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You’re a marketer in one of the most competitive industries.
You may be tired of trying, over and over, to use the same marketing strategies that you read about online or learned about in school - but is that really going to move the needle?
We all know the big brands - Booking.com, American Airlines, The Points Guy, Royal Caribbean, Marriott, VRBO, and Hertz... but what about the emerging brands that have found their path to scale?
The Travel Marketing Podcast is about sitting down with successful marketing professionals in the travel, transportation, and tourism industry to learn what has worked for them, what they’ve learned along the way, and what new trends they’re noticing.
We are Propellic, and we’re on a mission to create more diversity in thought for the planet. We’re doing that by helping brands - specifically travel, transportation, and tourism brands - increase their reach through intelligent marketing that travels further.
This is the Travel Marketing Podcast brought to you by Propelling, bringing you the news and insights and what's working and not working in today's competitive transportation and tourism landscape. From emerging brands to the most established professionals, these lessons of intelligent marketing will help your marketing plan travel further.
Hello everybody and welcome back to the Travel Marketing Compass podcast brought to you by Propellic. My name is Brennen Bliss and I am super excited today to jump in with a good friend of mine that I've known for a while that is just a icon in the tourism and activity space. We're going to be talking about Google things to do, how to rank better on it, why you want to rank on it, and then also just some broader conversations on AI because we can't avoid that topic, especially not when talking to Christian. So I'm going to bring Christian Watson and we'll get started right away.
Hey, Christian, thanks so much for joining me today.
Hey, appreciate it, Brennen.
This is fun. Where in the world are you right now?
I’m in San Francisco Bay Area, which is unusual for me these days.
Yes. You spent a lot of time backpacking around Europe, didn't you?
Pretty much, yeah. Remote working. Digital nomading.
Digital nomading, but still paying rent or a mortgage, right?
Correct. Oh, did I get that part wrong?
No, no. No, I'm just saying. It's the worst of both worlds.
Yeah, absolutely. I did mess that up, yeah. But I still had a grown child in the house, so I would have been rude to evict him.
Ah, Oliver. Yeah?
That's right, yeah.
Very cool. Alright, well, here's what we'll do today. I have a lot of people that are listening to this that are in the tour and activity industry. We're actually just preparing to go and spend a week in San Diego together. Arrival of the Tour and Activity Conference. I think we both judged the Spotlight Awards, right?
Uh, yes. I'm supposed to be in different categories, but yeah.
Different categories. I was specifically asked to mention the spotlight awards in this episode of this podcast. So Tour and Activity people, there's an awards show that is at arrival every year for tours and activities that you should apply for next year. There we go. I've done my job. You're welcome to-
It's not a paid placement.
That was not a paid placement. I don't think that that would ever happen.
Okay.
I don't think that we have enough market value to demand that, a paid placement.
But here's the question that all these tours and activities operators have been asking, it's the Google things to do, which like I could make the claim that you know more about that than anybody else in the space, just given that you run a company run what the only like non-exclusive integration partner, like you're the only one that people can go to that's not a rest tech, right?
Yeah, I think so. And living sort of still there, I'm not sure if are really actively in space or not, but I'm pretty, pretty much here with the only non-res tech.
Okay, cool. So basically this things to do product, it's similar to Google shopping feeds, similar to hotel feed where you're feeding actual product data to Google via typically an integration partner. In this case, you know, your company Magpie does that. So it's great you can get your tours listed for keywords like things to do in Austin, things to do in Nevada, activities in Vegas, like things, things of that nature. This is just context for everybody listening, and the question people are asking is...
Okay, I'm listed. There's also 800 other people listed. All I see is Viator and Get Your Guide tickets up there. How do I make myself right? Um, I'm curious if you know anything about that.
Yeah, we, we, we do. This is, this is what we do. Same thing. I expect you do in SEO. You're constantly testing this stuff and trying out and you, and you read a lot about it, the difference with go with things to do with, there isn't really a place to read because it hasn't been around for too, for very long.
And B, it's obviously, it's a niche. So there are, you know, 500 marketing agencies all writing about this. So we're sort of on our own and the people that are doing well are the OTAs, the Viators the Get Your Guides who definitely have no incentive to share best practices. Um, the only other people are Google themselves and sure, most people know Google don't talk too much about this. They don't print the algorithm, right? If they printed the algorithm, we would all just follow the algorithm or we'd all be in the same place.
So we definitely test. For, I say, first and foremost, we tell everyone, listen, stick to fundamentals and Google fundamentally is, and you may argue this or not, but it's user first. Whatever the user wants, likes, clicks on stays with is seen as a positive.
