whole home on these major OTAs, right? When you look at Verbo and those different things, then it makes me wonder, yeah, like what is Verbo actually advertising if the majority of it is actually still, you know, what we typically think of as majority of it is actually still what we typically

think of as large single-family homes that are converted into vacation rentals? I don't know what the right answer is there. But I think for, again, condo-type inventory, I don't say people don't care where they stay, because they do. But for more like, I'm on a budget, here's what I'm looking for, certainly people

might favor that sort of thing over a large family home. And I think Google mixing that stuff together a little bit is not a bad thing if they can monetize it all, which is one of my predictions that we'll get to here in a second. Perfect. Number two for you, sir. OK, awesome.

Well, I'll go to that one then. All right, so my second one is Google Vacation Rentals introduces, finally, a pay to play model or sponsored listings of some kind, which is similar to what they've already done on the Google Hotels product. So that's part one of my prediction. Part two is that Airbnb takes part in this. So famously, I guess, or maybe if infamously

is the right term, Airbnb at one point did list in like that Google vacation rental feed that Google had kind of gone out there. And then it wasn't too long after they pulled it. And I was like, well, that's interesting. They did all this work, engineering work, one would imagine technical work to get the listings in the right format and send them out to Google.

And at the moment, as the time that we record this, that is basically a free service. imagine technical work to get the listings in the right format and send them out to Google. And at the moment, as the time that we record this, that is basically a free service. You know, Google, you know, the inventory that shows up there is not really monetized in any way. Why wouldn't Airbnb want the free traffic, one wonders. And I think what they realized is that, wow, if we give Google all this power, they will eventually click monetize us. So if we just omit our inventory, we're the 100 pound gorilla in the room as far as the inventory goes. Google doesn't have the inventory, right? They kind of want the inventory, they're open to the inventory, because what would they love to do? Of course, sell ads against it. So I think that now might

be the time. And I think that two things might happen at the same time. One, they could have some kind of sponsored or like click here to run a Google Vacation Rental ad that might show in the search results at the top. And just like they do with hotels, right, it's either commission model, a CPC model, or a date search model, or different models, right? And we'll see what they kind of end up doing there. And more importantly, not only that, I think Airbnb will partake because they need traffic. If they're going to have some softening demand, or they're going to have less bookings coming in, they have to go look around and go, well, we're just kind of like leaving this real estate, if you will, empty, we could go fill it up. And they seem like an obvious candidate to want that traffic and potentially pay for it. So

it's a two-part prediction. I feel less confident about the second part because I think Airbnb can easily say, forget it. Even though bookings are down, we're not willing to like cross that line, so to speak, and give Google that much power. Like that may set a bad precedent long-term. So we'll sort of hold our inventory on our site

and just hope to do more with brand marketing or advertising or just regular Google search ads, which of course Airbnb still does. Tens of millions of dollars of that every single year, make no mistake. Yeah, Chesky loves to get up and talk about how they don't do so much advertising and then you go look at the quarterly reports and there's like, you know, billions of dollars of advertising that goes on but different discussion for a different day, perhaps.

So yeah, it's one of those things I think where that will happen. And I think that probably most likely, it will get open potentially to, you know, smaller vacation rental managers, we click a button and get your vacation will in the top of the search results, just like you could do that currently with Search Ads. So that's my second prediction. My, I'm going to, we're going to take a little side track of that. I just hope that anything where vacation rentals, like I want them to have a Google vacation rentals. I don't care if you just put like, put lipstick on a pig. Just have something separated I hate that anything you're managing within the meta search side of things is all Google hotels

That's you know, there's my there's my old man yelling at the at the clouds right now But I I think you've you've hit the nail on the head of what I want to happen That's what I think. This is probably of all the predictions This is the one I want to have happen the most because I do think that it does have a potential huge impact on some, let's say small to mid-size advertisers and property managers that do have a little bit of revenue coming in and can spend that and pay to play more on the MetaSearch side of things where it is. It's a little more exciting. I, I miss being able to manage message for hotels. That was one of those things where it took some time to learn how to do it.

