Paid Marketing for Brand Awareness and Conversion

Hotels can use paid search to help them reach guests with targeted promotions to entice clicks. With PPC, brands can make bids that get their content directly in front of the customer when they make particular targeted searches.

Organic search marketing can help hotels gain a lasting presence on the SERPs. In certain situations, however, such as during a particular sale or in preparation for a certain event, it can be challenging to get a page to rank quickly enough to attract attention. In these types of scenarios, PPC can play a valuable role in boosting the SERP presence for hotels and bringing them the traffic and conversions they need.

Paid search can help hotels in a variety of ways:

Let customers know about hotel deals for important local events or popular travel times
If the area has popular events or is an enticing travel destination and attracts many people to the area, promoting available rooms to people making searches about the event can bring in travelers.

Attract attention to flash sales
If the hotel wants to hold a sale on room specials, then a PPC ad can help customers see the promotion during the appropriate time.

Use paid search ads to fill empty rooms
If the hotel notices that they have a number of vacancies for a particular period, they can use paid search to promote these rooms at a discount to help keep the hotel bookings high.

Compete against larger brands
Smaller hospitality chains can also use PPC to help them compete against larger brands that have very strong digital presences. Since ranking organically for some key terms might become a challenge, paid search can help them keep their website on the first page.

Paid search refers to ads that hotels create that can be displayed in a variety of different places. The most common are:
 

• On the SERPs, or search engine results pages
• On social media, including Facebook and Twitter
• On websites that have agreed to host ads

With paid search, hotels can create ads that target people based on their online behavior. They might display PPC ads on SERPs to those who make a search relevant to their hotel and location. They might display paid ads on social media to those who fit particular demographics they typically seek for their hotels, such as young professionals who enjoy travel. Finally, ads across different websites can help the brand reconnect with people who have visited their brand site in the past but have not booked a stay.

With paid search, hotels can reach people at different points in the buyer's journey, creating ads that reach people with customized messaging. Creating unique PPC ads for those making relevant searches, such as ‘hotel rooms for SXSW’ will look different from those based on demographics, such as professionals interested in exploring new cities.

Paid search ads for hotels can be displayed in a few different locations and thus can help hospitality brands reach several different types of targeted customers.

Google Hotel Ads Metasearch
Google Hotel Ads or hotel metasearch appear alongside the hotel’s Google My Business listing, in a large element, alongside SERPs and include ratings and prices for that hotel from a varety of OTA websites. Google users can use input fields for dates and filtering options that are available with the metasearch results.

Metasearch are unique search engines that display the current live rates of hotels across a number of different channels. In their most basic form, metasearch platforms are websites that compare the different prices of products available for purchase online.

In the hospitality industry, a metasearch is a price-comparison engine for hotels and other accommodations. It aggregates rates and information from several online travel sites to provide the maximum variety and the best available rates to the bookers. Thus, travelers can easily find the best deals for a hotel  at a certain location with their desired amenities and within a specific time and price range. Whenever any traveler is interested in a listing and clicks on it, he is redirected to an OTA or the hotel website to complete the booking.

It's all about visibility
On a metasearch platform, each price provider is considered an advertiser. These can be from OTAs, tour operators or also the direct hotel website.

Meta search engines sell visibility or advertising space as a product to individual advertisers (e.g. OTAs and hotels) via an auction model. This means: Anyone can bid and get the top positions. In the case of hotels, for example, resellers who have access to availabilities and prices from the hotel. OTAs use the meta search engines primarily as a marketing channel to boost traffic.

Meta search engines are experiencing enormous growth and have become an important factor in the hotel and hospitality industry. They are now among the key advertising tools and a major contributor to direct bookings.

According to an EyeForTravel survey, 94.4% of travelers used price comparison sites at least occasionally to book hotels. 72.5% of survey respondents regularly used metasearch sites and 44.6% always used metasearch sites.

So, if you don't want to be left out of the most common ways people search for hotels, you should take the opportunity of being present on the biggest international travel and search portals. You will not only increase your visibility for travelers looking for hotels, but also significantly increase the number of bookings on your hotel website.

#1 Google Hotel Ads
Google Hotel Ads, originally called Google Hotel Finder, was launched in 2011. It displays hotel rates in direct comparison to OTAs and showcases hotels on Google across multiple devices.
When, for example, a traveler searches for “hotels in dublin” on Google, they will get a list of results in Google Hotel Search and on Google Maps, where they can further choose between various accommodations.

If, however, they search for a specific hotel, the results will be displayed on the right side of the result page, where the link to the hotel’s direct website together with the available room rates will be displayed together with the OTA links. The ranking of the link to the hotel's website depends, as with all meta searches, on various factors. Not surprisingly, the click price plays a major role.           

In March, Google released a feature update to its Hotel Ads so hotels can now participate without paying for position. While these organic metasearch results are below their paid ad counterparts, they now provide hotels the opportunity to participate in metasearch ads and capture more share of price-conscious shoppers.