And that's an absolute and an absolute algorithm specifically. That's meant to measure that, right?
Yep. And then, and as long as you build to that, most of the other stuff should fall into place, which is a little bit like SEO in general, but that's easy to say. And then, so, so what does that mean? So, I mean, first of all, as we tell everyone, fill out all their information. Don't, don't skip on fields, make sure you've got a proper name and a lot of decent description and make sure it's built for the use itself. You're the user looking for tours in Austin.
And you click on the little Google listing and I think pops up like a little product page, make sure that looks like a good product to get all the information in there that the user wants to read beyond that we do. We don't get much guidance from Google on it, despite us asking them every time we speak to them a couple of things that do tell us one is reviews. So you could display your reviews on that, right? So you got, you got space for your review score and your review count. The source of which is somewhat open to the greatest to choose their own. Well, yeah, it's going to be displayed on your product page, first of all, to display on your Google list. And, but Google's not saying you need to use TripAdvisor or Google or Yelp, I'll pull something specific.
Yeah. It's not even, that's not even like a factor. They're not asking for the source of the reviews. They're just asking for a review count and average value. Right?
Yeah.
This is like when they had schema markup for rich snippets that were specifically targeting review markup. And then they got rid of that because everybody was using fake reviews.
Yeah. When you could just upload a product page and just decide that you want to be 4.8 and 24,000 reviews and then Google would list it message and the middle.
Yeah.
But that helps, that definitely helps your listing get moved to the top. We tell people without reviews, you're probably not gonna get any traffic really on the organic stuff. Just because of its solid competition.
Okay, so we've got like this heading of reviews, fully incomplete profile. What I forgot to start with was thinking like, there are people listening to this that are not familiar with things to do that are in the tours and activity space. We talked about what it is, but why, why would something be in Google?
Well, I'd say just, just pull up your phone where everyone's on their phone. I'm assuming it was typing your city name followed by tours or bus tours or walking tours or things to do, pull up the search words that you've been targeting the last, however long you've been in this business and look to see the results that are coming up on your phone, chances are there'll be a carousel at the very top, which is ads, which is things to do ads and down below that, there'll be another carousel, which is organic or free sort of list of products, either directly below it or a few sort of sections below it. Or if it's a specific point of interest, like an attraction, you're going to have a whole section on the right, like a business profile, which is going to have listed tickets. So just look at the search results and look at the amount of realistic that is going to things to do…
It's not always that easy, right, you know there's tons of different modules and they're difficult to work out what's coming from where, but...
So it's interesting, Kevin Indig, who's an SEO brain, was the last guest on this podcast, and I saw nine hours ago he posted something on LinkedIn that's incredibly applicable to this. And basically it's statistical evidence that organic results have lower click-through rates when there's search features involved. And things to do is an example of a search feature. So just as you're saying, it's a basically different competitive realm that's pulling away from organic search blue links and people are clicking there. This is like, if this market were bigger, I would want to do a really thorough analysis of how you drive those, that’ll be like a $15,000, 20,000 with a word to spend to do that, but I feel like I want to know how this algorithm works because it is eating up all the realistic tours and activity. It's kind of incredible.
Yeah. Well, so a couple of things on that. One, I think you have non-travel clients. This is built on Google shopping, right? So the infrastructure for everyone out there should understand that it was just put on top of Google shopping. So just in the same way that you're looking for a red shirt, you're not really looking to go to Macy's or find a shirt. You just want to buy a red shirt. So you type in “red shirt” and Google shows you all the red shirts. It's the same thing. You're looking for a tour of San Francisco rather than the company. So it's the same concept. People are looking for products.
So I'd assume that good practice in shopping is also good practicing things to do. And then the second piece of that kind of in the middle is, hotels. So hotels is also part of Google travel.
Hotels has been, I think 10 years now. So if you search for some of these hotels, you'd like it to have quite a big section of realistic, which is part of Google travel.
Unless you're in Europe.
Yeah. Um, and saying it's the same concept, right? So the product listings show up and those links go off to an OTA or to the hotel website, Google doesn't do any transactions. So same thing, good practice there. It's probably good practice on things to do. And those are both big and niches. One being much, much bigger.
Yeah, It's like these micro algorithms that they've built. I mean, obviously you look at search as a whole and search is about 8,000 different distinct algorithms all working together that no single person could describe why one thing has happened. Right? We talked about it earlier, which is like an algorithm that specifically measures user experience. And the question is like, are they actually integrating that into the experience here for this product?
I don't know how many you got my insight, how that works in Google. Don't the way I see it. And again, they're not very revealing when we talk to them.
Nope.