But once you figure out the nuance, Oh boy, you can, you can really, I mean, fill specific dates, fill those, those soft periods, go, go and do some really. Intricate bidding strategies. So I hope that you are 100% right now, number two at the very least there. Yeah. All right. Awesome.

All right, do you want to take the next swing at it? What you got next? I got it. So Google will continue to try to take away a marketer's ability to, quote, manage ads with the next new ad campaign type. I think what, you know, we can kind of draw the line back to smart campaigns, which were the concept,

I mean, I hate that Google started with the Google business profile, my business at that, Google My Business. Okay, part of the completion of your Google My Business listing was creating a Google Ads account. Like you were a, you got a fair score or a less than 100% score, the yellow indicator, unless you had a Google Ads campaign creator account. But these are all smart campaigns and we're not even having to build a full expert mode,

we'll say, campaign. It's, here's some themes, give some themes here, just write one headline, write one description, and we're going to send some ads to add traffic your way. Oh, it's just the worst. And that was the first part. I mean, that the smart campaigns were, yeah, they they drove some solid ROI when you dug beneath the layers and saw, oh, it's all branded traffic. Okay, just got to adjust the strategy a little bit. I think P max performance max has kind of taken on that

same thing of let's add more to it as far as the assets of display assets, video assets, all that stuff. Awesome. Let's make them more engaging. And admittedly, I think the performance max ads when you see them in the wild, they're pretty cool. I will give Google that that that grace and benefit and whatever they need there. However, our ability to see the results at a deeper level, more granular level just isn't there. I know they they released something in the last week or two about

having a little more granularity and that reporting at the asset level, but it's just not there yet. And I think that that is something that I always appreciated the ability to put bit adjustments on things and and really go down to that level. Hey, if you're gonna if you're gonna manage something and you're starting to see trends at a micro level and you can impact that, that's awesome. But with every change that gets made right now, and you see it when you're creating just any campaign, a search campaign, display campaign, anything like that,

some of those steps along the way have been taken out. I mean, it is the ability to target specific groups. I mean, you have to dig to be able to put in audience segments and you have to dig to make sure that you're targeting the right locations properly. We've talked about that in some previous things, but Google is making it harder to get the right,

the traffic that you want, especially for marketers who know what they're looking for, know the audience, know the demographics, know all those things. So I can only assume that there will be a new ad campaign type because again, they're trying to make these more AI driven. I can only assume that there will be a new ad campaign type because again, they're trying to make these more AI driven. Any of those recommendations now, it seems like, oh, this is the, I don't know,

AI smart or the AI smart option, AI smart bidding, whatever those recommendations are, this is the AI essentials. I think that's what it is, AI essentials for any of those recommendations. Okay. Google, I don't need you to do the work for me. I'm happy to manage and try to get these ads perform at as good a level as we can there.

The drive for AI, and this is, I'm not a huge AI fan. I think that it's a necessary evil as with with some other things, but certainly the AI driven marketing options that we're getting are so so and I just I can only see that have continuing to happen and taking away our ability to again refine actually manage an ad you're going to set it and forget it and it's not the way it should that have continuing to happen and taking away our ability to, again, refine, actually manage an ad, you're going to set it and forget it. And it's not the way it should be done. So I don't like the fact that Google is pushing us all towards in that direction. What are your thoughts there? Maybe you can hop over to number three or whatever you think there.

Yeah, no, I can't I can't disagree with any of that. I think ultimately, you know, you're right, like our control has gotten eroded is the word that came to mind over time, right? We used to have complete control over keywords, we used to have complete control over bids, we used to have complete control. I mean, I don't I don't know exactly if budget was always that controllable, or, you know, that whole like 30 day rule, I'd have to think about that one. But needless to say, over time, the controls gotten, you know, we've gotten further and further away from the steering wheel. I'm like backing up,

hopefully the mic is still picking it up. You know, and it's hard to think that that's going to go the other way. Because it's one of those situations too, where to be fair, Google does have some case to be made with like, you are probably, you know, too restrictive with your keywords, like we can actually get you some good performance and stuff like that. But like a toddler, playing with a knife, like you've got to be very careful about what they think they're doing right, because they certainly can do some things. And they put things all the time and recommendations, we talked about this at length that are,

