Enhanced cost-per-click (ECPC) for hotel campaigns in Google Ads helps you get more conversions from manual bidding by using Google’s auction-time signals in combination with your existing bidding system. ECPC works by automatically adjusting your manual bids for clicks that seem more or less likely to lead to a booking on your website.
Campaigns with Manual CPC or CPC% bid strategies can use ECPC. You can't use ECPC when the campaign's bid strategy is Commissions.
Starting April 30, 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 February 20, 2025. Review Commission-based bid strategies in hotel ads to sunset to learn more about your next steps.
Enhanced CPC is a campaign-level setting. You can enable ECPC in addition to having custom bid adjustments, which can be set at the campaign and/or ad group levels. To use ECPC, a campaign must have conversion tracking enabled. To achieve optimal performance, you should ensure that your campaign has at least 30 conversions per week.
The conversion category must be set to "Purchase" to be used for Smart Bidding campaigns (ECPC, tROAS).
How it works
ECPC uses auction-time signals like device type, time of day, and other factors to find your best converting and most valuable impressions in real time. Based on this, ECPC will adjust your bid up or down slightly to help you achieve higher conversion value for your campaign while trying to keep your cost-per-conversion value the same as you would get with manual bidding.
Benefits
- Granular, real-time bid adjustments to help maximize conversion value
- Works well with existing bidding systems
- Simple setup with a single checkbox in “Campaign Settings”
Before you begin
To use ECPC, you must have conversion tracking enabled. To achieve optimal performance, you should ensure that your campaign has at least 30 conversions per week. It's also strongly recommended you use the following parameters with conversion tracking:
'value''currency'
Optional: The following parameters also help Google optimize your performance:
'transaction_id''id''start_date''end_date'
Getting started
When you create a campaign, simply check the box next to “Help increase conversions with Enhanced CPC” under “Bid Settings” in your campaign setup. Learn how to create a hotel campaign
If you'd like to change your bid strategy for an existing CPC or CPC% campaign, follow these steps:
- In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon
.
- Click the Campaigns drop down in the section menu, then click Campaigns.
- Select the campaign you want to edit.
- Click the Settings tab.
- Open “Bid Settings”.
- Check the box next to “Help increase conversions with Enhanced CPC”.
- Click Save.
Using ECPC with bid adjustments
The following table shows how the final bid is calculated based on whether ECPC is enabled and if there's a custom bid adjustment:
| ECPC | Bid adjustment | Bid calculation |
| Enabled | YES | Final bid = bid * ECPC adjustment * custom bid adjustment |
| Enabled | NO | Final bid = bid * ECPC adjustment |
| Disabled | YES | Final bid = bid * custom bid adjustment |
| Disabled | NO | Final bid = bid |
Best practices
ECPC will automatically try to help you increase your conversion value by evaluating in real time the expected value of any given impression. For best results, we recommend you don’t use bid adjustments to approximate conversion rate or expected conversion value. Rather, you should only use bid adjustments to account for information that may not be built into a ROAS calculation, such as profit margin.
Understanding Max CPC value
The max CPC value you set is a base value, not a cap on cost. Before the auction, the max CPC value is multiplied by the number of nights. The CPC value may also be further increased by bid adjustments, resulting in an effective max CPC bid that will often be higher than the base value that you set. The actual CPC (cost to you) will be less than or equal to this effective max CPC bid.
Example:
You set a max CPC value of $1 and a user clicks on your ad with a length-of-stay of 3.
| Room price | CPC bid |
| First night: $100 USD | $1 USD |
| Second night: $90 USD | $1 USD |
| Third night: $80 USD | $1 USD |
| Total bid for 3 nights | $3 USD |
| Bid adj type | Bid adj |
| Device - Desktop | +20% |
| Effective max bid | $3.60 USD |
In this example, the actual cost to you for the user’s click will be less than or equal to $3.60.
If you don't want the CPC to increase linearly with the number of nights, you should use length-of-stay bid modifiers to decrease the bid for longer lengths of stay.
Learn more about CPC bids for hotel campaigns
Related links
- Edit bid adjustments for hotel campaigns or ad groups
- Bidding overview for Hotel Ads
- About CPC bids for hotel campaigns