Hotel Ads FAQ

Given the number of important features that Hotel Ads provides, integration requires a significant amount of technical expertise. For best results, we recommend that you work with a Google-authorised third-party integration partner.

If you have a Google Account Manager, talk to them about any additional integration options that we have available to you.

Learn more about integrating with Google Hotel Ads.

The hotel list is a complete list of all properties that you want to display on Google Hotel Ads. We use the information in your hotel list to match your properties to the canonical listing on Google Maps. The Feed Status Tool gives you a list of issues related to your feeds and their possible remediations. Review your properties list for errors and to help fix issues with missing, incorrect or incomplete feed data that doesn't match with Google Maps.

To publish or fix any errors in your hotel list and upload the updated file to your Hotel Centre account, learn which option is best depending on your delivery mode and how to set up your hotel inventory.

For more information about updating your feed, see the Hotel list XML reference.

If a hotel is not indexed, then it does not participate in the auction. The following are the most common reasons why a hotel might not be indexed:

• Data quality issues
• Clustering issues
• Matching issues

Each of these common issues are described in the sections that follow.

You can use the scorecard (on the homepage of your Hotel Centre dashboard) to get a quick sense of your overall matching statistics:

Data quality issues

Data quality issues are problems with the hotel list feed, such as missing information or incorrect formatting of information. The cause of a data quality issue is shown in the DATA ISSUES column of the Matching Report tool.

If a hotel in your feed has an error message, add or correct the information in your hotel's entry within your feed and resubmit the feed so that the hotel will be able to participate in the ad auction.

Troubleshoot data quality issues

Clustering issues

Overclustered hotels are hotels that appear to be duplicates of other hotels in your hotel list feed. Overclustering is usually a result of incomplete or duplicate information in one or more entries.

If a hotel is 'overclustered', the Matching Report tool displays it and the other overclustered properties in the 'HOTEL ID OVERCLUSTERED WITH' column. To fix overclustered hotels, correct the error(s) and resubmit your feed. You can also download a CSV file with all of your overclustered hotels by clicking the 'Download as CSV' button.

Troubleshoot clustering issues

Matching issues

Unmatched hotels are hotels whose entries in your Hotel List don't match any entries in Google's catalogue of hotels (also referred to as the manifest). Google attempts to match the hotels in your feed with those in its manifest.

Troubleshoot matching issues

Over-clustering usually happens when one or more of your hotel properties appear to be duplicates of another property. Hotels are often over-clustered in densely populated areas, such as Las Vegas or other tourist destinations. Occasionally, two or more attributes (e.g. address, phone, longitude, name, etc.) of a hotel are listed on maps separately, but describe the same hotel property. If you experience issues with over- or under-clustering, see Manual Match Fix tool.

Google gathers images of hotels from multiple sources. Depending on the original source of the image, you may be able to resolve the issue yourself. For any issues not resolved by the sources listed below, please contact Google.

Photos submitted by other users

Street View

With indoor Street View for hotels, you have the ability to offer 360º virtual tours. To troubleshoot issues with these Street View images and user-submitted images, use the 'Report a problem' link included at the bottom right of any photo's page. You can also use this form to request blurring and report on the overall quality of a photo.

User uploaded images

Hotel photos uploaded by users can be flagged for review. See our reporting errors article about flagging inappropriate or irrelevant photos. Google will review flagged photos to determine if they violate our quality guidelines.

Photos that you submitted

After you verify your hotel's page on Google, sign in to your account to add and manage photos of your hotel.

If the photos for your hotel(s) are incorrect (old, wrong hotel, rebranding) or non-existent, please contact Google through the contact form. (Note: This form is available in English only.)

Review transaction message errors by using the Feed Status Tool, which generates a report of feeds that include errors and/or warnings that Google encountered when processing those feeds. Filter the report by file type, status or time period to get more granular insights into your feed errors. You can also use the Feed Status v.2.0 to generate the same reports.

The Hotel Ads Feed Validation Tool uses feed error codes to identify specific problems with the validity of your data feed. For more information on how to interpret specific error codes, consult our searchable feed error codes table. It provides options to filter by keyword or by feed error type. We also have a variety of other tools in the Hotel Centre that you can use to troubleshoot different types of feeds.

