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Online Campaigns: Paid Ads and benefits for Hotel websites

In this blog, I’ll explain how Paid Online Advertisement can benefit small and big hotel websites and key metrics to take into consideration when setting up your Ad.

Nowadays more and more travellers are making their reservations online but there are different channels that a customer can use to book, and this is not a surprise to anyone. But what can you do so your customers book on your website and not through large international Online Travel Agencies (OTA) like Booking.com or Expedia? 

OTAs have been leading the online booking system for many years and hotels are working hard on their online presence to increase their market share and get bookings directly through their branded website and save money as they don’t have to pay commissions for direct bookings.

What can you do to get more direct online reservations?

Every hotel should have a Search Engine Marketing strategy (SEM), within this strategy there should be two sides: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Paid Online Advertisement. In this blog, I’ll focus on Paid Online Ads but if you missed our SEO blogs you can visit this link to learn more about The Importance of SEO in the hospitality industry or this link to review ways to improve your SEO for your hotel’s website. 

What are Paid Online Ads? 

There are a few types of online advertisements. The most popular and effective is PPC or Pay Per Click. When a customer searches online for hotels in an area like “Hotels near Croke Park” as you can see below in the results 2 pages appear on the top and both with the word ‘Ad’ in front of the heading meaning these two companies are paying Google Ads to be at the top of the search engine results. 

This is a great way to increase visibility, but this will not necessarily increase the conversion on your website as there are many factors that can influence a customer’s journey and decision making like your hotel’s website information, photos, content, page usability, clear information, location, online reviews, price, to name a few. 

PPC is definitely a great way to target new potential customers and to increase your brand awareness. This is also a great tool for small hoteliers or for new hotels that don’t have much traffic going to their website and need to increase awareness if the website is not doing well in the search engine results alone without online advertisement. 

How does Paid Advertising work?

Search engine advertising, like Google Ads, allow companies to bid for their ad to be placed in the search engine results when a customer types certain keywords like the above example “Hotels near Croke Park”. Google takes into consideration the bid but also the website’s content and general ad performance over time before ranking the ad as the first one on the page or lower down on the page.

How much do you have to pay for online advertisements? 

This will depend on your budget and the settings for your Ad campaign. For example, you can set up your PPC strategy to bid a max €1 for every customer that clicks on your PPC. But remember, if as result you have a customer who books accommodation for a weekend worth €500 then that was money very well spent!

Three are some key metrics for a successful PPC campaign: 

• Researching keywords: Some investigation should go into this very important step, your marketing agency can help you choose the best and most relevant words for your hotel.
• Organizing keywords: this will be the order in which the keywords will be placed in the campaign. 
• Setting up PPC landing page: A poor landing page will leave your website with high bouncing rates, meaning customers will click on your Ad but once they don’t find what they are looking for on the landing page they will leave your website increasing the bouncing rate. 

For more information on the benefits of running paid adverts in the Hospitality Industry read more Premium Digital blogs.

Premium Digital Working for Success in Hospitality.

Written by Fernanda Pinate