5 Reasons Your Hotel’s Direct Booking Campaigns Fail (And How To Avoid Them)

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November 26, 2019 by

You already know that driving more direct bookings for your hotel is the key to long term financial health and success for your hospitality business. You’re ready to maximize your direct bookings with a robust digital marketing strategy. You’ve hired a hotel digital marketing agency to help you reach your goals. But alas, your campaigns are not producing the results or ROAS you need to achieve your revenue goals. How can you fix this? GCommerce is here to help. Here are the top 5 reasons your hotel’s direct booking marketing campaigns are not producing better results.

1. Your Hotel’s Rates Are Getting Undercut By the OTAs

You’re spending thousands of dollars to drive qualified traffic to your website but reservation contributions from OTAs keep going up. You’re running marketing campaigns that are well-targeted and focus on all parts of the consumer journey, including bottom of the funnel branded terms and retargeting campaigns. Your website is well optimized, easy to navigate and provides a great user experience. After reviewing your hotel’s revenue management you find the culprit. You’re selling rooms for lower rates on the OTA channels than on your own website. Today’s consumers are intelligent and use a variety of websites and tools to ensure they are securing the best price for their hotel stay. If you’re selling the same room for a lower rate on the OTAs, guests are not going to book directly through your website. Make sure you are monitoring the OTAs and offering the lowest rate only through your website. 

2. You’re Targeting the Wrong Audience

You dive into your hotel website’s Google Analytics and find high bounce rates, low conversion rates, and your ads just aren’t getting engagement. The cause may be that you’re targeting the wrong audience. Maybe your paid search keywords are too broad, maybe your demographics aren’t right or maybe your interest targeting on Facebook doesn’t correlate to your brand or product offering. 

How can you fix this? At GCommerce, we approach every client campaign with a customized approach. We create audience recommendations based on the client’s first-party data and brand strategy. Google Analytics and your hotel’s PMS is a great place to start to identify geotargets, demographics and other campaign targeting ideas. There are many different types of audiences and targeting across platforms. Here are a few of our favorite audience creation examples:

  • Create a targeted Facebook look-a-like audience off of your Facebook page followers to find new potential fans/guests to target with prospecting ads
  • Create a Google Ads segmented customer match audience of your top revenue-generating guests and target them across Google’s network
  • Target a customer audience list of website visitors that have included children in their search for date availability on your site

Make sure you are using data to guide your decisions and adjust your targeting as you discover what works and what doesn’t. 

3. Your Hotel’s Campaign Budget Needs to Be Adjusted

Maybe your direct booking campaigns are failing to hit your goals because your budget is not well allocated. Maybe your current budget is too low to drive the sufficient awareness, traffic and conversions you need in order to drive enough revenue or leads. Or maybe you have too much of your budget allocated to awareness campaigns when you need to be pushing some budget to campaigns and media platforms that drive more ROAS. At GCommerce we calculate recommended budgets based off of your hotel’s historical analytics and campaign data as well as estimates provided by each platform’s tools. Since these calculations utilize estimates, it’s important to re-evaluate campaign targets on an ongoing basis. We recommend reviewing campaign performance each month to understand what channels are helping you achieve your KPIs and which ones are not. Depending on your results, you can adjust budget between channels accordingly. 

4. Your Campaign’s Messaging Doesn’t Speak to Your Audience

You’ve created a well-crafted set of customer personas based on your target guests. You’ve carefully selected the best audiences based on these personas. You’ve created great content and your website is well optimized. You launch your campaigns but engagement metrics are low and underperforming. 

How can you fix this to drive more qualified traffic to your hotel’s website? Focus on your ad messaging. Have you created messages that speak to your target persona and how your hotel solves all of their problems, eases their worries, or provides the exact type of experience they desire? Many times ad messaging is too broad and generic. Craft targeted messaging that speaks to each of your target personas to improve your campaign performance. Some example strategies:

