This year is set to be an important one for advertisers currently using Google AdWords to shop their wares. If your hotel is one of these businesses, Google is introducing a brand-new interface for the platform along with some new features.
Depending on how extensively you use your account, the changes could have little impact on your hotel, or they could open up a whole new set of opportunities.
Experts predict the changes to occur on a wide scale some time around October.
Here’s what’s happening with Google AdWords and how it affects hotel advertising.
One unified version by the end of the year
A new experience has already been launched which includes a new design, streamlined reports and the ability to create campaigns based on your hotel’s business goals.
However, not all traditional features were immediately available when the new version was released. By the end of October, this will be rectified, and the traditional version will no longer be available. Google will notify its AdWords account users via email and any reports, filters and rules should be automatically moved from the previous version to the new one.
New opportunities for hotel marketing and promotions
One exclusive development on the new version is the creation of promotion extensions. These will allow you to highlight a special sale on your website.
Subscribe to our newsletter below
Using a promotion extension means you’ll be better placed to use the correct number of characters in your hotel’s advertising copy. It can also help you maximize the success of the promo as you can refer to it in one of your two headlines, a URL and the extension itself.
In accounts using promotion extensions, click-through rates as high as 10% have been seen.
New ways to manage your hotel’s audiences
A new audience manager lets you set a hotel marketing campaign to target people who have already engaged with your website in some way.
Along with this is the ability to target by demographics, so advertisers can cater their ads to appeal to different genders and ages. This was available before but now it goes further, with targets able to be based on household income and parental status.
A capability like this enables advertisers, such as hotels, to get really specific about their audience, making it easier to attract the right guests.
Life events are now a metric
Keywords are extremely useful, but they do have the propensity to attract a very diverse audience, many of whom still won’t end up converting. Another new feature Google has created is life events targeting.
A capability like this enables advertisers, such as hotels, to get really specific about their audience, making it easier to attract the right guests.
SiteMinder
At the moment this is broken down into graduation, marriage and moving house. All of these are perfect segments for hotels to dabble in, depending on the business goals.
These three events cover a number of demographics and represent a great chance to deliver some travel-related marketing.
Think about young graduates wanting to travel before they start their career, newlyweds on honeymoons and people taking a break either side of relocating.
AdWords now also visually displays the breakdown of clicks, cost and conversions across desktop, tablet and mobile devices, simplifying campaign management and optimising bid adjustments.
In addition, AdWords highlights bar graphs and heatmaps for how your hotel’s ads perform across different days of the week and hours of the day, making it easier to manage your online advertising schedule.