About commissions (per conversion) for Hotel ads

Starting from 30 April 2024, commissions (per stay) and commissions (per conversions) bid strategies will no longer be available for new hotel ads campaigns.

Active hotel ads campaigns with commissions-based bid strategies will continue to serve until 20 February 2025. Review commission-based bid strategies in hotel ads to sunset to learn more about your next steps.

Commissions (per conversion) is a way to pay only when a traveller books your hotel. Commissions (per conversion) is a Smart Bidding strategy that automatically adjusts your bid to help you maximise conversions. You pay a percentage of the booking value that you set.

Overview of commissions (per conversion)
Set up commissions
Evaluate performance
Frequently asked questions

Note: Conversion tracking and purchase conversion values (full booking amount) are required for all Hotel ads Smart Bidding bid strategies. Learn more about conversion tracking for Hotel campaigns.

Overview of commissions

Commissions (per conversion) helps you achieve a predictable cost-per-conversion. This cost is a percentage of the booking value that you set in Google Ads. The commission should represent how much revenue you're willing to spend on Hotel ads for each dollar that you earn from bookings from your Hotel ads.

Benefits

Maximise your conversion value with minimum effort
Define a consistent cost relative to revenue that you earn from Hotel ads
Adaptive learning predicts performance at different bid levels to maximise conversions
Auction-time bidding is used for every auction, not just a few times a day

Before you begin

Before you can use commissions (per conversion), you need the following from the Global Site Tag (gtag.js).

Conversion tracking with the following required parameters:

'value'
'currency'

While optional, these parameters also help Google optimise your performance:

'start_date'
'end_date'
'id'

Notes:

The value of 'value' is used to compute your commissions (per conversion) cost for a particular conversion. If the value isn't provided, Google will interpret that conversion as having zero value.

There's no minimum number of conversions required to enable a campaign using commissions.

How commissions works

The commissions (per conversion) bidding strategy predicts future conversions and associated values by using your reported conversion values, which you assign through conversion tracking. Then, commissions (per conversion) sets an optimal CPC (cost-per-click) bid while trying to maximise total conversions at the cost-per-conversion equal to your target.

To help improve your performance, the commissions (per conversion) strategy adjusts bids using auction-time details such as the traveller's device type and location, the Google site where the hotel ad appears, geographic location, itinerary and hotel price.

The average cost-per-click will vary, but regardless of the number of ad clicks, you only pay if a conversion happens.

Example

People who don't convert	People who do convert
Your commissions (per conversion) bid is 12%. A person clicks on your ad. A person doesn't convert on your site. You pay $0 AUD.	Your commissions (per conversion) bid is 12%. A person clicks on your ad. A person converts on your site. Booking value is $450 AUD. You pay $450 AUD * 12% = $54 AUD.

For general information on conversion tracking and how Google uses conversion tracking data, refer to 'Track sales and other conversions'.

Choose the right commissions (per conversion) bid

To find the right commissions (per conversion) bid, determine what distribution margin you want to spend for your bookings.

For example, if your goal is to spend an average of 12% of booking value and maximise your booking revenue, and you have a cancellation rate of 10%, your commission bid should be 10.8%.

If you decrease the commission, your bid in the auction will decrease and can result in fewer bookings. Similarly, if you increase the commission bid, your bid in the auction will increase and can result in more bookings. Bear in mind that this depends on the auction, and booking volume changes aren't guaranteed with commission changes.

Conversion metrics

Conversion metrics such as 'Conversions' and 'Average booking value' can be updated one or more days after a click occurs, depending on when an individual user converts and on your account's attribution window (the number of days after the customer clicked that we'll attribute a conversion to a click). This means that the cost for a campaign using a commission bid strategy can also change one or more days after a click.

Note: If you're uploading conversions using offline conversion uploads, note that you can only upload conversions for clicks that happen within the same month.

Set up commissions

You set your bid strategy at the campaign level. If you'd like to change the strategy, change how you bid.

Evaluate performance

You can view the current conversions and cost-per-conversion for a campaign in the campaign summary table. Learn more about your conversion data.

Best practices

This section lists some best practices when setting up and using the commissions (per conversion) bidding strategy.

To get the best performance with commissions (per conversion), your campaign should have at least 10 conversions per week. If your campaigns don't have this many conversions per week, consider merging some campaigns together when using commissions.
Organise hotels into different campaigns depending on distribution margin or conversion rate. Commissions may perform better when partners' hotels are grouped by similar ROI goals and performance. Learn more About hotel groups.
Allow the campaign to accumulate traffic for at least seven days before evaluating performance and making changes.
Don't change your commissions (per conversion) bid more than once every few weeks. This gives you time to account for any conversion delays and the commissions auto-bidder strategy time to adjust.
Ensure that conversion tracking is well implemented on all landing pages and all devices. Outages in conversion tracking (complete or partial) can significantly impact your performance and volume.

Tune and evaluate

The more data Google Ads has, the more it can optimise per conversion bids.
Keep in mind that changes in ad performance are natural, and you may need to use the commissions (per conversion) bid strategy for some time to understand how it affects your campaign's performance.
Don't make large changes to a campaign while using commissions (per conversion). For example, don't pause all active hotel IDs and replace them with new ones.
Don't remove your conversion tracking code from your website or move it to a different location while running the commissions (per conversion) bid strategy. These kinds of changes can result in significant changes in which clicks lead to reported conversions. If you do change your conversion tracking code, the pay-per-conversion bid strategy might need several weeks to adjust to these changes.
Compare your clicks and conversion rate before and after using the commissions (per conversion) bid strategy to gauge its impact on your campaign.

Frequently asked questions

On what levels can partners apply and set commissions (per conversion) bids?

Partners can use the per conversion bidding strategy at the campaign level only. It's not possible to set commissions bid overrides for ad groups or hotels.

How does the commissions (per conversion) bid strategy interact with the CPC auction?

When using the commissions (per conversion) bidding strategy, Google Ads sets optimal cost-per-click (CPC) bids for partners' hotels to help maximise booking value at the specified cost-per-conversion, which is a percentage of the booking value you set.

Are commissions (per conversion) costs billed as of the query date, click date or conversion date?

Commissions (per conversion) costs are billed as of the date of the query. Google won't bill for conversions outside the partner-configured attribution window.

Can commissions (per conversion) support conversion adjustments?

Yes, commissions (per conversion) does support conversion adjustments. You can restate or retract conversion values even after they’re reported in Google Ads. Learn more About conversion adjustments.

Note: When conversion values are changed, they can no longer be adjusted. To undo changes, the conversion data must be uploaded again with slightly different conversion timestamps. This ensures that they’ll be treated as new conversions.

How are cross-device conversion costs reported for commissions campaigns?

When viewing reports at a campaign or ad group level, cross-device conversions will be part of the total reported cost. However, viewing by Hotel ID won’t include cross-device conversions costs. So to calculate the costs coming from cross device conversions, you can compare the campaign total cost versus the sum of cost by Hotel ID. For example, if campaign A had $1,000 AUD in total costs yesterday, and when viewing by Hotel ID you spot a combined total of $950 AUD, then the remaining $50 AUD were from cross-device conversions.

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