Why Your Hotels Digital Marketing Budget Should Be Used on Adwords

However, for inexperienced users, AdWords can be confusing and overwhelming at times. With its large number of options and campaigns settings, it’s near impossible to learn how to efficiently operate it by yourself.

If you’ve ever felt lost in the AdWords interface, we have compiled a comprehensive guide for you. It will help you to be more proficient with the platform and also help you to choose the right type of campaign for your hotel business. We’ll be discussing how to run the campaign, what metrics to look for when tracking your KPIs, and why you consider investing more into AdWords campaigns.

Here we go.

CAMPAIGN: Brand Search Campaigns

If you’ve ever wondered if you should bid on your own business name or not, the short answer would always be yes. However, this doesn’t mean that you should just do it without understanding why you’re doing it.

First off, if you own a hotel today, you know how important online travel agencies (OTAs) are to your business. They’re one of the main sources of customers, as your business is either found on an OTA site, or on Google. Despite the fact that they help to increase the reach of your business, the traditional direct bookings from your own website or through phone calls are always better. It comes with a low cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and it gives your business an opportunity to connect to the customers directly, which increases loyalty and open up new sales opportunities.

If you opt for a brand search campaign option on AdWords, it will show your ads to users who are actively searching for your hotel. You can use terms like “direct booking with us to get the best deals”. This way, you’re showing your customers that they are making the right choice by contacting you directly.

Often times on OTA sites, it’s likely that they will be running ads on your brand name search, and this is something you have no control over. It’s always a better idea to have your brand name comes before any ads or other irrelevant information. This is the main benefit of a brand name search, as your website is guaranteed to be the one that comes up first, promoting direct booking.

Metrics to Watch

We’ve briefly mentioned CPA and we will emphasize it here. It’s the best metrics to use for brand search campaigns. If you run your ads on an OTA, they will take a cut from every action your customers take, which means that the costs can add up very quickly. With a brand campaign, you will pay once when a customer clicks on your ads. This lowers the overall CPA significantly.

Secondly, look at engagement with the landing page for your campaign – the page that your ads direct users to. You should look at bounce rate, time on page, and the number of pages per session those users have on your site. Are they only looking at the landing page, or are they moving on to the booking engine or the rest of your site?

You should also look at the engagement on your landing page as well. This is the page that the user will be led to once they click the ad link. The metrics to look for are the bounce rate, time on page, page viewed and actions taken. An effective landing page is one that the users want to engage with, and these metrics will show that. If there’s a high bounce rate with low time spent on page, this means that there’s something wrong with your landing page, and you need to make an adjustment immediately.

Finally, consider your overall ROI. If the investment isn’t paying off, then you need to look to change your strategies.

CAMPAIGN: Generic Search Campaigns

This is the perfect campaign for reaching the users who are in their shopping stage of the buying journey. The campaign involves long-tailed keywords that are relevant to your business. For example, “Disco themed hotel in Tokyo” or “Luxury hotel in downtown New York”.

While it’s true that as the user gets closer to finalizing a purchase, the harder they are to convert. This is one of the biggest benefits of a generic search campaign, as it’s designed to secure more conversion at the most cost-efficient rate as possible. If you have an engaging landing page that users want to use, it’s going to drive more visibility, traffic, and conversion.

Generic search campaign should only be considered once the other necessary campaigns are already set in motion. It’s a good campaign to be used in conjunction with a simultaneous remarketing strategy. A well-executed combination of these two will ensure that each click (visit) you are paying for is paying dividends.

Metrics to Watch

You should look at the advertisement engagement KPIs like click-through rates to know whether your ads are converting. Then, you should also look at the landing page engagement like bounce rate and time spent on page, similar to a brand engagement campaign. And don’t forget to track your ROI and CPA.

THE DISPLAY NETWORK

Google display network (GDN) is a connection of millions of websites, pages, blogs and other Google tools like Gmail and YouTube. It has a massive reach of up to 90% of global users.

Advertising on the ‘Display’ network is often called “interruption marketing,” as it “interrupts” the viewer whilst they are browsing the web. In that sense, it’s the opposite of search advertisements, which show up when the user is actively searching on Google.

By advertising on the display network, you are engaging in a marketing strategy called interruption marketing. The idea is that you are intercepting the browsing users and direct them to your page instead. You must make sure that your landing page and ads are at their optimal state for this strategy to work properly, as it can actually hurt your branding if the people feel annoyed if they feel like they are wasting their time on a bad landing page.

CAMPAIGN: Remarketing on the Google Display Network

Remarketing list allows you to target to users who have a history of engaging with your website but might not have finished their conversion. This way, you are reaching out those who just need a little bit of push to complete their conversion. Not only that it creates a more precise audience targeting, but it also helps with sales and customer experience as well.

By employing this strategy, you are securing those customers who weren’t ready at the time to complete the process. Whether if they had doubts, were distracted, or simply just didn’t have a credit card with them. Just by using a simple follow up ads, you are ensuring that you are getting the most out of your investment. You will also be securing your customer base from spilling to your competitors.

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