  • Targeting mothers who are in charge of planning their family vacations? What matters most to them while they are searching for a family vacation? See the below example for a luxury guest ranch targeting parents searching for their next family vacation:
  • This ad for Dollywood’s DreamMore Resort & Spa targets parents of young children with Dollywood interests. The messaging focuses on the magic of the new Wildwood Grove park:
  • Targeting couples looking for a unique romantic escape? How can you address their concerns and desires? See the below example for a luxury guest ranch targeting couples during a shoulder season need period:
  • This ad for Sunset Marquis West Hollywood aims to target those uber-luxury guests like celebrities and the elite. The messaging is coy and focuses on privacy and comfort:
  • Targeting fans coming to town for a sports event? Try something like this Hotel 43 Ad that speaks to BSU fans traveling to Boise and offers them a special fan rate:

5. Your Website Isn’t Built to Convert

Your marketing teams have built data-driven audiences, strategies, and ads. They’ve optimized campaigns repeatedly but your website traffic isn’t converting. Across all of your hotel’s website traffic channels, the bounce rate is high, conversion rates are low and website visitors aren’t engaging with your site content. The reason could be that your website needs to be updated for better conversions. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

  1. Does the design and style of my hotel’s website accurately portray the hotel brand and on-property experience? 
  2. Is the imagery and media on my hotel’s website appealing and allow the visitor to experience the hotel’s rooms, amenities, and ambiance before they even step foot on property?
  3. Is important information about my hotel easy to find on my website? Can a visitor easily navigate around the website?
  4. Is there a clear path for the visitor to take action and book a reservation or contact the hotel?

If you answer “no” to any of these questions you probably need to revamp your website or consider launching a new one. Your hotel’s website is your online storefront and if it doesn’t look good, is outdated or doesn’t provide the information and imagery a consumer needs in order to feel confident in booking, they aren’t going to make a reservation at your hotel. As a result, your direct booking campaigns won’t convert and your ROAS will suffer greatly.

Looking for additional ways, beyond launching a new website, to enhance your hotel website’s conversion rate? Here are some of our favorites: 

  1. Incorporate direct booking tools such as The Hotels Network to personalize messaging and content on your site depending on the visitor and audience type
  2. The Guestbook cashback and guest rewards/loyalty program allows you to build loyalty and drive more conversions
  3. Custom packaging and special offers targeted to your desired audience segments

GCommerce is dedicated to helping hotels succeed with their direct booking strategy. If this is something your hotel needs assistance with please reach out to our sales team today.

How to Increase Your Hotel’s Midweek Stays with Facebook Advertising

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November 5, 2019 by

Does your hotel or property suffer from high o accupancy on the weekends but low demand during the week? Maybe this only happens during specific seasons or months, but whatever the cause, you are not alone! In fact, many hoteliers find themselves stuck in the rut of minimal midweek stays. While there are many different approaches to alleviating this issue, we’re going to focus on how you can increase midweek stays through Facebook advertising for hotels. Not only is Facebook easy to use, but it’s also cost-effective because you can run campaigns for only a few dollars per day and enjoy lower CPCs and higher engagement than other ad platforms.

Take a look below for a few tips and tricks when it comes to advertising midweek campaigns for hotels on Facebook.

It All Starts with A Facebook Audience

Exact Match Facebook Audience

The first step to creating any Facebook advertising campaign is to create your audience. While you could continue focusing on the audiences you use for your hotel's regular Facebook campaigns, a more focused approach might prove better in the long run. After all, if those same Facebook audiences were good enough for your hotel's midweek campaigns, they’d already be converting that way.

Instead, we suggest creating an exact match list on Facebook of customers who have stayed midweek at your hotel in the past. Whether you want to target all midweek guests within the past two years or by season, using this targeted approach will be a great starting point for getting your message in front of the right audience on Facebook.

An example of this concept could be uploading a list for everyone who stayed at your hotel midweek last summer and targeting them with a summer midweek promotion.

Lookalike Facebook Audience List

Once you have your exact match Facebook audience created, you can take it to the next level and make a lookalike Facebook audience based on that list. By creating a lookalike audience, you’ll be able to target a fresh pool of potential hotel guests who are similar to those on your hotel's exact match list. This also allows your booking funnel to be continually refreshed and lessens the likelihood that your retargeting list gets stale.