They're greater kind of talking through things and new features and that, but no one's going to sit there and walk through the algorithm. That's just how they are for good reason, but I get the feeling that they've got this complex algorithm with 800 parameters in it over here that they've used 20 years, and then when they launch something new, like Google things to do, they grab one of them to start.
Yeah.
Is the keyword in the product name is one that works. That's probably the first one they thought of 25 years ago. So they've applied that. There's 799 to go that haven't been applied yet and the way, in my head, I'm sure this is not how it works, but they kind of grab them as they, as they test and they sell.
I honestly don't know. I would imagine they're doing some of that and they're also building some unique stuff. Like I would imagine right out the gate, they build like an eight factor custom algorithm specifically for things to do. That's using the shopping product feed or they're using the same algorithm that they built for shopping products and hoping it works. Like if that's the case, then I lean to believe that authority metrics are a significant player in this environment because the large websites are performing best and that's, you know, page rank. You look at like, when I do a search, like I see, I see Viator and Get Your Guide rank there, typically.
Yeah, we don't see that. If you've got a hop on hop off product in Austin, we can get you to the top of the organic listings above Viator.
Okay.
And the process is why that's just, it's just filling it. It's the product name.
Product name, that's the main weight. Put a name description, make sure you got sort of the right keywords in there. Um, this, I don't, I don't see any authority ranking in there.
Maybe I've just had, I've cherry picked bad examples. That's probably what happened.
I think maybe there's another reverse, but if you were building this in your Google, you know Viators got 350,000 products. You know Viators got the number one, or maybe TripAdvisor has. If you built that into your algorithm at all, that'd only be Viator listings on all of these surfaces rates. I think they've almost had to avoid that factor because you've got a million products trying to take up really a 10 product carousel. Obviously not all million in one city but tens of thousands potentially in a big city. Try not to, it's just a…
It might have something to do with simply just the concentration, right?
That's what likely is driving that. Had there been any new features, any new product development in the past six months on the things to do product?
Lots of development is just in broadening keywords. So they're constantly adding more keywords to the searches. They talked a lot this year about more local searches. So they, you know, we, in the industry focused on tourism, I think everyone understands that things to do is actually quite a local term. People do more things on weekends near their home than they do when they go on vacation. So I think Google has to look at both of them. Google sees the search traffic and they understand there's a lot more things for locals than they offer tourists. So they're trying to incorporate those two colors.
Do you see any influence coming from price?
No, no, on the admission section, just separate piece, a hundred percent, it's still price ranked. Exactly price ranked.
And that's, that's underneath the business listing, right?
Correct. If you're an, if you're an attraction.
Yeah. Got it. And then it's, yeah. So it's not, cause that's, that's like knowledge graph driven. That's specifically one entity that's getting pricing data from multiple different entities. Whereas the things to do is a product feed. That's one price from one entity, right?
It's the same feed. It goes into both sections.
Got it.
There's an old tag that says, say attraction, but it means you're an attraction. And therefore that goes to the admission section under the empire state book.
And the price is that that's feed driven. It's not scraping it. Right.
Correct.
Okay. What a weird product, like across the board. It's ething that just people have not paid much attention to because it doesn't touch a lot of the sophisticated brands because tourism, the traveling tour industry is much more fragmented than hotels, for instance, which would be.
Yeah. Yeah, that, that absolutely. And the people that are making the money at it are the OTAs who still have, as you've seen the vast majority of the listings and they don't see the need to go around shouting about why, why would you, as you get the traffic?
Yeah. And it's still much a very like emerging market in terms of the, um, businesses that are around the consolidation that's happening, the people that are actually thinking about tourism activities on their vacations, uh, it's really interesting.
Uh, what's also hard when you, when you do that search in your own city and you look at search results now, you know, it used to be very easy. There were 10 blue links and then, Oh my God, there's images on there. This must mean something, but now you, you have to, you, you, you need to study each of those different modules, right? To work out where they're coming from. You might not know it really well. You struggle with a couple of them because it might've come from this direction or that direction. It is quite difficult to work out where it's.
I think people just get confused as where to show up in each of these modules.
Yeah. Cause it's a different strategy for each one right?
Yeah. And there's the blue links is the one where we have the most data to tell us what to do and the least data is any, anything new it's generally also the least sophisticated
Any strategy around photo selection and what shows up to influence click through rate?
No, again, you know, we get guidance on that and the guidance is just make it relevant, obviously, but there's no specific guidance. We maybe looked at OTAs a bit more for that. The stuff to look at on that is the ratios. The photos are showing up square, but we're submitting landscape. Don't ask why, we've asked it many times. So you've got to consider that. So you've got to know that your photo will be cropped.
