Metasearch has become more complex than it initially was in the beginning, and advertisers demand this type of complexity. The question is no longer about a fixed CPC per property or country. With the increasing competition on the market, all advertisers are looking for more flexibility and refined targeting to better adjust to their commercial goals. Today, most of the metasearch platforms offer the functionality of Bid Multipliers (also known as Bid Modifiers), which enable us to apply complex bidding strategies.
What are Bid Multipliers? How do they work?
The Bid Multipliers are the levers that can change your final bid, and allow you to decide whether to decrease or increase your final bid in the auction based on the user search criteria at that moment. This gives you more granularity in terms of targeting your specific commercial needs and leveraging your investment as well as allowing you to optimize your returns on advertising spend in the end. Introducing the new dimensions into your bidding strategies gives you an opportunity of acquiring more valuable traffic and reduce the non-efficient costs.
Taking a deeper dive in an example with the most common Bid Multipliers based on the length of stay dimension would be if you have a portfolio of resort hotels where the stays are very rarely shorter than four (4) nights, you would want to acquire more visibility and traffic for the searches that are intended for longer stays rather than check-in today/check-out tomorrow types of searches. By increasing the Bid Multipliers in place for four (4) nights or longer and decreasing the bids on shorter stay searches, you will be able to manage your budgets more efficiently by investing the majority of it in more conversions and valuable traffic for you.
What multipliers are available?
Each metasearch channel has its own Bid Multiplier structure and naming. However, the functionality and multiplier logic is very similar in most of the cases.
Length of Stay
As described in the example earlier, Length of Stay or LOS, is a multiplier that allows the user to adjust bids based on the number of nights that a guest is searching for. By increasing the Bid Multiplier for longer lengths of stay, the user is able to be more aggressive on searches that are for multiple nights. A user can also decrease the multiplier for single night stays if these bookings are not profitable at the current CPC level.
Booking Window / Days to Arrival / Time To Travel
This is a type of Bid Multiplier that is applied based on the number of days in advance that the end-user wants to check-in. For example, you can set a higher multiplier for bookings that are coming up sooner and a separate multiplier for those that are further in the future. The idea is to leverage the booking lead times that have the biggest revenue impact for your business.
Check-In Date
This is a type Bid Multiplier that can be applied to ads shown based on the check-in date on which date the end-user wants to check-in. This allows you to target specific need periods by date and apply multipliers within these date ranges.
Day of Week
The Day of Week is a Bid Multiplier that can be applied based on the day of the week on which the end-user wants to check-in. For example, you can set a lower multiplier for weekend check-ins and a higher multiplier for weekday check-ins. This allows you to further address need periods in a more specific manner.
Date Type
The Date Type (DT) multiplier is very simple but also very effective for optimizing a campaign. The Date Type refers to whether the user modified the default travel dates when they performed their search for a hotel. A user who does not select a date and uses the default dates that are populated in their browser will fall into the Default Date bucket. A user that manually selects a date will fall into the Selected Date bucket. This is important so that users who select specific dates show a much greater intent to purchase than users who do not select specific dates. This does not mean that a user in the Default Date bucket will not convert, but it does mean that the users in the Selected Date bucket already have set travel dates, indicating that they are deeper in the purchase funnel on average.
Number of Guests
This type of Bid Multiplier allows you to target the number of guests for which the end-user wants to book. The Number of Guests multiplier is one that is used more infrequently but can be of value if the number of guests in a room directly impacts the revenue generated by the booking. This is not always due to the room price being higher, but it is important if the number of guests impacts the amount of money spent in the hotel outlets.
How does DerbySoft deal with all the multipliers?
DerbySoft has built proprietary algorithms to maximize the advantages of using multipliers, making it effortless and painless for you. Based on the performance trends and your targets, the multipliers and the bids are automatically recalculated and updated by the algorithms in order to achieve the desired performance goals.