Once you’ve got your new adset loaded with this lookalike audience, dial it down further by utilizing interests, behaviors, and demographics. Is your midweek hotel guest a parent? Married? Do they have a certain education level or work in a particular industry? Maybe they are frequent travelers or have interest in your metro area and its big attractions. Whatever your midweek persona is, using detailed targeting helps narrow your audience even further to ensure your impressions and clicks are more qualified than a general audience.

At GCommerce, we like to target business travelers in particular for these campaigns, as they are typically an audience that stays midweek. How do you target business travelers for your hotel? You could start by filtering through demographic targeting such as specific industries, employers, and even job titles. From there you can dive more into behaviors, such as frequent travelers and frequent international travelers and then narrow it further by interests that business travelers might have.

Creating Midweek Ads For Your Hotel

Your hotel's midweek Facebook audiences are set up and ready to run, great! But now comes the part of actually drawing them in and getting that click-through to the website. When your hotel is struggling with midweek occupancy, running a midweek offer or promotion is a great way to encourage bookings. However, a midweek offer doesn’t always have to be a percentage off or a free night. 

Here are a few of our favorite “offers” for increasing midweek stays:

  • Stay Longer, Save More – give 10% off for booking three-plus nights
  • Complimentary Midweek Happy Hours – provide a free drink or a glass of wine in the lobby or bar after 5 PM during the week (this is great for business travelers!)
  • Free Breakfast – complimentary breakfast for midweek stays (again, great for business travel)
  • Book 3 Nights, Get 1 Free – this is a great way to extend your hotel's midweek audience
  • Free Upgrades During Midweek – why not offer to upgrade that standard hotel room to a deluxe, or deluxe hotel rooms to suites (based on availability)?
  • Host Meetings and Events – offer up meeting and event packages or free stays for hosting at your property
  • Rewards Program – if you don’t already have a rewards program in place, offering rewards for midweek stays is another great ploy for both frequent and business travelers

Alternatively, though not technically an offer, hosting midweek events and activities such as live music or other performances is also a great draw to use in your hotel's Facebook ads.

Use Creative Messaging That Speaks to Your Audience

So now we’ve got our Facebook midweek audience and formulated an offer; the next step is to tie everything together through creative messaging. Your hotel's Facebook ad messaging should align with your audience and offer, but should also be fun and eye-catching.

Below we came up with a few examples that could tug on potential guests’ heartstrings:

  •  Are you trying to get your weekend guests to book an additional day?
    • Play hooky
    • Extend your weekend getaway
    • Stay longer and get an additional night on us
  • Are you targeting people to visit during off-season?
    • Avoid the crowds
    • Save more when you travel during non-peak months
  • Are you targeting corporate travel?
    • Travel for work doesn’t need to be boring!
    • Long day at the office? Get everything you need right here!

Now that you’ve got the tools for success, it’s time to start strategizing and getting your hotel's own midweek Facebook campaigns into place. Facebook might be a small and relatively easy way to start boosting your midweek activity, but in the long run, it can prove to be extremely effective when it comes to engaging your past customers and improving your hotel's current marketing audience lists.

How to Enhance Your Hotel's Guest Experience from Start to Finish: Part 5

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September 24, 2019 by

To help guests through the customer journey, hotels will need to participate in a multi-channel digital marketing approach. That includes channels that can provide insights and ROI such as paid search, Facebook, display, and more. I'm often asked how I would prioritize all of the different digital marketing channels for hotels, and my response is always to start at the goal. Are you trying to generate top of funnel brand awareness through prospecting or are you trying to drive more bottom of the funnel direct bookings at a lower cost-per-acquisition (CPA) than the OTAs through remarketing efforts? Once you have a goal and a budget, you can start to select which digital marketing channel will help you reach the right customers. 

1. Ongoing Search Engine Optimization for Your Hotel's Website

Most hotels see organic as either the #1 or #2 source for website sessions and revenue. While performance shown through organic traffic metrics is a result of a full-funnel and multiple channel marketing strategies, in order to maintain position within the organic search results means an ongoing focus on foundational on-page SEO strategy and tactics. Hotels should always prioritize search engine optimization near the top of the list and one-time optimization is not going to be enough. Google's search algorithm, the SERP and competition for your targeted keywords and search intent are constantly changing. Ongoing search engine optimization for your hotel's website and digital presence is necessary to remain competitive within Google’s search results. Ongoing on-page SEO includes optimizing foundational elements such as image alt tags, meta descriptions, H1 title tags and possible schema markup, which at GCommerce we call Structured Data. It also includes recommendations for new and expanded content, monitoring the site for technical SEO issues and recommending changes to ensure successful accessibility. Learn more about how to be successful with on-page SEO for hotel websites in our previous blog here.