There are a variety of factors that can prevent your ads from appearing in searches, including issues with billing, prices, taxes, landing pages, bidding strategies or feed errors. Below are suggestions for troubleshooting each issue:

Check your billing accuracy

• Make sure that your billing information is accurate and complete in your Hotel Center account.
• Confirm that your hotel is indexed and has no data quality issues. You can check index status in the hotel list views, or in the list provided by the hotels API. To resolve data quality issues, use the Manual Match Fix tool.

Ensure that your hotels are not suspended and have valid prices

• Ensure that you have valid prices and no errors for hotel itineraries. You can check prices through Hotel Centre or the Hotels API.
• Check to see if your hotel has been suspended because of price violations.
• Review the Price accuracy policy to see if your price accuracy score is below the acceptable threshold.

Review the Taxes and fees policy

• Hotel itineraries that include taxes and other fees will show in markets outside the US and Canada, but itineraries that don't include taxes and fees in the US and Canadian markets are more likely to be shown. Refer to the Taxes and fees policy for further details.

Check for landing page mismatches

• Check that there are no landing page mismatches by looking at the tags in your landing pages file. Our matching algorithm decides whether or not the ads should be displayed for a user coming from a particular IP location.

Evaluate your bidding strategy

• Review your bidding strategy to confirm that your bid for a hotel is competitive enough. Non-competitive bids will result in a slot type of 'Z' and a slot position of '-1' in your performance report.
• Check the Ad Preview tool. The Ad Preview tool in Hotel Center can help you understand why your hotels might not be shown. Learn more about the Ad Preview tool.
• Fix feed errors. Often, ads won't show up in searches due to feed errors. Google's Hotel Ads Feed Validation tool provides you with quick and easy access to the information that you need to fix most search-related data issues, such as overclustering, indexing and more.

Additional information

For additional information on how to improve the performance of your ads, see our tips on how to troubleshoot common issues:

• Improve the performance of your ads.
• Optimise your bidding strategy to improve your ad performance.
• Identify missed opportunities based on auction participation and bids.
• Learn how budget can affect ad visibility.
• Use room bundles to boost performance.

Want to learn more? We offer a comprehensive list of reports that can help you effectively manage your ads performance and identify improvement opportunities.

Getting an alert that your Hotel Centre account experienced an 'Automated Check Score Drop', means that your accuracy score experienced material drops and needs to be improved.

To opt in to alerts or to review/change your email alert settings, see Setting up email alerts. To improve your accuracy score, review Price accuracy report and Improve price accuracy.

Your reports will by default show the post-adjusted conversion numbers based on the latest data that we have. We will add a new 'Conversion adjustment' segmentation option to Google Ads reporting that will separately show the original conversions and the adjustments, reported by the time of the impression.

New conversions and conversion adjustments require separate uploads due to different columns, and formats for each upload file.

The adjustment time in Google Ads isn't the original transaction date or the upload time. It's the specific date and time that you learnt about the change to the original conversion. This adjustment time should always be after the original conversion time and before the upload time. While the exact hour and minute aren't critical, it's important to ensure that the adjustment time falls within this window.

If you upload adjustments for order IDs that weren't previously tracked, Google Ads will ignore them. You'll probably receive an error message during the upload process to alert you of the issue.

Yes, if an order is adjusted that we counted as an observed cross-device conversion, we will adjust the estimated component. When a conversion is retracted, Google Ads tries to maintain a more accurate picture of how different devices contribute to overall cross-device conversions.

No, retracting conversions or adjustments in Google Ads wouldn't directly impact view-through conversions. Conversion adjustments are meant to restate the value or retract clicks that led to conversions, not impressions that resulted in view-through conversions. View-through conversions track users who saw the ad but didn't click, so they wouldn't be counted as a click to be adjusted. Learn more about view-through conversions.

Yes, EVCs are supported by conversion adjustments.

No, conversion adjustments don't work with goals imported from Google Analytics (GA) into Google Ads.

Pay for conversions is a billing model where you are only charged when a user completes a desired action (conversion) on your website or app (i.e. billed based on the original conversion). This could be a purchase, a sign-up or any other action that you define as valuable. You will be billed based on the original conversion.

Yes, conversions keyed with GBRAID can be adjusted regardless of source (tag or OCI) and as long as the advertiser uses the transaction ID/order ID to match conversions to adjust. Conversion adjustments are not available for WBRAID.