What are the things not to do with your things to do ads? Or your things to do, um, feed your travel. I think, I think in the end, I think not, not, not to carry your photos. The photo is the first thing that's going to pop up. So make sure your photo, they're also really small. So it's nice to have these sort of landscapes and things or background of the city, but they're really small. People work much better, maybe a vehicle or something, or a close up point of interest, but something that pops.
Yeah.
Because you're going to be amongst many other photos. I'm looking, it's funny because I'm just down on my phone looking and obviously the ads are getting substantially featured and then down the page are going to be the organic listings which is just, that's just Google.
Yeah.
Who's currently sitting with the US Department of Justice today, in the first day of their antitrust hearing. One of many antitrust hearings and got ruled, what a $2 billion ruling yesterday for antitrust violations in Europe. I don't know, so funny.
It's been a tough 24 hours maybe.
For them, yeah. Yeah, two billions a lot. That was like a penalty from 2017 that they received that came back and bit them.
What other channels?
So actually before I do that, we've run some paid on things to do and we've seen a couple things. It's been a little while because we kind of turned some of them off. The advertising piece has not been nearly as effective as the organic piece for us. Clearly, OTAs are investing meaningful dollars into things to do ads. Do you have clients that are doing that, that you would be able to report positive, negative outcomes to with?
I’d say most of our companies onboard today are on paid, so I think the organic ones came in a year or two ago, where there's tons of people today who want to pay just because it's so prominent.
Yeah.
We don't see the data. Because you know, once we submit it and link it and everything's set up, you're managing from within your Google Ads people, and that's why you have to share that with us. We do get anecdotal, we get a lot of, we've seen some 30x returns. I'd say anecdotally probably 6 or 7 is the average, but it's very anecdotal.
That's way higher than search ads deliver.
Yeah. Um, the interesting thing there is, uh, a lot of these tours and activity providers have crap data on the reservation system. So basically they're using GA four integrations and cross-domain tracking, which out the gate is losing a lot of data. And then add to that, that they're using the GA four connector to Google ads rather than linking that conversion directly to Google ads because of, you know, whether it's Fare Harbor or any other res tech, they don't have a direct ads integration. So, uh, if we saw a four X return on investment in Google ads, that's probably closer to seven or eight.
And yeah, it's a big differential.
Yeah. We get a lot of questions on that just because people are frustrated with the track.
And honestly, we just finished a corporate partnership. We just onboarded with a corporate partnership with Boken and we're talking about they can do a, they can get on their product roadmap, something that actually works for them. And then we would wholeheartedly say, this is who you need to be working with to run media. If you're a tour and activity provider that is using a custom out of the box, ResTech.
Yeah, maybe the, maybe the all the best tech should be thinking more about that and about the opportunity of all these marketing agencies who love them because of this and would therefore recommend them for that.
I had a client call me two days ago and say, hey, I hate our reservation company. Who would you recommend for both the tour management and the booking?
Yeah.
Like, well, I know who we're talking to about developing new, but none of them have it right now. It has to be a custom integration. We work with a lot of, you know, vacation rental, property management companies, hotels, cruise, all those things, they have custom platforms for the conversion, but tours and activities never have custom platforms. It's just not, it's not a developed industry yet. Like it's just, it's, it still is very much at the beginning of it's like I had Josh Viner, a friend of mine, he said at one point, tourism activities look today like vacation rentals looked five or seven years ago. Like it's a, a new somewhat quote unquote new market still.
Yeah. You say yet like it's on some timeline. Maybe it's not, maybe it's just, it's a fragmented industry and companies come and go. There isn't this one way path of consolidation. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's consolidation happening. There is bits and pieces. Yeah. I mean, most of the companies are hobby businesses that don't have like a lot of them are hobby businesses, right?
Yeah.
None to acquire if you were rolling them up, for instance. But you look at, you know, like Hornblower, you look at even what Chenmark's doing, even though they're keeping them branded. There's some. There's some that are...
Do it. Do it so I don't wanna move the conversation, but you travel to do different experiences right? You don't, I don't expect you to eat McDonald's when you travel to Thailand. So...
Very fair. Although there is definitely McDonald's in Thailand.
I'm sure there is. And maybe you do, I won't judge you, but the thing to do is definitely something that you don't want to just do the chain back up from a City Sightseeing background. I think that's slightly different because that's kind of there. The core product often in the city, but I don't want to do the branding tour everywhere. I want to go with the local head office person sometimes.
Um, that's what you look at multi-day tours, Intrepid, send an exceptional job up is, um, is basically creating a branded experience that is so natural, so diverse and so local. Um, it's the only company I can think of that's achieved that balance as well as they, um,
yeah. I mean, that's fair.
