2018 is a key year for Google Hotel Ads, with many changes planned to their hotel ads platform.
During Google’s IP partner event in Berlin, they announced the roll out of Campaigns. This is a new account architecture for hotel ads, similar to what you can find on Adwords. It impacts both the way you bid on hotel ads and how your account will be structured.
The introduction of campaigns is also important as it is Google’s first steps to integrate hotel ads into Adwords (expected in the second half of this year).
A look at campaigns account structure
The new architecture splits accounts into four levels.
- Account – Contains all your hotels. This is where you set you spend and bid caps
- Campaign – Here you set you bidding strategies and adjust your multipliers for hotels within this campaign
- Adgroup – Here you assign the hotels to an adgroup per campaign. You can also set bidding strategies and adjust multipliers at this level. If you do this then Google will use the settings within your adgroup instead of the settings at campaign level
- Hotel ID – Will largely be used for manual bids for each hotel.
What does this mean for you
With the introduction of campaigns you can now manage your Hotel Ads bids and budgets across multiple campaigns. This lets you target different user countries and hotels, and choosing different bid strategies for each campaign.
Some benefits include:
Target geographies more effectively: You can choose where you want your ad to show
For example, Create a campaign for US and Canadian customers looking at hotels in Latin America
Set more flexible budgets: As the budget is set at campaign level and one hotel can belong to several campaigns, you will be able to control your budget with more granularity. You can have a budget per brand, per geography, etc
Be relevant to your audiences: You will be able to use your existing Adwords Audiences in your Hotel Ads campaigns as well as offer specific call outs at the campaign level. Letting you set a higher multiplier for people who visited your website twice in the last 30 days.
Optimize for different traffic segments, such as mobile users in a particular country. For example, you can set up two campaigns for US and Canadian customers. Have one campaign target desktop users and the second campaign target mobile/tablet users.
How it will impact performance
Having worked with Google as part of the BETA. We will begin to see better performance for our customers with the introduction of campaigns. The new bidding structures allow for more control over bidding. Giving our platform more granularity on how to bid for each of your hotels.
In terms of bidding, it is important to note that one hotel can now be in several campaigns. As it is not possible to display more than one hotel ad at the same time Google will only display the hotel for which the campaign bid is highest for that auction.
Changes to the way bidding takes place
Hotels and ad groups within a campaign all use the same bid strategy, which is set at the campaign level. Every campaign has a default bid. This will will be used for the ads within that campaign. Depending on the bid strategy selected, you can optionally set more granular bids at the ad group or individual hotel level.
To use different bidding strategies, multiple campaigns have to be created.
For example you can:
Set up different campaigns that target different ad groups and hotels.
Set up different campaigns that target different user countries.
Pause ad groups or hotels from appearing in one campaign, and run them in another campaign that has a different bid strategy.
Get ready for more changes
Google have introduced campaigns as a first step towards integrating hotel ads into Adwords. With this integration you can now take advantage of pre-existing Audience lists from Adwords. Allowing you to begin remarketing to your engaged customers through Google hotel ads. Something you have not been able to do before.
We will continue to report on the performance of Campaigns as our clients transition to the new architecture. For now we are excited to be bidding using this new structure because of the increased level of control made available to our platform.
