Google streamlines hotel advertising with integration in new Google Ads platform

As tipped off last week, Google is making changes to how hotel marketers manage and scale advertising campaigns on the site.

At Google Marketing Live on Tuesday, the company announced that Google Hotel Ads will become part of the new Google Ads platform that launches July 24. Hotel Ads will launch as an open beta available to advertisers later this year.

In a blog post, Google senior product manager for hotels Michael Trauttmansdorff says the integration is based on “feedback that some partners have a hard time managing their Hotel ads in a separate platform from their other Google Ads, like their search and display campaigns.”

The new Hotel campaign type in Google Ads will allow hotel groups to organize properties by attributes such as brand and class, and enable marketers “to optimize for bidding dimensions unique to hotels such as a traveler’s length of stay or check-in day and audience bidding.”

Google says results from initial tests of the new Hotel campaign type have been positive.

Google is also creating a new Hotel Center to help advertisers optimize and manage their hotel price feeds. Trauttmansdorff says  the new Hotel Center will “simplify feed troubleshooting with faster and more intuitive in-product guidance” and create a “central hub to power other price feed-based hotel features in the future, like dynamic remarketing creatives,” among other benefits.

The new Hotel Center will replace the existing Hotel Ads Center in phases.

Google says in the first six months of 2018, leads to Hotel ad partners grew 65% compared to that period a year earlier.

The new Google Ads solution replaces Google AdWords and is being launched along with two additional products – Google Marketing Platform and Google Ad Manager.