When your prices are reported as inaccurate in your Hotel Ads Center account, there are many possible causes. To help debug your inaccuracies, Google automatically categorizes mismatched prices that can be attributed to specific, common causes.
To check your price accuracy score, log into your Hotel Ads Center account, click Tools in the top navigation, and then click Accuracy Score in the left-hand panel. You can view a graph of causes for inaccuracy under the heading Recent Price Mismatches, shown below.
Common causes of price mismatches
Price feed delayed
Description: Mismatches will be categorized into this bucket under the following condition: Google scrapes your site at time X and finds a price of $A on your web page, but a price of $B in our cache. At a later time, we receive a pricing update from your account that matches price $A, which was found when the initial scrape was done.
Suggested action: If your most accurate prices are taking too long to update in our cache, it implies a lag between the system that updates your consumer-facing website and the system that updates your prices with Google. Please check with whoever manages your Google feed to ensure pricing updates are being sent to Google at the same time they are being pushed to your consumer-facing website.
Price feed delayed, intervening price mismatches
Description: Mismatches will be categorized into this bucket under the following condition: Google scrapes your website at time X and finds a price of $A on your web page, but a price of $B in the cache. Some time passes, and Google continues to receive pricing messages that indicate the price for the room is $B. Finally, more time passes, and we receive a pricing update that still matches price $B.
Suggested action: This situation typically implies some sort of disconnect or bug between the system that updates your consumer-facing website and the system that updates your prices with Google. Please ask whoever manages your Google feed to validate that their price update pipeline is working correctly.
Other causes of price mismatches
Google cannot automatically classify every mismatched price. Prices that cannot be automatically classified will be put into the ‘Other’ bucket. Below are more possible causes of price mismatches that cannot be detected automatically:
- Country-specific mismatches: The Price Accuracy report segments data by the top 3 countries whose accuracy scores differ significantly from your overall score. Use the graph to identify countries whose average accuracy scores are less than the overall average, and then filter the report by Hotel Country to find specific instances of price innaccuracies.
- Missing taxes and fees: Please include all necessary taxes and fees in your pricing updates, and ensure you correctly split your base rate and taxes apart (where applicable).
- Unclear tax and fee representation: Be sure to indicate any taxes and other uncollected fees clearly on your site so Google's crawlers and manual reviewers can easily find them.
- Undisclosed website experiments: When you conduct tests on your website design and layout that affect the checkout page sequences or the HTML elements involved in displaying your prices, consult your technical account manager (TAM) beforehand. He or she can assess whether the experiment could impact your price accuracy.
For more information about how to correct inaccuracies, see Improve price accuracy.