The Benefits of Running A Paid Ad Campaign to Drive Traffic

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The Benefits of Running Paid Ad Campaigns to Drive Traffic

As part of a hotels strategy, we put content on our site, our blogs or our social media to help grow our audiences and hopefully convert sales. To help increase the traffic and hopefully increase conversions we also use online paid advertising. We have previously discussed search engine marketing when looking at the topic of SEO. This focused on different types of improvements to the hotel’s blog or website to help it rank higher in Google’s organic search results. Another element to search engine marketing is search engine advertising (SEA). Unlike organic SEO which is free and takes a lot of time and effort to rank high in the searches, SEA allows you to buy traffic. If a business wants to rank higher or wants to promote a special campaign, then it can turn to search engine advertising as part of its strategy. SEA paid results are shown above organic listings with “Ad” or “Sponsored” written beside them. See the example below of ppc advertising examples. This is a form of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising where a company will bid on search terms or words and pay for every click they receive. SEA can be called PPC in marketing, but we must remember SEA is for search engines, and PPC while is part of the SEA, PPC advertising campaigns can also be used with popular social media platforms. 

How SEA Works:

While search engine optimization is focused on improving your organic placement on a search engine with the use of keywords on your website, SEA takes the keywords and places an advert directly into the search engine results for your website or blog based on the keywords you are bidding on. These ads will appear above the organic results and you will pay for every time someone clicks into your site or blog from the advert.  The first step of using SEA effectively is defining the keywords that are relevant to your business. We discussed keyword Research in blog 3 and some tools you can use for this. Once you have your keywords defined, you can begin to create your ad using Google Ad Manager or an alternative ad manager for a different search engine.

How much should we Spend? 

In reality, it doesn’t cost anything to simply place your ad on the search engine it only incurs a charge when a user clicks on your advert and they are redirected to your website or blog. Different keywords or phrases will incur different charges. Therefore, you need to have a budgeting plan in place. A good place to start is understanding your breakeven return on ad spend (ROAS). To determine your break-even ROAS you need to know what your average profit margin is. If you sell your room for €100 and the cost of service, products and fees is €45 then you make a profit of €55 or a profit margin of 55%. To determine your break-even ROAS you take your % profit margin and multiply by 100 to give you the breakeven ROAS %. This means that for every €1 spent on ad campaigns you need to make a return of €5.55 to remain profitable. Once you understand your break-even ROAS you then need to decide your desired ROAS and this is really up to you. Anything above the breakeven ROAS will result in profit.

What are the benefits of SEA? 

Your hotel can benefit from the use of a PPC campaign to increase traffic, promote your brand and generate conversions. Other benefits of paid advertising can be identified as the following: 

• Paid Advertising is Measurable
• Paid Advertising gives you quick Instant visible Results
• Paid Advertising is Cost-Effective
• Paid Advertising allows you a great amount of control
• Paid Advertising gives you access to a large audience instantly  

While SEA has great advantages it also has its disadvantages in that there is high competition for commercial keywords amongst you and your competitors. Take hotels in Dublin if they were to all compete on the keyword "Dublin Hotels" or "Hotels in Dublin", this would drive the cost per click up and cost your campaign too much. Overall though it is important to be involved and use PPC as doing nothing won't lead to conversions and won't lead to success. Premium Digital can help your hotel set up the best PPC campaigns for your website or blog so contact us today to get started. 

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

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Written by Philip Kelly