you know, supposedly, their AI driven recommendations. And there's a lot of a lot of junk mixed in with some gold, I guess, you know, sometimes with those recommendations, and you've got to unfortunately, like waste money to figure out what's what if you're new to the game, or you haven't managed a lot of accounts before. And that's a bummer. Honestly, I don't think that Google necessarily wants that, to be honest with you, like I think they do long term, like what's most healthy for them is people paying getting good return on their ad spend and stuff like that. But it's almost like the incentive poll is too strong, you know, for

them to ignore it, right? They're a public company, they've got to increase revenue. There's some product manager somewhere that says, Hey, if we put this button here that says click it, and we'll change all your keywords to broad match, like 10% of people will click it, you know, we'll get those people to like buy a lot more keywords, like, you know, I'm sure the math works out very much in their favor there. So yeah, I'm with you. I would argue P max is not that far away from what you're describing right now. And as you make a new campaign, what does Google want you to make a lot of time now? P max. So hard to think that that's going to slow down.

If anything, it'll probably speed up. Well, my next one's pretty quick. We can go through this one. I would argue in just a minute. I think Google's antitrust lawsuit sort of landmark legal case means nothing. Nothing's going to change. Nothing is actually going to be different in 2025 because I think it's a lawsuit with billions of dollars in the line, tens of billions of dollars in the line.

If Google were to do what maybe would be suggested of them or they were told to do, which is break up the company, you know, have like a cloud company, have a maybe an email company have a YouTube be its own company, and so on and so forth. And I just think that's gonna take so long to like litigate or go through like this sort of legal process. So by the end of by the end of 2025, I'll go as far as to say that so that's way more than 12 months from now, nothing will have happened. Google will still be one company or I should say like Alphabet

will still be one kind of company. The Google services that you use today will pretty much be the same thing. There won't be any separate LLCs or separate stock listing for YouTube or anything like that. And this thing is going to take years to actually drag itself out. So people celebrating, you know, Google being marked as antitrust maybe or oh, there's gonna be more positive changes for small business. I don't buy that. Like whatever the rules are today are pretty much the rules how

they're gonna be for the next little while. And if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. But I don't think I'm wrong on that one. I think it's gonna take a very, very long time for all the, you know, suits to fight it out and figure out what that actually is gonna look like in the real world for small businesses. I think you're right. But I'm also going to use that as a transition to my last one there that I, part of my prediction is actually that the crumbling will begin in 2025. Now, I don't know, I'm gonna say, having listened to your explanation,

I would agree with that. I think that it is so big and this is such a massive undertaking. I mean, let's just think that the decision to have of the outline of actually calling them on Monopoly and 286 pages, it is some deep stuff. So there is a lot to untangle, a lot to unwind there. But I do, I think before the end of the year, we will start to see something.

I mean, this might not physically be like branding changes or anything like that, but I think you're going to start to see some type of decoupling start to happen. I think YouTube is probably the most obvious like decoupling point. Search is where they're a monopoly. So I don't know how you get that to be. Like, not to get us off the road with predictions,

but let's say YouTube was its own company. Just like, I'll give you an example. We ran, we tested other ad channels for a client this year and we ran Spotify ads, audio ads. So we had to log into a different interface, use a different credit card, run different creative and so on and so forth. Okay, I mean, we didn't end up liking the results

we saw from Spotify, so we didn't end up continuing with it. So let's say YouTube was a different interface than Google Ads. I had to log into ads.youtube.com and go down that path. Is that really any different at the end of the day? I don't know. Maybe YouTube, if anything, YouTube is going to be harmed in that scenario because they're going to be getting less traffic from Google search potentially, because I'm assuming what you'd have to do in that scenario is give more equal weight in the search engine to

