AT ALBION, WE DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY…

Most hoteliers and marketing staff of hotel and guest house sites are well aware that it is essential to achieve high rankings in Google’s search engine results pages. Traffic from these website visitors is usually where most online bookings come from – after all, when you are looking to find a hotel in a specific city you Google it ratehr than look on Twitter, Facebook or elsewhere. However as many have noted, Google is pushing the natural search results further down the search engine results pages each month, so achieving maximum visibility usually requires that your hotel brand advertises your offering via Google Pay Per Click advertising.

Those that do enjoy the benefit of traffic from paid search results tend to take the largest share of the hotel sector market and without the sales that come from that traffic, rooms are left empty. When done correctly Google search advertising can generate a continuous stream of highly targeted website visitors that are in the market for your offering. And is more often than not the source of highly profitable streams of paying guests that booked a room on your website.

Reaching and converting increased search traffic into bookings can be highly scalable too – simply because a share of the profit generated from paid search advertising can be reinvested back into Google Ads in a way that allows your hotel or motel brand to convert more of your traffic into sales conversions.

Of course it is only those that enjoy well-structured and optimised Google Ads campaigns that enjoy the benefits of the click data that guides your advertising campaing from a blind attempt at receiving more traffic to one that focusses on only attracting those people most likely to convert to a sale and book on your hotel website. By reviewing the search queries used by visitors who click on your ads, you are able to see where your untapped search markets reside, understand their search behaviours and learn the key messages that convert them into repeat customers.

With a proven history of creating and optimising advertising campaigns for hotel brands, guest houses and bed and breakfast businesses we have seen time after time just how many organisations waste a large share of their advertising budget on clicks that will never convert into a booking or enquiry. Usually, this is because campaigns have been set up by those with minimal advertising experience so the campaigns are not adequately optimised to deter clicks from those who are not likely to book a stay. Indeed generalist PPC advertising agencies with little experience of the hotel market often make the same mistakes made by hoteliers who try to create their own advertising campaigns, these include:

• Failing to review search queries and continually add relevant negative keywords
  Say your target offering is a “4 star double room in Brighton” and you bid on a keyword phrase like “hotels in Brighton”, you would benefit greatly by adding a number of keywords that would ensure your ads DON’T show to people that included the following words in their search query: “cheap”, “worst”, “dirty”, “reviews”, “jobs” etc.
• Failing to track and optimise for booking form conversions
  Your landing page should include a form that redirects to a “thank you”, or “booking completed” page that is tracked as a goal conversion in Google Analytics, Furthermore by importing this goal into Google Ads you will be able to see which search queries and targeting methods turned into bookings, rather than just website traffic. With this information you can send most of your advertising budget to the ad groups and keywords that generate the most profit, Without it, you are just throwing money at Google for traffic that may not be of any use.   
• Failing to adjust bids for profitable devices and locations
  In the above example, you wouldn’t want to receive clicks from people in near Brighton, Alabama in the US. Indeed you may find that clicks from people in certain cities in the UK turn into more bookings than others. For this reason you’ll want to bid less on those that convert less. And if it is shown that most people book using their mobile device rather than their laptop or tablet, that’s where you will want to increase your keyword bids, so you generate the most leads and sales for your budget.
• Failing to adjust bids for profitable times of the day or days of the week
  If you found from your historic advertising data that paid search clicks cost twice as much during office hours, but they converted just as often as clicks on the weekend, then you would be foolish not to send the majority of your budget to weekend or evening clicks. After all many people do research at work and book when at home in the evening. Or it may be the other way round – either way PPC advertising gives you all the data you need to better understand not just your market, but the people in your market that actually turn into customers. 

One thing that many hotel businesses and their digital marketing agencies don’t realise is that Google’s Display Network (GDN) allows advertisers to use image ads to “pinch” high-value potential clients directly from competitor hotels, B&Bs and guest houses. Sure, you can bid on their hotel names via search marketing but a much cheaper option is to follow their website visitors around with image ads – at less than a sixth the cost per click!

By simply listing your main competitor’s website addresses and targeting visitors to those sites in your Google Ads account, hotel brands are able to get their offering in front of these potential guests with image ads. What makes this a powerful advertising strategy is that your ads can show images of the selling points that may sway them to book with you instead. It may be that you have a sea-view or your rooms are better decorated or that your location is more desirable than the competitor you are pinching customers from.

Long gone are the days when you had to pay through the nose for search advertising to generate a stream of highly qualified traffic to your page. With a well structured, tactical, set of display network image ad campaigns many hotels around the world are taking full advantage of the often un-tapped targeting options Google now offers – targeting just those people who you know are in the market to book a stay in your town.

At Albion, we already know the targeting options that work best for hotel advertising online and have proven again and again how we can drastically reduce wasted advertising spend and channel those savings into campaigns that are shown to generate more bookings for your budget. How? Simply because we understand the travel and hotel market, we know how travellers and holidaymakers search and interact with hotel websites and we know the best ways to lay out your booking pages and forms to generate optimum enquiries and bookings.

So if you are unsure if your existing hotel marketing agency or in-house staff are doing everything they can to ensure you get a larger share of the market, feel free to request a free Google Ads account review and recommendations. It may be the most important thing you do for your hotel all year.