#2 Trivago
The Expedia subsidiary Trivago was founded in 2005 and is most commonly used by European searchers. On that platform users can compare prices of hotels, hostels but also bed and breakfast accommodations. It checks prices of more than one million hotels worldwide from over 250 booking sites.
For example, if guests are looking for a hotel in Dublin, Trivago scans the catalog and shows the best price for all available hotels.

When the user chooses a hotel, one clicks on the price of the corresponding provider - ideally your hotel website - and is redirected directly to the provider's website to complete the transaction.

#3 Tripadvisor
The independent company Tripadvisor has existed since 2000 and is based in the USA. It consists of a comprehensive system of reviews, customer feedback and rankings for hotels, apartments, restaurants and activities.

On the website, mainly online travel agencies, individual hotels and hotel chains promote their availability of rooms. The commercial links are displayed on the entry page of the respective hotel and in the list view of a specific destination. By clicking on the respective link of a provider (similar to Trivago), the guest is then redirected to the corresponding website to complete the booking.

Google is clearly ahead in meta search at the moment. But Trivago and Tripadvisor also have their advantages. While Trivago particularly captures travelers who are looking for a particular city but do not yet have a specific hotel in mind (generic traffic), Tripadvisor primarily receives traffic when guests already have selected a hotel and want to obtain additional information about the hotel, such as reviews from other guests (brand traffic).

What counts in the end is the revenue generated by the ads and the associated cost ratio. The bottom line for the hotelier is, of course, that costs and benefits should be in the right proportion.

In general, we can say from our experience that the hotels which benefit most are which are broadly positioned in the metasearch world and run several campaigns at the same time. 

But there is no recipe for success because every hotel is individual. Accordingly, the analysis should be individual to determine which platforms make sense. Are you not sure what suits your accommodation or which channel is best to start with? No problem, our hotel specialists will be happy to advise you individually and without any obligations.

Social media
On social media, brands can create ads that reach people according to interests and demographics. Social media paid ads settings allow brands to create ads that appear to people who fit particular groups. People can create ads for people in certain age ranges, geographic areas, or express particular interests.

Paid Search
On the search engine results pages, organizations can create ads that target people making particular searches. Those who search for the area around your hotel, customers planning vacations or outings in your area, or those who enter keywords indicating their interest in hotels can all help you place relevant bids for ads to appear.

Other websites
Some websites allow ads to be displayed on their pages, such as at the bottom or side of the page. These ads often work well for those who have already visited your site and you want to retarget them to encourage them to return to your site to continue booking a room.

As you create these ads, for any of the above platforms, focus on creating a strong CTA that is relevant to the customer based on where you target them. If the ads have room for an image, such as on social media, try to make the image as targeted to the customer as possible. Entice the customer to click.

PPC, or pay per click, and SEM, or search engine marketing, are both forms of paid digital marketing that enable you to create targeted ads for customers that are potentially interested in your hotel. Unlike organic search marketing, these paid options require you to create ads and then bid on potential ad slots to get your message in front of the targeted customers.

With these paid search options, you want to create an ad that addresses the likely interests of the customers behaving a particular way online. If you are creating ads for the SERP, for example, then your ad should be applicable to those making that particular search. Your text in the ad, any images you include, and then the landing page should all reflect the likely interests of people seeing the ad.

Paid advertising should be part of an omnichannel digital marketing strategy that helps the brand create a digital presence across multiple platforms. Use it in conjunction with social media campaigns, organic search optimization (SEO), and email campaigns to build relationships with customers and build a brand reputation.

SEO and SEM play complementary roles in digital strategies for hospitality brands. SEO, or search engine optimization, focuses on creating content that offers high value for potential visitors. This strategy researches the terms and topics of interest to potential customers, uses search optimization best practices, and creates helpful content that will rank well on the SERPs so that potential travelers will find the content when searching on the major search engines, such as Google.

On the other hand, SEM describes paid search strategies. With these campaigns, hotels create ads that target customers based on their online behavior. The ads appear to those who make particular searches or reflect certain key demographic points in their social media profiles.

For hotels, both play a valuable role. Hotels that want to thrive will use other strategies simultaneously to build a strong digital presence. They will create an organic presence that appears in the search engine results, but also create targeted ads that will help to raise brand awareness in new ways.

To create a paid search campaign for a hotel, brands will want to follow a few key strategies that will help them achieve their desired success.
 

• Determine where you want to run your campaign, typically social media or the SERP.
• Know what you want to prompt with the campaign. Do you want to build your social media followers? Are you promoting a specific deal that the hotel will offer customers? Are you offering suggestions for people regarding where they can stay for an important local event?
• Identify who you will target with the campaign. On social media, you can target people based on demographics. If the local event typically attracts people in a particular age bracket, you can create a social campaign based on those demographics. On SERPs, you want to target those who search for highly relevant keyword phrases.
• Create a landing page that will provide value for the customer. Make sure that the landing page the customers reach when clicking on your ads appeals to those in that particular targeted group. Focus on high-value material and a clear call-to-action.
• Write an ad that makes sense for the campaign. You want the ad to offer clear, concise information for your targeted audience.
• Track your results. Make sure that you carefully track your results throughout your campaign. Note how many clicks you get as well as how many people convert on the page.