Hotels should monitor search engine ranking reports, also called SERP reports, that show the current rank for the top keywords the brand wants to target. The goal is to improve rank and exposure for targeted keywords within the Google search results page. It can be very difficult for smaller brands and independent hotels with smaller overall marketing budgets to gain enough traction to rank for high volume keywords like "Miami hotels", so finding more specific, long-tail keywords that you are more qualified for is a more successful approach and strategy for your hotel's SEO. Instead of a broad keyword with incredibly high competition such as "Miami hotels" try a keyword like"oceanfront Miami hotels near Indian beach park" that might have less total search volume but has less competition and is more qualified and more relevant to your hotel. You'll have a better chance of ranking higher in the search results and drive more qualified traffic.

Below is an example of a search engine ranking report:

Example SERP Report

2. Paid Search for Hotels

Google and Bing paid search campaign management is ever-evolving and something that most hotel marketing teams do not have the bandwidth to manage. Most hotels either avoid participating in it or hire a digital marketing firm, like GCommerce, to manage it for them. What is important to note is that beyond having a well optimized and mobile-friendly website and booking engine, paid search is the most important marketing channel hotels can participate in.

If you look at the booking funnel for hotels, paid search is the only digital marketing channel where the guest shows intent before seeing any type of ad.  A guest needs to have actually typed into Google a keyword phrase such as “hotels near a golf course in Heber" before they see an ad for The Homestead Resort. Think about your property and your market and what you think guests are searching for to find your hotel. Make sure that your hotel's digital marketing firm is aware of these search terms. Make sure the firm knows the local way people refer to the area your hotel is based in along with any neighborhood specifics. For example, do they know that downtown LA is referred to as DTLA? When my clients give me this type of guidance, we complete research around that keyword phrase to make sure it has enough search volume to include it in our paid search campaigns for the hotel. 

Just like with SEO, Google is always changing the game. The platform is constantly adding new features along with getting rid of current features, so paid search requires continued management and optimization. At GCommerce, we are continually adding and removing keywords from campaigns, updating messaging, testing targeting options and testing bid strategies based on performance so that we can drive down the ever-rising cost-per-click (CPC) as much as possible to improve overall ROAS.

3. Facebook and Instagram Hotel Advertising

Facebook and Instagram ads are two of the most popular channels for driving brand awareness for hotels because of their fantastic targeting capabilities. You can target geo-locations and standard demographics such as age and gender. Based on the targeting, ads should create awareness of the hotel brand and highlight the key location, events or amenities. For example, if you are trying to drive wedding RFP submissions for your hotel, you would want to target those that are recently engaged in a specific drive market. 

Hotels can also use Facebook and Instagram to run remarketing ads based on traffic to the hotel website or email lists of past guests. Hotels can target these audiences with messaging around hotel offers, events and loyalty programs. Once considered a low-cost marketing channel, Facebook and Instagram are not always a low cost, but they are still lower cost than most other channels and worth investing in for both awareness, lead generation and driving direct bookings for your hotel. 

craguns facebook ad

4. Display Advertising for Hotels

Like most other digital marketing channels, display ads can be used for both hotel prospecting and remarketing campaigns. When my hotel clients ask me how they can drive more qualified eyeballs to their website, I will usually recommend a display prospecting campaign through the Google Display Network. The CPM is usually around $3 per 1000 impressions and the targeting capabilities that include those looking to travel to a specific region are fantastic. For prospecting, GCommerce recommends that the campaigns run for at least 60-90-days with a minimum budget of $750-$1500 per month. The goal is to drive visitors to the hotel website that we can remarket to with offers in the future. 

