The long and short of metasearch is... you only pay when your guest books a room.
Meta search is no longer a nice-to-have – it's a must-have. With an estimated 5.6 billion searches made per day, Google has 90.46% of the search engine market share worldwide. Using Google Hotel Ads will truly help you gain a significant increase in direct qualified traffic to your website.
Metasearch engines have grown in usage hugely over recent years. OTAs use these platforms very successfully - be wary of this and also make an effort to utilise metasearch in the best way that you can, especially at a time when we are seeing such incredible results.
Last May, we saw the strongest ever performance on Google Hotel Ads. Compared to May 2019 (because 2020 wasn’t a normal year) revenue in May 2021 increased by 42% and CPA improved by 63%.
This year, in May 2022, we noted a revenue increase of 145%.
What other standout results have we seen?
- CPA average of 4.3%
- Revenue increase of 145% across our clients using metasearch
- Property Promotions (free click activity) continue to deliver strong revenue and are growing at a rate of over 100% per month. This is proving to be a hugely successful part of our clients’ book direct strategies
If you are a hotelier and you still aren’t using Google Hotel Ads, we’d strongly recommend you make this part of your book direct strategy, and at Net Affinity, we provide direct connectivity to the platform via our Booking Engine. Get in touch with us to learn more.
How can you make sure your Google Hotel Ads are performing optimally?
The main factors to consider are budget, commission and rate parity.
Budget
- Avoid limiting your campaign with your budget. Since you only pay for the conversions you actually get (When using commission bidding), make sure your daily budget setting is not preventing you from displaying ads to potential guests
Commission
- While your goal is to pay the lowest commission possible, you also need to make sure that you don’t set it too low. Doing so may lead to losing visibility to OTAs which could cause a loss in traffic and bookings
Rate parity
- Make sure you offer the lowest rate compared to OTAs (or that you are on the same level as them – just as long as their rate is not lower). You can view this on your Google My Business Profile or Hotel Ads Performance report (this will tell you for what searches your rate was “uniquely lowest”, “tied for lowest” or “not lowest”)
How should you budget for Google Hotel Ads effectively?
Budgets for your Google Hotel Ads campaigns should ideally be uncapped. The best thing you can do is let your campaigns run without a 'budget' if bookings are coming in at a low CPA.
How do you activate property promotions for your hotel?
Assuming your Google Ads account is already linked with your Hotel Center account, you need to create a Hotel Ads campaign, choosing “property promotion” as the ad group type. Then, choose ‘commission’ as your bidding strategy, we recommend setting a 10% commission bid as a starting point and then you can optimise from there.
