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In this series of posts we have delved into the Google Hotels funnel, both the ‘paid’ and ‘free’ parts, and identified the variables that affect each part of the funnel. In this last post of the series, we will detail the actions you can and should implement in order to get the most out of your presence in Google Hotel Ads.
Generate more opportunities and/or demand for your hotel
Search by name or branded search
- Increase repeat business through a loyalty program that encourages your customers to return to your hotel in the future.
- Attract new profiles, similar to your recurring customers, by creating digital marketing campaigns that use audiences that target users with similar profiles.
- Compete on OTAs and other showcases in an effort to access users looking for accommodation in your destination (accelerators such as Expedia Travel Ads, Booking Network Sponsored Ads or TripAdvisor Sponsored Placements).
- Improve your online reputation, which will automatically increase your visibility and therefore your demand.
Generic searches (without brand names)
- Increase visibility with Paid search campaigns on both generic searches and the new Demand Gen, which is showing very promising results,
- Harness the power of Google’s Performance Max for Travel Goals campaigns by excluding your brand.
Boost your Participation Rate
Minimise restrictions or your lack of inventory
- Offer all your room types (not just the best sellers) on metasearch and don’t abuse minimum stays; increase the price for short stays instead.
- Upload prices to the calendar as far in advance as possible. Google allows you up to 330 days, so everything should be visible.
Don’t leave any occupied rooms undisplayed
- Respond to all searches for various occupations (including adults and children) as accurately as possible. 30% of all queries made are not for two people.
Highlight your flexible rates
- Make sure you set up your flexible rates correctly so that Hotel Ads will show them when the filter that Google has for this purpose is applied.
Cover all possible languages and currencies
- Don’t fall into the trap of supporting just 2-3 languages and a few currencies. The world is very diverse and you may be leaving 10%-15% of the demand either unmet or poorly met (diverting them to other languages and currencies). If you’re not aware of what the important traffic is that you’re missing out on, check out the Landing Page Matching report on Google Hotel Center.
Increase your Impression Share (share percentage)
Optimise your CPC (cost per click) bids
- Choose your bidding system correctly in order to get the most out of it:
- Manual bids (Manual CPC or CPC%).
- Mixed-type bidding using Enhanced CPC semi-automated bidding.
- Automated bidding strategy systems such as Maximising Conversion Value (Target ROAS).
Remember, Google has announced the end of its commissionable models by early 2025, so it’s important to master CPC models, as you already have with Google Ads.
Increase your budget
- If the profitability of your campaigns is good, set a higher or potentially unlimited budget. Or are you putting a sales limit on OTAs?
Offer your best prices on meta-searches
- Attract more traffic for a lower investment by pricing more competitively than the competition. Having the best price both allows you to bid less to compete for a spot in the results and boosts your conversion (as we will see below).
Choose your channels correctly
- Over-commercialisation is a major problem for direct sales on metasearch engines. Restrict channels and put restrictions on bed banks for online distribution. Having 50 online competitors is shooting yourself in the foot and gives you zero value.
Know your Price Accuracy and keep it ‘excellent’
- Google places great importance on Price Accuracy, or the match between the price of your hotel shown in the meta-search and that shown in the search engine. You might expect this variable to be optimal but, in many integrators, this is not the case. Check yours and make sure it is at optimal levels.
Maximise your CTR (Click-Through Rate)
Have the best possible ranking for your ads
- The quality of your listings is critical to having a high quality score. If you list all your available rooms, occupancies and policies while offering the best price, you can be sure that your quality score will be optimal.
Make your ads more attractive
- Add your hotel logo, and differentiate yourself from the competition.
- Use callouts and/or personalised messages to highlight your differentiating values.
- Include good thumbnails of your room photos.
- Include relevant data in the metadata of your integration (e.g. breakfast included or free cancellation up until…).
Work on and improve your Conversion Rate
Have better price, cancellation and payment conditions than OTAs.
- This can be open to all users, or broken down by:
- Device (special rates for mobile phones).
- Market (geo-localised rates).
- Loyalty rates (e.g. show special rates only for members of your loyalty club).
Many defend parity with OTAs in metasearch engines as a way of gaining visibility on these and being able to generate incremental sales. While this is a totally legitimate strategic line, at MIRAI we feel it is unrealistic, as OTAs have crossed this line a long time ago and generate constant disparities in a totally personalised way that is undetectable.
Optimise your campaigns
- Create targeted campaigns for your key source markets, so you can tailor your bids to your performance in each market.
- If you operate your bids manually, carefully optimise your bid multipliers (check-in dates, length of stay etc.) to match the demand conditions at any given time of the year.
- If you can’t do it manually, let Google do it for you with one of the bid multiplier automation options available.
- Create and foster the use of audiences, which will allow you to differentiate your bidding (e.g. for users who have visited your website and those who have not) and therefore improve the return on your campaigns.
Choose the optimal booking engine
Just as there are many metasearch integrators, but very few good ones, the same goes for booking engines; there are thousands on the market but very few are any good. Cheap is expensive (in the form of commissions to OTAs, of course).
Whichever you choose, make sure your engine:
- Maintains the dates, occupancy (including adults and children), currency, language and tax information (inclusive or not) that the user saw in the metasearch engine. There is no more frustrating feeling than seeing $100 before tax on Hotel Ads only to arrive at the search engine landing page and see ‘104€ tax included, but no local tax’.
- For greater convenience and a better user experience, highlight the room and rate the customer saw in the metasearch. Switching from a website to a completely different process is one of the biggest sticking points in metasearch.
- Display all your room, offers and extras content cleanly and clearly. Content is key to the conversion of any e-commerce process. OTAs understood this a long time ago, which is why they do it themselves directly.
- Demand optimum performance and speed, especially on mobile devices.
- Customise your booking engine on the same domain as your website and with the same look & feel. Engines that have a different URL, are in pop up format, or are visually different, are fatal for conversion.
- Integrate loyalty naturally into the booking process, as this allows the customer to register at the same time as booking (Book & Join) without the need to divert (which kills conversion).
- Make it easy for the customer to pay in the way that is most natural for them and accept any payment method, like OTAs do.
Conclusion
Getting the most out of metasearch requires time, knowledge and technology. But the good news is that it’s all in your hands. There’s no reason why you can’t do it. If your suppliers (meta integrator and booking engine) are unwilling to help, change them. 15% of direct sales are already generated from metasearch engines. You cannot and should not get left behind, or you’ll be leaving the way open for OTAs to occupy all these spaces.
We hope this series of posts…
- The six levels of the Google Hotels funnel
- What factors affect the results of your metasearch campaigns?
- The metasearch funnel in detail: the free booking links funnel and data sources
- Keys to improving the performance of your Google Hotel Ads campaigns.
… helps you identify and quantify the opportunity, the variables you need to know in order to know precisely where you are, and the keys to optimising each of these as well as the friction points you will encounter along the way.
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations, you’re ready to get the most out of your hotel using meta-searches.