Remarketing is also a great way to utilize this digital marketing channel for your hotel. Based on the different custom audiences that we discussed in part two of this series, you can promote lodging ads to visitors that interacted with the room pages of the website, wedding packages to those that visit the wedding section and F&B to those that spend time on the dining pages and are located 30-miles from the hotel. With display remarketing, the budget is based on the hotel's website traffic.

surf and sand ads

5. Organic Social Content Marketing for Hotels

Though there has definitely been a decline in social engagement for brands over the last few years, it is still important to push out organic content for your hotel on Facebook and Instagram. We know from the Search Engine Lands SEO Periodic Table that social signals are correlated to ranking performance within the search engines. At GCommerce, we recommend keeping the content authentic. This could look like photos of community involvement, fun photo contests, local & hotel specific events, and hotel guests user-generated content (UGC). 

For most hotels, the most important channels for organic social are Facebook and Instagram. Try to post 2-3 times per week on Facebook and even more frequently for Instagram. Avoid posting about promotions, which should be pushed out as ads instead. Use social channels to have a conversation with past and future guests, and avoid a one-way conversation.

ice cream cone in the air at the durham hotel

6. Hotel Metasearch

Hotel metasearch platforms, such as Google Ads, TripAdvisor, and Kayak, are an extremely important initiative for driving direct bookings for your hotel and taking market share back from the OTAs. Hotels should prioritize metasearch based on the amount of OTA contribution they have. If a hotel sees that their OTA contribution is rising or they would like to decrease their contribution, participating in metasearch would help drive more direct bookings. However, metasearch should also be paired with rate parity tools that will make sure that the hotel is always the same, if not lower, than the OTAs so that there are not any wasted marketing dollars on this channel. Hotel metasearch is managed on either a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) model or requires a management fee plus media budget.

lenox hotel metasearch results

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Series Breakdown

How to Solve 3 Common Hotel Digital Marketing Challenges

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July 30, 2019 by

I’ve learned a lot after hundreds of phone calls with my clients, including the unique digital marketing challenges that hoteliers face. Regardless of the uniqueness of the represented independent hotels, there are a few challenges that remain the same among my different clients here at GCommerce.

1. Your Hotel Is Losing Ground in the SERPs

It’s no secret that the hotel niche has been one of the most competitive niches out there within the SERPs (search engine results pages). Each property has to compete against other independent hotels, hotel chains, review sites and OTAs. Not to mention, the seemingly infinite amount of travel destinations that consumers have to choose from can draw potential guests to other destinations entirely. And if your market is down in occupancy as a whole, you’ll have an even harder time competing to get people to stay at your hotel.

Solution – In order to have a bigger presence in the search engines, you need to develop a solid SEO strategy for your hotel. Here are a few key components for success:

Do keyword research – Before you start, you’ll want to do some research to find out what your hotel’s target audience is searching for, and create content and messaging to include those keywords within your hotel’s website.

Take advantage of Google My Business and Bing Places – These free resources are true gems in getting your hotel’s website to appear within the SERP. Take advantage of their features and make sure you are encouraging your guests to leave reviews on Google as part of your strategy. Consider a partner that offers local search directory optimization, as ensuring your information is consistent across the internet can positively impact your hotel’s SEO success.

Optimize your meta descriptions and title tags – Make sure every page on your hotel’s website has optimized meta descriptions and title tags. Title tags carry a lot of weight in determining rank within search engines, and meta descriptions can have a lot of impact on getting users to click-through to your website.

Create local content – If you don’t have a blog you’re actively using, start now. Write blogs about things to do in your area, about your hotel and other topics geared towards your target audience and post them at least twice per month. Don’t forget to include a CTA within the blog, encouraging readers to stay at your hotel.

Page speed – Make sure your website is loading quickly. Note that 53% of mobile site visitors bounce if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Don’t forget Google includes page speed as part of its ranking algorithm. Use Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool to check the speed of your website and work with your website administrator to make updates to improve speed but that don’t take away key functionality and imagery.

Mobile first design – The majority of site visits are from mobile devices. Make sure your website (and booking engine) are designed with this in mind. Whenever you make a change on your hotel’s website, make sure to view that change on your mobile device.