YouTube results versus results on other platforms. But YouTube has the most video content. So it's like if you show Bimeos and the search results, well, Bimeo doesn't have any of these. It's the same breadth and library of video content as does YouTube.com. So it's like you could argue that their monopoly allowed them to push YouTube in the search results, which gave it more traffic, which they had advantages on the technology side because they had cloud storage, they can store all these videos cheaper, faster, better bandwidth, all this kind of stuff. Like that's okay. Like maybe you're right about that. I don't really know, to be honest with you. But doesn't matter. Like if we snapped our fingers today, and YouTube was its own business,

would it make any difference? Or would YouTube still be a behemoth, and it would have its own balance sheet, its own CEO? Well, I think it already has some CEO to be honest with you. So anything that would be any different, you know, at the moment. So that's where I'm just skeptical of like, what is it? What is it actually going to mean? I think the things that would actually make a meaningful difference to the whole antitrust thing would be you fire up a new phone, for example, or like your browser. Now, if Chrome was separate from your experience, then I could see that being the case or like, Google does currently pay Apple a ton of money metric ton of money, billions of dollars

to make Google the default search engine on the iPhone. But I genuinely believe even if you fired up your iPhone and there was a button there, do you want your search engine to be Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo? Let's just pretend those three options for simplicity sake. I think of most people would still pick Bing. I think 90% of the, I'm sorry, would pick Google, sorry.

I think 98% of people would still pick Google. A fraction might pick DuckDuckGo, a fraction might pick Bing, that sort of thing. But I think 98% of people would still pick Google. A fraction might pick Doc, but go a fraction might pick Bing, that sort of thing, but I just don't think it's gonna be meaningful. So, you know, Google's market share, as far as like less people using search, let's ignore that conversation for just a second. Of the people that you search,

the percentage of how much search share they actually have in the next like two, three years, I don't see it being massively eroded, to be honest with you, unless someone big gets in the space. So I think the obvious one would be like Apple. This wasn't in my prediction list because I don't believe it to be true. I don't think you've seen enough evidence of it, but what if Apple bought DuckDuckGo and then made DuckDuckGo the default search engine on the iPhone?

Well, that could be a massive shift. I mean, most of our clients get 25% of 30% of their traffic from Safari on the iPhone. So if that magically switched overnight to be DuckDuckGo instead of Google, that would be a death blow. You know, that would be a meaningful percentage of revenue or a meaningful percentage of searches that are going off of, you know, maybe a button to switch it back to Google if you wanted to. But I think defaults are powerful. But I think also Google is almost a de facto default, even if you didn't go and set it up that way for a lot of folks, because they would just, the moment they could, they could

swap it back to that search engine. Because objectively, it's often a better search engine than these other search engines that we have access to and are available in front of us today. So yeah, yeah, we'll see. I mean, I kind of hear where you're coming from. Here's the here's the all in case. And if you listen to all in a podcast, but Chamath made this case, the case for what you're predicting, I think could be if we do it ourselves, if we go to if we go to the regulators and say, here's what we're going to do, here's our plan, and we don't make them fight us on it. They may be more agreeable to what our solution is. So like, hey, we'll go quickly. We'll do this. We'll do this.

We'll split YouTube out. We'll split Google Cloud out. Look, we're no longer a monopoly. Like these companies have to compete on their own accord. Then I could see that, you know, maybe being the case for you being correct is that Google does it by their choice or they feel like they're in control. They don't wait for the regulators to come and tell them what to do, because let's be honest, right, someone in the government making that decision for you might not know exactly all the parameters of

like, what makes a good business unit successful, they're a regulator, and that, you know, in the government, they're not you know, savvy with how Google Business works near the same level as Google themselves. So that would be my case for you being right is that they do it themselves, not like the the wheels of the legal system actually forcing them to do it in the next 1617 months, basically, I even just just to put a bow on that and that's thinking about the it's always fun to see like the annual ad spend across all like channels and it's you've got Google

search Google display YouTube I mean there are four or five Google products that show up before you even get Facebook in there so I think you're just perfectly exemplifying that it is. It's just too big. And from what we see on a day to day basis, especially for the small business, mid-sized business, they're not going to see any impact. And maybe a personal, I hope it's right. But at the same time, is it going to impact us in a negative way as marketers? I would say probably. So maybe it's just best if we all stay together. They'll have a little kumbaya moment there or something like that. Yeah, no, one of those things.

