Note: You are viewing an article about the Hotel Ads Center, which has been replaced by the Hotel Center as the primary feeds platform for Google Hotel Ads. Learn more about the new Hotel Center experience.
You can achieve maximum business benefits and cost-effective results from using Google Hotel Ads if you apply the following best practices.
Basic best practices
Prepare for success
To leverage Hotel Ads, you should launch with a significant % of properties. Having more properties activated with bids will give you more opportunities to capture clicks.
You should also enforce price accuracy. Make sure that you display the accurate total price for all itineraries at all times. Total price refers to all fees required to book the hotel room, including base rate, taxes and additional fees. When a user clicks on an ad and price combination on Google, the partner booking page should display the same total price as seen on Google.
Brand your ads with a logo
You can include a logo (or icon) with your ads so that end-users can quickly see who the ad is being displayed by. The following example shows where icons are displayed in hotel ads:
To ensure that your ads are properly branded, the icon must meet the following guidelines:
- 72x72 pixels or larger
- Square dimensions
- No more than three text characters per icon
- .PNG format
Start using Hotel Ads Center
Hotel Ads Center provides a user-friendly interface for partners to manage all aspects of your interaction with Hotel Ads. You can manage groups and bids, and access the pricing, hotel, and diagnostic reporting data for your ads.
Add access for your account teams and begin using Hotel Ads Center by visiting partnerdash.google.com/hotelads.
Bid by percentage and bid above the reserve
Hotel prices change all the time. Use percentage-based bids to ensure alignment between investment and potential revenue.
Bid above the reserve: By bidding above the reserve you’ll be more competitive. We suggest bidding at least at 1% of the property price. Even if your rates are competitive, you will lose the auction if your bid is not.
In your daily performance report, any property with a price bucket of “-1” is ineligible as it is below the reserve price.
Edit bids offline: Hotel Ads Center provides bulk editing options for you to manage bids in scale.
Add conversion tracking to gain actionable insights
Conversion tracking can show you what happens when users visit your website after clicking on Hotel Ads: whether they booked, which hotel they booked, the value of the booking, etc. For comprehensive insights on your performance, implement conversion tracking for all platforms—desktop, mobile, tablet—anywhere users visit your website from.
Use conversion performance metrics to adjust your campaign strategies
Available metrics include number of conversions, conversion rate, cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend
(ROAS), average booking value, average length of stay, advance booking window and revenue per click.
These metrics surface new insights within your reporting, helping you make better campaign management decisions and improve overall return.
Intermediate best practices
Group hotels to better manage your bids
Grouping properties into hotel groups will help you manage your campaigns efficiently while maximizing ROI. You apply the same set of rules to every property in a Hotel Group—think about how you’d like to structure your bids and create your Hotel Group(s) accordingly.
You can group hotels on the basis of: brand, market, and conversion rate. You could also do a more advanced grouping based on: occupancy, promotions, events, and distribution channels.
If bidding by percentage, you can group hotels by conversion rate.
Properties that convert at similar rates should have similar percentage bids.
Make bid multipliers work for you
For each of the hotel groups you set up in Hotel Ads Center, assign appropriate Bid Multipliers by each of the core dimensions (e.g. Google site, device and user country). Review and update your Bid Multipliers once per quarter to account for seasonality and shifts in user behavior.
You should focus on your most lucrative “Length of Stay.”
Review conversion rate by “Length of Stay” and decrease the Bid Multiplier for length of stay longer than X nights.
Moreover, to compete for a longer length of stay without breaking the bank, decrease the “Length of Stay” multiplier when the number of night being applied to is higher.
Advanced best practices
Take advantage of performance reporting.
Daily and weekly reports show how your properties performed by device, Google site and more.
Customize display of performance data: Hotel Ads Center lets you view performance data by impression share, bid rate, and so on. You can customize columns to slice data and view stats by hotel group, hotel ID, Google site, device type, ad slot, user country, and date—and adjust your bidding strategies accordingly.
Check impression share for insight into available opportunities: For insight into relative opportunities available, look at impression share in the Hotel Ads Center.
Ensure your strongest-converting properties are winning one of the top two slots: In your daily performance report, check to see whether the majority of impressions for these properties are coming from the most prominent position. Review these reports at least twice a week to understand where your traffic is coming from and how it was addressed. For example, if you won the 1st slot, but your property didn’t show, or if your rate was good, but bid was too low.
Capture missed opportunities with Opportunity Report: Weekly Opportunity Reports show the opportunities that have been missed because of limited auction participation and/or bidding. Download the report from Hotel Ads Center and find out whether you are maximizing the number of eligible impressions. Ensuring full participation is the first step toward capturing greater clickshare.
Watch out for feed-related factors that could be limiting your impressions, such as failure to provide a robust set of rates, mobile-optimized deep links or localized landing pages.
Ask the right questions of your performance metrics: To get the most out of the performance metrics and improve your strategies, ask yourself these key questions:
Focus on performance to achieve max return
- Bid by profitability
- Increase bids for profitable hotels, decrease bids for non-profitable ones.
- Apply and adjust Bid Multipliers according to performance metrics.
- Google can provide benchmark data for 7 target countries for eligible impressions, CTR, CPC. Use these insights to evaluate the potential growth opportunities in your Hotel Ads performance.
- Bid Multipliers help you optimize in specific areas where performance is lacking. Understand your performance— preferably Conversion Rate, if not, then relative CTR—by user country, device, Google site, length of stay and adjust Bid Multipliers accordingly.
Hotel Ads success stories
See how other hotels are using Hotel Ads to grow their business:
IHG
Learn how IHG grew revenue by 78% and coordinated worldwide marketing across their company with Hotel Ads.
Choice Hotels
Learn how Choice Hotels boosted bookings by 75% by using property-level bids for hotels with low occupancy rates.
AccorHotels
See how AccorHotels attracted international travelers in key markets by using the geo-targeting features in Hotel Ads, and boosted bookings by 70%.