GDU NInja Update 33 - Don’t use if Adwords if you prefer to give your money to the OTA’s

A Hotel Customer has dibbled and dabbled with Adwords over the years with mixed success, but at the beginning of November decided to give it another go. A new account was set up and they decided to start with 300€ Per Month targeting their Christmas Promotions, Dining and what is know as their ’Brand Name’. A quick look at the results from the last 10 days shows that they generated €20,260 from an investment of €229. (Yes we can measure if someone clicks on a Google Ad the value of rooms they go on to buy) If you wanted €20,260 of room sales from the OTA’s you would have to pay them over € 3000. What would you prefer?

You may also see that this came from their ‘Brand Name’ campaign where they are asking Google to display their ad when someone searches with their property name. You would be right to say that this is in the area where the OTA’s normally advertise and divert customers searching for you to their own website, so in effect you are competing with the OTA’s. It doesn’t make sense to spend time to discuss how we arrived at this point in the industry, but we are where we are!!

For their Dining and Christmas campaigns we cannot easily measure the value a hotel gets when someone clicks on an ad (We don’t know if they buy something), we can however see that in total 1458 people clicked on the ads in a 6 week period. Anecdotally good value!