Awesome. All right. So you did your last one. So I think you've got one more. I've got you got to. OK, I've got two more. So my turn here. All right. So number four on my list, then Google ads get cheaper on a CPC basis in 2025 compared to 2024. And there are less companies bidding against you in your impression share report. So I'm actually predicting that Google ad is sort of usage and interest will go down. And you'll pay a

little bit less per click in 2025, which is not you know, maybe maybe the maybe a bit of a bull prediction and inflationary environment, one would assume that your cost per click go up. I think it might actually go down because I think you're going to see there's a lot of companies out there that are using Google Ads to do affiliate margin plays. I'm buying a click for a dollar and I'm selling it for $1.25, right? I'm making money off the middle. Now, when bookings go down and the revenue goes down a little bit, those margins just get so compressed to where I think that a lot of people are just not going to be able to survive in that world. And I think that a lot of your competition on the Google ad side of things will flame

out, will not be able to do it. The small advertiser that's maybe doing okay right now, they can put a few hundred dollars a month, a few thousand dollars a month in a little tiny individual market. Maybe they don't have the same budget. If their bookings go down, they haven't set up their business in a profitable way and they end up having to pull the plug in some of that advertising. So hopefully a similar number of searches occurring or within some level, reasonable level percentage, less people in the auction, reasonable to assume the prices will go

down in that scenario. So that's my prediction. I actually think your ads get cheaper in 2025 compared to what you paid on an average cost per click basis in 2024. I admittedly, one of the things that didn't hit my didn't make my list was Google ads are gonna get more expensive. But your but your the way you're saying it fewer players in the impressions are absolutely I mean that that if that is the end case, that is absolutely yeah, you're gonna get cheaper. And I like the way you're looking at it from the affiliate perspective of selling, selling the traffic, selling the clicks. I would say for those who have tried it, it's not a sustainable model all the time. And that's at some point along the lines, you're going to get upside down. And once you get upside down, it's really hard to get back back on the right page there.

So I tend to think that Google is going to again, they're going to charge a premium, I think they're going to find ways to as they seem to have done over the last decade plus, they're going to find ways to make make everything more expensive for you. I think and maybe it's the way that I think Google search ads are going to get more expensive. I think holistically your Google ads engagement may get less expensive.

So let's, I'll tie on to half of that at the very least there, because I do, I think Google's going to, and I think on the search side, they will, they're going to find a way to ratchet things up. But I think they're going to, you're still going to be able to find cheap traffic through the display side of things on, you know, through performance max campaigns.

You're going to be able to get something I think they're going to have to get competitive on the video side because I still see most of the non vacation rental, non hospitality vertical marketing, you know, surveys and stuff like that saying connected TV is where you want to be digital out connected TV is where you want to be digital out of home is where you want to be. That's where a lot of people are looking to and tick tock tick tock is, I think, Google and YouTube specifically have a lot of a lot of competition out there that is not going away anytime soon. So finding a way to ensure that they are that that that the connected TV portion of it is

Included with YouTube and then you know finding some of those other ways as well But I'm gonna Oh co-sign half that at least there Yeah, we gotta take it. Yeah, are you got one more? I believe and then I got one more I got one more and I think this has been not explicitly the case, but your Google business profile has played an increasingly important role with your organic presence.

I mean, I think that's something where when they started doing tests, when a lot of the big SEO names started doing tests on your active hours and how that impacted how you showed up in search, You got to have your business hours applied. Like that is something that you have to really focus on that being the first engagement that people are going to have with your business, whether that's talking about the reviews, whether that's, I mean, we've seen different iterations of the generative search experience where that's what they were giving you. They weren't directing you to a to your

website, they were directing you to kind of that map local pack view that we're familiar with right now. But the first click did not give you any opportunity to get to the website clicking on the name of the business just brought you into the more complete version of your Google Business Profile. So Google wants us to stay in their ecosystem. Google wants to answer the question. Nobody's going to tell me that's incorrect because again, look at the AI overviews. They want to provide the answer without actually getting to results. Zero search results. That's go, go, go, go down the line there. I think that optimizing your Google business profile is going to be as important. I don't know.