I'm curious outside of things to do, uh, any trends that you're seeing in the travel, in the, in the tours and activities space specifically from a marketing standpoint.
I mean, the other stuff I, of course I'm going to talk about AI because…
Yeah, of course.
I do think a lot about the future of search marketing with AI and you know, that's happening today. I don't think we don't see a ton of gen AI results on Google in this space, probably because we've got Google travel.
Yeah.
And they may not happen because Google travel kind of fills that need.
But I do think it's, there's a lot of long tail searches and there's a, and this stuff is going to change. And I just think of it in terms of an agent searching instead of a human searching.
That probably needs a bit of background. So when I think, you know, we're not all going to have agents by Christmas, but we are getting to this point where your, your content and your website and your information needs to be really thorough because you're no longer display and stuff just for humans. So now I can do a long term when I think about restaurants, I want to go and have dinner tonight in San Francisco and I want a restaurant that's facing the Bay that has some outdoor seating, but it's not close to a road. There's no way to find that way. I can't search that in Google maps or in the office, but I would like to be able to search that on Google and then something's been able to find all that data and say this restaurant fits all of those parameters.
Yeah.
So I think you're going to get these weird long tail searches that are very specific that previously is too much information for you to store on your website.
Now you need to save all that on your website.
It's that and then also the fact that those queries can be answered now because data that's unstructured can be understood.
Exactly.
Whereas data previously had to be faceted and filtered into distinct database tables with distinct attributes, right?
Yep.
Now you can have a tour description that's descriptive enough such that if somebody's looking for something that accommodates food allergies and it accommodates food allergies in someone's home kitchen and it's a cooking class, like all those things are things that you can ask. That can be a question that can be answered. It's just an interesting time. I like these futuristic conversations with you. You obviously have a very creative mind. It's always fun to hear you at places like PhocusWright and Arival sharing even on stage with incredibly conflicting views with others.
Well sometimes conference organizers arrange that don't they?
Yes, they like to create the fights, the infighting, right? Although you and Matthew kept it pretty tame on stage, I'll say, I'll give you that acknowledgement. But I appreciate it. I appreciate you coming on talking a little bit about Things To Do. It's definitely one of the three travel services that we deal with most, hotels, vacation rentals, which is part of hotels and things to do.
And then also like weird one-off coincidences and things that were not coincidences, but opportunities we have to work with Google flights and GDS data, which is, that's a, that's a whole different beast because that's basically just availability and price. So it's, that's so commoditized. I would say in the theme of commoditization, tourism activities and hotels sit next to each other and flights are well below that.
Yeah. Which, which is where you'd expect, I'd say less than I'll talk, that's where you'd expect it to be a flight is most for most people are commodity.
Yeah.
Based on time and, and yeah, basic promise. And that's where it should be. Things to do should be the most complex product. It's where we choose to spend most of our time and money on vacation. That's the reason is Dirk Skrimby would say, what does he say? It's the reason we go. It's the best part of travel. The reason we go, all these things.
Oh, of course, right? Of course. The best part of travel, according to the airlines is the flight though.
I don't think even airlines would argue that too much.
No, that's very, it depends on what airline, depends on if you're flying in one of those, those, uh, Middle Eastern airlines that only have first-class, you know, caviar and champagne and everything.
Yeah, maybe.
So questions I like to ask people at the end of the show is just number one, what's been an incredibly meaningful and inspiring destination you've been to, then the other is where you go next.
Yeah, I did a lot this summer. I did India last year, which was amazing. This summer I'd say Albania. Albania is kind of, well, they're actually quite a lot of tourists there, but it's still up and coming. I love those up and coming places.
There aren't too many left in Europe. So that was definitely a top spot.
Next, I think I'm going to do, I've got to go over to Singapore for a conference. So I think I'm going to go to South Korea on the way over. I haven't been there yet.
What conference is in Singapore?
WIT.
Ah, yes.
Web in Travel.
Yeah. Very cool. That's a fun place. It's very humid. Very humid. Unbearably.
Yeah. Um. Yeah.
But thank you so much for being on the show. Where can people find out about more about your product and give it a try if they're interested or in market.
Yeah, thanks. Well, about.magpie.travel domain is a free trial on there. And then if you want to sort of see what we're talking about with LinkedIn is based on most days, so I can address later stories and yeah.
All right. Well, thank you, Christian. Appreciate you joining me today. I hope you have a wonderful day and I'll see you in San Diego in a couple of weeks.
Sounds great. Thanks, Brennen, appreciate it. And yeah, see you in a few weeks.
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