The first quarter of 2015 has seen a slight improvement in the number of clicks lost by hotels to third party intermediaries bidding on branded keywords at auction. The count last quarter was 26,514 clicks per month for a brand with 1 million monthly branded searches, which was in contrast to Q4 2014's 31,653 clicks lost per brand.
The information is part of quarterly report series that analyzes performance across industries by BrandVerity, a firm that offers paid search monitoring for brands.
When considering the hotel segment, here is how the advertiser breakdown looks when analyzing trademarks present in various ads, including who the purchaser of the ad was:
The OTAs that were most likely to use hotel brands as keywords in this sample were as follows:
- hotelreservatons.com
- hotelroom.com
- hotelsavings.com
- priceline.com
- onetme.com
- roomstays.com
- local.com
- hotels-and-discounts.com
- orbitz.com
- trivago.com
As far as brand takeaways, the report noticed a drop off in OTA advertising compared with the previous quarter, which is likely calendar related. Even so, the OTAs remained the single largest group purchasing branded keywords in this sample.
A drop in OTA spend creates opportunities for hotel brands to continue to push for dominance in search results — if that's a strategy they are pursuing:
With significant OTA advertising on all engines but Google and Google Mobile, it’s clear that hotel brands who want to maximize their direct bookings could benefit from approaching Bing and other engines with the same mindset that they approach Google. Although these engines receive less traffic overall, the frequency of OTA advertising is significant enough to divert a large number of direct visitors and direct bookings
The full report can be downloaded here (e-mail required).
NB: Mouse click image courtesy Shutterstock.