2. OTAs are a necessary evil.

You would love to NOT participate with the OTAs, but the cost to compete against them is just too great. So, you join forces, perhaps just limiting to one or two OTAs, and pay the 10-30% commission for them to take reservations on your behalf. In fact, Booking.com knows how reliant hotels are and recently announced they will be taking a commission on resort fees. And even with this change, the reliance on OTAs isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. In this current landscape, utilizing OTAs to supplement your reservations is important. However, your goal should be to strive for as many direct bookings as you can, and reduce overall OTA contribution.

Solution – Develop and implement a book direct strategy for your hotel.

Take ownership of “Best Rate Available” – You control your hotel’s rates. Take ownership that you have the best rates available on your website. You know a portion of your guests are going to price shop against the OTAs - give them confidence that they are getting the best rate by booking direct.

Use software tools - Look at using partners such as Cybba or The Hotels Network, who have shopping cart abandonment tools and price comparison tools. While the price comparison tool can be controversial, consider the customer buying journey. If potential guests are shopping your hotel’s site and they see they are getting the best deal booking through you, why would they need to leave your site and price shop elsewhere? Keep them on your site, minimize the chance for price shopping (risking them booking through an OTA or another hotel), and capture the conversion.

Consider joining a rewards program – One of the reasons many people book with a hotel chain or OTA is to get hotel points (especially business travelers and frequent travelers). Consider a partner like The Guestbook, which allows your property to white label the rewards program and offers multiple reward redemption options. Or as another option, join independent hotel groups like Preferred Hotels or Stash Rewards.

Market to past guests of OTAs – Train and enforce your front desk asking for email addresses for guests who book through an OTA. Segment these guests into their own email list, and send specific offers with targeted messaging, encouraging those guests to return and book direct for their next stay.

Entice guests with unique perks – You may be stuck price matching rates available OTAs, but you can also get creative and offer what OTAs can’t. Try offering resort credits, complimentary room upgrades when available, or unique packages with dining, spa, golf or other experiences included in the stay package.

Pay attention to rate parity – You’d be surprised how often I find that my clients are not in rate parity. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done a Google search on my clients, only to find that their hotel website is the most (or one of the most) expensive places to book a room – no joke. If the OTAs have a cheaper rate than you offer on your own hotel’s website, don’t be surprised if your guest books through the OTA. When this happens, all of your digital marketing dollars have gone to waste.

3. Wearing Multiple Hats

I find it’s not uncommon for the general manager to be in charge of email campaigns. Or the revenue manager also in charge of public relations. Or the director of sales to also be responsible for social media and community management. We get that you’re busy, but here’s some tips to help.

Solution – Let go of one of your hats (or at least share one).

Encourage employees to take ownership in marketing efforts – Train your front desk to capture unique information about your guests, like their favorite beverage, what activities they like to do when they visit, etc. You can use this personal information for an extra touch next time the guest stays, which will increase customer loyalty. Also, encourage your front desk staff to have guests leave reviews if they’ve had a pleasant stay. Task a few staff members to take photos that could be used for social content.

Consider training from the ground up - I’ve seen my clients successfully use internships as part of their strategy, which has often turned into full time hires down the road. Off-load some of your easier, time-consuming tasks to them to free up more time for you to focus on revenue-generating projects.

Hire a hotel digital marketing partner – Find a trusted marketing partner that knows the digital marketing landscape, specific to the hotel industry. GCommerce has been specializing in marketing in the hotel industry niche for over 17 years. Here at GCommerce, we would gladly wear one of those hats for you. Contact us for your free online assessment.

Google's New Hotel Booking Search Features & What it Means for Your Hotel

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March 13, 2019 by

Google has been gradually taking away website traffic for many industries over the years by moving more information and functionality directly within the search engine, allowing searchers to find what they need without ever leaving Google.com. This shift for the travel industry has previously been felt with the introduction of Google My Business, Google Flight and Google Hotel Search as well as featured snippets and answer boxes within the search results. Last week Google introduced even more changes to its travel related search for hotels and flights that follows this trend and further monetizes travel bookings for Google.

New Features for Google’s Hotel Search with Travel Insights Tool

1. Allow Google to Help Pick Your Next Travel Destination

Google will now curate the best flight deals based on your airport of origin by offering a filter by price and highlighting great value options.

