12 Things Hotels May Not Know About Google Adwords

Google Adwords is the marketing method of choice for most businesses nowadays with the key advantage being that the results can be measured.

Short Read

• You can attract people to your website by having a 'Googlead' displayed when a certain word is used in a Google Search.

• You can tick the locations (ie towns or countries) where you want your ads to display.

• Google allows you to set a daily budget so your spending doesnt go out of control

• Done right, the effective commission cost on Adwords is lower than with OTA's

• Googleads is measurable: You can see the value of purchases and the cost of the adwords (Conversion tracking).

• Conversion tracking almost always underestimates the amount of people who purchase rooms from adwords.

• You can target people with adwords who have visited a website similar to your own (ie your competitors).

• Simple keywords work much better than sophisticated keywords ie 'cheap hotels London' is searched for 18 times more than 'boutique hotel paris'

• You can target people who visit your website with ads after they leave (ReMarketing).

• The best people to decide how to use Adwords is non technical people, people who don’t understand the technical details.

• You can set up adwords a 'tap to call' number that routes callers to your phone number.

• The highest converting adword is normally your hotel name (You will need to the Long Read to understand this one!!).

Long Read

You can attract people to your website by having a 'Googlead' displayed when a certain word is used in a Google Search.

Imagine you think your customers are searching for ‘cheap hotel bristol’, with this search the top 3 results on Google are sponsored ads, ie companies that are paying Google for the privilege of appearing right where customers are looking.

You can tick the locations (ie towns or countries) where you want your ads to display.

Often forgotten, you can decide the location of the people where you ad should appear. Is it really necessary that customers in Australia and America see your ad, or are most of your customers European?

Google allows you to set a daily budget so your spending doesnt go out of control.

No one likes to see their budget blown in 1 day, so you can limit the amount you spend with a daily budget ie 10$ per day. Google switches the ad on and off during the day to conserve the budget.

Done right, the effective commission cost on Adwords is lower than with OTA's.

Yep, in cities we often see hotels with conversion rates of 10:1 ie for every 100$ they spend on Google Adwords they get 1000$ of room sales. Remember that with the OTA’s on 15% commission you need to spend 150$ to get 1000$ of room sales.

Googleads is measurable: You can see the value of purchases and the cost of the adwords (Conversion tracking).

Google has the ability to track if someone clicks on a Google Ad and then goes ahead and purchases a room. The can track the cost of the click on the ad and the value of the room sales.

Conversion tracking almost always underestimates the amount of people who purchase rooms from adwords.

Good though this conversion tracking is it cannot track if someone sees an ad whilst browsing the internet at work and then rings the hotel, or books from their hone or computer at home.

You can target people with adwords who have visited a website similar to your own (ie your competitors).

Lets say your website is a hotel in Bristol, you can create a Googlead that is displayed to people who are searching for websites similar to yourself ie ‘hotels in bristol’.

Simple keywords work much better than sophisticated keywords ie 'cheap hotels London' is searched for 18 times more than 'boutique hotel paris'.

From years of writing text for brochures, Hotels are often stuck in the minsset of using the most high-faluting language possible for their keywords. But busy customers, often on the move will use simple common language when doing Google searches.

You can target people who visit your website with ads after they leave (ReMarketing).

So you have visited a dog food website one night whilst browsing the web and then found that everywhere else you go on the web an advert form that dog food website keeps appearing. Good for brand awareness.

The best people to decide how to use Adwords is non technical people, people who don’t understand the technical details.

Hard to believe, but often common sense gets lost in the technicalities. We often find when working with people who don’t understand the technicalities that they will take a step back and ask the simple questions; Well what are we selling? What will we promote in the ad? Who will see this ad? How do we know if it is working? This has the effect of steering the campaign in the right direction.

You can set up adwords a 'tap to call' number that routes callers to your phone number.

Often forgotten in the technical world, but you can set up an ad to provide a number for the customer to tap (on their mobile phone) and ring you directly. Low tehch though phone calls sound, we have seen some surprisingly good results with this.

The highest converting adword is normally your hotel name.

So you are puzzling over what keywords should trigger your ad and someone says your hotel name would be a good one to use. ‘But wont the customer find my hotel in the Google results if they search using our name?’ you ask. Only if they scroll past all the other Google Ads at the top of the page, and customers often don’t even understand that the top 3 results in a Google Search are ads.