Should "Official Site" Be In Your Hotel's Paid Search Ad Copy?

Often times on SERPs you will see "official site" next to a brand's site name. We wanted to know if this made a real difference, so we put it to the test with several of our clients. So far, we have seen various results. Some clients are in favor of using the phrase in their paid search ad copy and some had the opposite conclusion. My tests using the phrase “official site” within client paid search ad copy has made a positive impact on many of my clients' campaigns.

One of the first hotel client accounts I tested this on had a small budget in a heavily competitive market and was very seasonal. When tested with "official site," it resulted in an increase in conversions. The results of the test are below:

As we had expected, the experiment of using “official site” in the ad copy resulted in an increase in conversions along with a slight increase in CTR. What we also saw across most of the properties was the average CPC decreasing, which in return either lowered our costs or allowed us to drive more clicks to for the same budget.

Here are the results from two more tests that performed similarly:

While most of the tests resulted in positive increases, there were a few who didn’t see any major changes in conversions, positive or negative. They did, however, see the decreasing of the CPC and cost.

After our testing was done, we did decide we would implement “official site” language in the headlines in our branded terms campaigns across multiple hotels' paid search accounts.

GCommerce recently pulled our top converting ads from a sampling of our hotel client accounts across our entire portfolio. We found that a majority of them had “official site” within the title, once again confirming that having it in the ad copy can be effective for improving campaign performance and conversion rate optimization.

Conclusion

I recommend testing the inclusion of “official site” in your account’s ad copy to see if it has a positive impact before adding it in permanently. Still have questions about how you can test this in your hotel’s paid search account? Reach out to GCommerce today.