2. New Hotel Deals Filter

Google now offers expanded filters to let you narrow down your hotel search based on a new “deals” specific filter that “uses machine learning to highlight hotels where one or more of our partners offer rates that are significantly lower than the usual price for that hotel or similar hotels nearby.” - Google’s Blog Post.

Click through on one of these deals and you’re taken to the previously updated Google hotels overview page that features hotel overview information, photos, reviews, rates and availability from hotel ads partners and things to do within the destination and near the hotel.

3. View Hotel Highlights

Consumers can also filter and view by hotel highlights and amenities such as if it has a pool, is family friendly or is a luxury hotel - all curated with machine learning and aggregated from multiple sources that Google does not specifically state.

This information can also be found on the hotel’s overview page:

4. Searches for Hotels Near Landmarks in Google Maps

Google is instructing consumers to use Google Maps for helpful information about what hotels are around specific landmarks or attractions by providing hotels near the landmark along with rates, walking and driving distances.

How Can Your Hotel Optimize For Exposure & Conversions With Google’s Updated Hotel Search?

  • Make Sure Your Hotel’s Google My Business and local listings are accurate and optimized
  • Participate in Google Hotel Ads to ensure your hotel website is competing with OTAs in this highly visible space
  • Encourage guests to write reviews and make sure you are responding to them - on all important channels and especially on Google. If your hotel isn’t getting positive reviews - make sure to address the issues whether it’s customer service or product related.
  • Make sure you have a competitive rate strategy in place and your lowest rates are only found on your website.
  • Optimize your website with location focused keywords and optimize for demand driving location attractions and/or events
  • Partner with local events, organizations, conventions and more to gain exposure and potentially links from local businesses

Need help getting started or auditing how you measure up with all of these items? Reach out to our hotel marketing team and we'll set you up for success.

How GCommerce's Programmatic Bidding Strategies Benefit Our Hotel Clients

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October 4, 2018 by

If there is one thing that is absolute in the hospitality internet marketing world, it’s that we must constantly be testing, analyzing, implementing changes (or not) based on test data, and testing some more.

GCommerce utilizes programmatic bid optimization for paid search marketing, which is now a must in a world of constant changes and bid management. Programmatic bidding allows bid adjustments throughout the day and uses data based on previous days data. For an individual to be able to delve into the performance and history of a specific keyword would take hours to be able to optimize an account of 100+ keywords, multiply this by 10 or more clients a day and there is now no time for other important client optimizations.

Programmatic bidding is not just a set-and-forget machine learning tool. If you use programmatic bid optimization you must make sure that you are making the most of it and getting the best results possible for clients. How do you do this? Test. Analyze. Implement (or not). Test Again.

Earlier this year, I ran a test on a sample of clients using a different bid strategy model to see if client performance could benefit from it. It wasn’t that the current automated bid strategy wasn’t working, it was based on the idea that we always want to improve our results, therefore we test different theories and strategies.

This particular test yielded some pretty significant results:

Due to the seasonality of our clients, the best data to gather is to compare year over year with a significant amount of time. Using a date range of 6 months of data, here is what we found:

  • Average CPC’s increased 1%
  • Reservations increased 89%
  • Revenue increased 100%

When comparing to GCommerce’s entire hospitality paid search marketing portfolio, here is what we found:

  • Average CPC’s increased at a much lower rate
  • Reservations increased at a much higher rate
  • Revenue also increased at a much higher rate
Programmatic bidding strategies performance

Rising CPC’s are a constant battle in the paid search marketing world. At GCommerce Solutions, our hospitality internet marketing teams are constantly optimizing paid search campaigns to help decrease this metric as best as we can. After reviewing performance across GCommerce’s entire portfolio, I found that, on average, GCommerce clients experienced an increase of 4% in average CPC’s during the same time period. This leads to a conclusion that our clients and the hotel industry continue to see ever-increasing rise in CPC’s across the board in order to compete in the SERP. But the fact that we have been able to slow it down while ramping up reservations and revenue is a huge win.

After pulling all of the data and seeing such clear results, it was obvious that it was in our clients’ best interest to switch gears on our overall strategy to best reach our KPI (key performance indicator) goals and maximize their spend. So we did.

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