According to Google, more than 60% of travelers use the internet to plan their trips, and many of these sales come through Google Hotel Ads. A true revolution in the tourism sector for online purchasing.
In this article, we show you everything you need to know about this tool—and how to get the most out of it to promote your hotel on Google’s search engine.
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What is Google Hotel Ads?
Google Hotel Ads is Google’s hotel search. It allows users to search for and book hotel rooms, see their availability and prices, and read reviews from other guests. It offers the possibility of showing an accommodation ad to travelers when they are looking for a hotel.
For example, from a Google search like “hotels in madrid”, the user will get to a map where they can see different hotels for the location they’re searching. Various filters can be applied to the search based on:
- Price
- Date
- Reviews from other customers
- Type of hotel.
Google Hotel Ads ads include rates, photos, amenities, and a link to the hotel’s official page to book the room. This keeps the user within the advertiser’s ecosystem, allowing the hotel to work its digital marketing and have a direct relationship with the customer.
Advertisers will only pay when the user clicks the ad or books a room. They can also bid for a featured spot in the search engine through an ad auction similar to Google Ads.
One of the main features of Google Hotel Ads is the price comparison, where different real booking options are shown to the user, who can later click on their preferred option and book.
How does Google Hotel Ads work?
Google Hotel Ads works like a hotel metasearch engine that returns the most relevant results for the user’s query. Google Ads advertisements appear first, followed by Google Hotel Ads, and lastly the organic results.
This ad section contains multiple hotels, with different filtering options such as check-in and check-out dates, number of people, hotel locations on the map, budget, or rating. At the bottom of the module there’s a button called “More hotels” to see the rest of the lodging options.
This button will take you to a larger hotel price comparison tool with several filtering options according to the characteristics.
One of the great advantages of Google Hotel Ads is that it shows real-time rates and availability for a property. This way, ads are only displayed when rooms are available on the selected dates.
When you select a hotel where you want to stay, it takes you directly to the hotel’s page or an accommodation website like Booking to proceed with the reservation.
Hotel Ads is based on a series of data feeds that include information about rooms and on bids, which tell us how much you can bid to drive users to your booking pages.
On this platform you can set a budget that fits your needs. With the estimate you can get an idea of how much to invest depending on the results you want to obtain. In addition, you can stop, pause, or edit ads at any time.
What are the requirements to activate a Google Hotels campaign?
It’s very similar to Google Shopping, as you have your Hotel Center account as if it were a Merchant Center. In this account you must provide the hotels you want to advertise, the prices, and the configuration. After that, you only have to link this account to your Google Ads account to create campaigns, ad groups…
There are two ways to set up your Google Hotel Ads account: via an integration partner or by filling out a form; in this second option Google will contact you to help with the integration.
Create a Google Hotel Ads campaign, step by step:
Creating campaigns in Google Hotel Ads is easy. You just need to follow several steps.
- Objectives. The first thing you must be clear about is the objective of your campaigns: to get more sales or to increase awareness and reach. Google Ads will use those objectives to guide the campaign setup.
- Ad location. Through Google Ads you can choose the geographic locations where you want your ads to appear—specific cities or areas. Through Hotel Insights you can find out which markets to focus on to reach the highest possible number of potential customers.
- Choose keywords. With the Keyword Planner tool you can identify relevant keywords users are using, see how they use them, and how much your hotel should pay per click for each term. For example: “hotels near barajas,” “hotels plaza castilla,” or “hotels madrid.”
- Create the ads. Once the keywords have been selected, you need to create the ads so they appear with what the customer is searching for at that moment. As with Google Ads, they must meet strict professional and editorial criteria.
- Publish the ads. When the ads have been published, they will be shown to users who search for your hotel or are looking for accommodation in your area. The ads appear in Google Search and on Google Maps. Remember that advertisers only pay when users click the ad, visit the website, or check how to get to the hotel.
How to get the most out of your campaigns?
Google Hotel Ads has several features that make it a great opportunity for hotels to increase visibility and business opportunities. Here are some keys to getting the most out of it:
- Show different room types and rates.
- Add room features and conditions—it’s important not to include only the price.
- Show photos of the rooms
- Offer a free cancellation option, since after COVID-19 Google added a “free cancellation” filter.
- Choose the best bidding model: CPC (cost per click), commission per conversion (CPA), and commission per stay (CPS).
- Add an image of your brand in the ad. This will reinforce the message to your customers that they are dealing with your direct channel.
- Adapt tax information to each point of sale.
- Show exclusive rates by device and country.
- Monitor performance with the tool and optimize the campaigns.
As you can see, the world of digital marketing is continually renewing itself. There are more and more tools that make life easier for users, and for advertisers they offer more opportunities to reach our target audience. But this ongoing renewal is very demanding and difficult to keep up with for independent advertisers. For this reason, having a digital marketing agency is a great help. At Dos Setenta we are constantly renewing ourselves to offer the best to our clients as a digital marketing and advertising agency. Don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions you may have!