It's going to be bordering on more important than your brand website. Not to say that you don't need a brand website, but some of these other, some of these other things come into play the pay to play on the vacation, on the vacation rental meta search side of things, you may not need to have as many people hitting your brand.com direct booking website because they're able to take care of that right within Google. Is that a good thing for us? Is that a bad thing for us? I don't know yet, but I really do think that people who have not put a focus into the Google business profile are not, and it does, it looks like, you know,

they have no images, they have no anything to speak of there, no reviews. You're going to suffer in 2025. And that's not something we, I bet we have at least half a dozen episodes where we've talked about some variation of the importance of your Google Business Profile. But it is with these new results, pages, that is where Google wants to keep you. They want to keep you in their space,

and that is your version of their space on Google. So make sure it's up to date. Yeah. Right on. Awesome. I got one more here. I think it kind of details into my second one. So my second one, if you recall, was the pay to play

modeler sponsored listing. So I think this will be coupled by, maybe shortly thereafter, sort of a dedicated subdomain or travel page only for vacation rentals. So again, we kind of have it right now. If you do a search, you'll kind of come to the search experience where you get shown a tab on the top.

You can flip between hotels and vacation rentals. Kind of clunky, but it's there. It's kind of half built out. I think they work on that. I think they finished that at some point in 2025, or at least get it to a more solid point to almost where you can go to flights.google.com. I think hotels.google.com does the same thing.

I could see maybe vacation rentals earning a subdomain, not just a little filter tab on the actual travel search box. So right now, I think if you go to vacationrentals.google.com, I can test it really quickly. Yeah, nothing shows up there. So they don't actually have any sort of structure built out yet. I think they're going to edge in the space. I think they see opportunity in it. And I could see that being the final piece, their resistance, if you will, of their expansion into the vacation rental search box is that they give us a subdomain. They give us our own homepage, if you will. It sits next to flights.

It sits next to hotels, even things to do, or what they call the Explore tab. There's going to be vacation rentals there, and it's going to be its own dedicated website or portion of Google Search that they spend a lot more time, effort, and energy on. And that, again, dovetails nicely with my second expected thing, which

is that there's going to be ads on there. Certainly, they're going to be promoting that or talking about that with regards to travel. I think they want this inventory. I think they know they can make money off of it. And right now they haven't monetized it nearly to the level that they do many of their searches, which they make billions and billions of dollars off of these travel OTAs, bidding on that traffic, bidding on those keywords every single year. Why would they stop? Why would they not edge their way to the space further? I think that'll kind of put the gas pedal down a little bit further in that in 2025.

So that's it. Those are our five predictions. So here'd be the fun one. This is kind of my idea, Paul. I think we talked about this. So recording this again, tail end of August, you'll hear this probably the beginning of September 2024. We're gonna come back a year from now.

We've got to run through this list, you know, 10 things, see how close we were, if we were on, if we were off, what happened. So again, mostly, you know, 2025, but really we'll be in the next 12 months or so from the time of episode release. And we'll see how many points we get. I don't know, maybe there'll be a friendly wager online. How many, how many things we got right along the

way? Yeah, it could be a good one. So save this audio file, you know, bookmark this in your podcast at by choice. And we'll come back to you probably a year from now, you might be hearing these same voices, but we'll be a year older, a year wiser, a year better looking. But you know, one thing that hopefully needs to happen between now and a year from now? You gotta leave us a review, dear listeners. So if you made it all the way to the very, very end,

we thank you for listening to this one, a fun one that we had, Paul and I had fun putting it together. Go to Spotify, go to iTunes. Those are our podcast apps where we get the most downloads. Leave us five star reviews. That's not a prediction. That's not anything fancy.

That's just you clicking five stars, leaving a fun comment. We appreciate the reviews that come in. It helps a lot for more people to listen to the show. So we always do appreciate those. We thank you and we hope you have a fantastic day.