Hotel campaigns in Google Ads offer several bidding tools that provide flexible billing options and allow you to automatically capture the target market without needing to adjust bids.
This article outlines bidding best practices and tips to help you navigate through the smart bidding strategies for hotel campaign investment at times when user demand is rapidly changing.
Best practices to manage hotel campaigns effectively and with minimal effort
- Determine your goals and performance targets. Learn more about setting goals and targets for specific hotels using campaigns and ad groups
- Once the right bidding strategy is determined, learn how to set the right bids to account for changing conditions, such as spikes or dips in volume or conversion rate.
- Identify how traveler behavior is changing and adjust your bids accordingly. For instance, there might be a shift to certain device types or spikes in certain markets as regions recover from COVID-19 on different timelines.
Here are some tips that can help you navigate through the complexities associated with bidding strategies:
1. Identify the right bid strategy for your hotel campaign
When click and conversion trends are constantly changing, Smart Bidding can help you acquire your target market using auction-time signals like user location.
If you do not have the necessary resources to update bids frequently and react to changes quickly, then consider using one of these Smart Bidding strategies:
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.
- Commission (per stay): This helps you eliminate the risk of cancellations. You only pay after guest stays occur. Learn more about commission (per stay) for hotel ads
- Requires you to upload reconciliation reports after guest stays are completed.
- Commission (per conversion): This helps you automatically optimize for bookings, even when user demand is changing quickly. You only pay when a booking occurs. Learn more about commission (per conversion) for hotel ads
- If you're not able to set up conversion tracking, CPC bidding still provides you with the ability to optimize using bid adjustments.
- Target ROAS (Return on ad spend): Will help automatically optimize your bid and maximize conversion value based on real-time data. Learn more about Target ROAS bidding for hotel ads.
- Enhanced CPC (ECPC): This gives you full control of your maximum CPC bid while automatically adjusting to capture more bookings. Learn more about Enhanced CPC bids for hotel ads
Tip: If you’re using ECPC or Target ROAS, you can also use the Google Ads Conversion Import feature to upload offline conversions. This is useful if your bookings occur on a partner’s website, or if post-booking processes are required before the booking is confirmed. However, online conversion tracking usually provides better performance for Smart Bidding because it does not carry a delay.
Note, the conversion category must be set to "Purchase" to be used for Smart Bidding campaigns (ECPC, target ROAS).
2. Set your bids to account for current trends
The Target ROAS or maximum CPC bid that you set in your campaign Bid Settings is the best way to control your performance and budgets. Here are some tips:
- Anticipate upcoming changes. Smart Bidding strategies will optimize conversions for you based on previous conversion rates. If you anticipate a sudden change to the system that is not reflective of trends over the last month, adjust your bids and targets accordingly.
Example
Country A has announced the lift of domestic travel bans, effective next month. You know that travel demand will be significantly higher in the next few weeks compared to what it has been over the past month. To capture this opportunity, you should consider increasing your commission rate (if you are using Smart Bidding) or CPC for campaigns with traffic in Country A.3. Stay on top of changing trends
These additional tools can help you identify how traveler behavior is changing:
- Reporting in Google Ads: Google Ads provides many itinerary-specific dimensions by which you can slice performance of your hotel campaigns, such as Advance Booking and Rate Type. These trends can be helpful in informing your campaign setup or bidding.
- Think with Google: Think With Google regularly publishes macro insights and trends that may be helpful in understanding how to reach travelers effectively. For example, you can check Google Trends to see query interest in “open hotels” in different geographies.
- Bid simulator: If you’re using commission or CPC, you can use the bid simulator for hotel campaigns to estimate how changes to your bid will impact performance metrics like impressions, clicks, and conversions.
Bid simulator isn't compatible with Hotel campaigns.
4. Adjust your targets by biddable segments
Hotel campaigns offer rich bid adjustment dimensions so that you can optimize for goals that matter to you, whether or not you are using Smart Bidding. Bid adjustments for hotel campaigns are supported for the following bid strategies: commission (per conversion), Target ROAS, ECPC, and CPC.
Example
You can apply the following bid adjustments depending on your use case:
- You're using commission (per conversion), which automatically optimizes for pre-cancellation return on ad spend, and you want to shift traffic away from bookings that are likely to cancel. You notice that bookings for “tonight” are least likely to cancel. You could consider setting a positive bid adjustment using an advance booking window to capture this demand, or applying a negative bid adjustment to longer booking windows.
- You're using CPC or Target ROAS bidding and notice that traffic has shifted significantly to mobile while people are staying at home. You could consider setting a device type bid adjustment to account for this pattern.
- These traffic shifts will automatically be accounted for when using Smart Bidding.
You can evaluate the performance of your bid adjustments by slicing performance metrics by the bid adjustment dimensions applied.
5. Adjusting bids and budgets is the best way to control performance
- Adjust Targets: When using value-based bidding with a target ROAS, if you want to increase conversion volume, consider gradually reducing the target ROAS. This allows the bid strategy to enter more auctions and generate more volume. Alternatively, if you want to increase conversion value, you may raise the target ROAS. When you change targets, the bidder will react immediately but will need some time to hit the new target (give it 1-2 conversion cycles). Learn more about How to make target adjustments with Search Smart Bidding.
- Set a target ROAS that’s right for you:
- Before transitioning to value-based bidding, ideally you will be already bidding to the desired conversion goal using a tCPA bid strategy. Be sure to report values across all relevant campaigns for 4 weeks or 3 conversion cycles (whichever is longer) before determining your ROAS target and activating value-based bidding. Learn more about changing biddable conversion goals.
- Your ROAS target should be at or below the ROAS compared to your historical performance.
- To find this, select Modify Columns from the “Columns” drop-down and add the Conv. value/cost column from the list of "Conversions" columns. Then, multiply your conversion value per cost metric by 100 to get your target ROAS percent.
- Ensure the time frame of your ROAS evaluation excludes the most recent conversion delay period to get an accurate view of campaign performance.
- Target recommendations can also be found in the Recommendations tab, during campaign construction or while creating a strategy at the campaign or portfolio levels.
