Google Ads for Hotels: How To Setup An Effective Campaign

Many advertisers launching Google Ads campaigns for their hotels can do so at an affordable amount while acquiring many bookings. That’s mainly because Google’s machine learning tools and capabilities have proven to be effective for hotels.

In the past, advertisers would make all changes manually. They would update bids individually for each keyword or ad group and this was not efficient.

And they had to always pick the keywords to appear for and select the ad headlines and descriptions to appear at auction time.

Now, many of these have been automated and hotels and other businesses can be more efficient and get better conversion results. However, the manual tools are still available for those who want to have more control.

In this article I’ve included instructions on how you can make use of these features to setup a campaign for your hotel and increase bookings.

 

Campaign objective

The Marketing objective for your campaign determines the features and settings that you’ll have to attract people to your hotel. And it determines the campaign type you’ll use, which is one of the most important settings you’ll update.

The Google Ads objective best suited to hotels is the Leads objective. And that’s because it helps you get as many bookings as possible by encouraging customers to take action from the ad and website.

The Sales objective is good too and will provide you with similar features to get bookings for your hotel.

 

Campaign type

The next setting to choose is the campaign type. For sales and leads objectives the Search campaign type in Google Ads is the best one for hotels that want to target people who are searching on Google and its search partners.

With the Search campaign, you’ll add keywords to bid on and these will trigger your ads when people search.

 

Budget

Budget is another very important factor for Google Ads campaigns for hotels. It determines how many visitors you get in terms of impressions and clicks and bookings too.

One way to decide on your budget is to do some keyword research and I describe how you can do that below. That will help you get an idea of how much traffic there is looking for hotels in your location. And then you can set a budget.

However, you can also start with a test budget for the first month to see what results you get. A good budget to start with in the first month is $800 or £500 per month and then you can increase it as performance improves.

 

Bidding

Automated and manual bidding are the two types of bidding strategies in Google Ads. You can use either of these at the beginning and later in your campaign management.

Automated bidding has many benefits, like saving you a lot of time, because it makes all the bid decisions. It’s also more efficient and can set the right bid at auction time that will see you spend less and achieve the best positions for the searches you are targeting. However, it gives you less control over bids compared to manual bidding.

Maximise Clicks is the best bid strategy to start with. It helps you get as many clicks as possible for your budget. Later you can test other bid strategies to see how they work for you.

 

Keywords

The Keyword Planner tool is a free tool in your account that helps you to find keywords to add to your campaign. And you can use it to carry out some forecasting to decide on what budget to set.

However, it’s important to know some of the limitations of this tool. It will not show you all potential search queries that your ads will get, especially very low volume ones. And some of the bid suggestions may not be relevant at the time you want to advertise, so you may see a difference in your average cost per click.

It’s important to also consider the match types that you use. Phrase and exact match are the best to start with because they give you greater control over the searches you get and later you can add broad match keywords when you want more traffic and a wider range of searches.

This is an example of a keyword in exact and phrase match type.

“southampton hotels” – phrase match keyword
[southampton hotels] – exact match keyword

 

Text ads

You will setup Responsive search ads which include 15 headlines and four description lines. And you should have at least one in each ad group with targeted benefits and features about your hotel.

As part of your ad creation, you should also include ad extensions for structured snippets. In these snippets you can add the various amenities that are available in your hotel. These make your ads more relevant to search queries and increase click through rates.

 

Locations

Because many people searching for your hotel will be outside of your location, it’s important that you set the right location targeting from the start. One way to do that is to have separate campaigns for each location, like countries and cities. Or have one campaign with all the locations but make sure the ads are relevant to every location.

You can also target all countries and then exclude specific ones that you don’t want your ads to appear in.

There are many different options in Google Ads for location targeting for hotels and it’s important to think these through as you setup your campaigns.

 

Ad schedule

The Ad schedule feature helps you decide when your ads should appear on Google. The default setting is for your ads to appear on all days and hours and that works well for many hotels.

For hotels, running ads at all times especially when the campaign is new is the best setting. Later you can change to the best days and hours when you’ve analysed your Time reports and can see when are your best times.

 

Where your ads appear

A Google Ads search campaign for hotels delivers ads to people searching for a hotel on Google. The ads can appear in various places depending on your bid strategy and this includes above or below the Organic search results.

Ads can also appear on search partner sites if you opt into the Search partners. This network includes hundreds of distribution partner sites who use Google.com as their default search in browsers and toolbars. And this also includes Google owned and operated properties like Gmail, Google Maps and Google Play.

Opting into this will increase your search volume traffic.

 

Get in Touch

Want to know more about how a Google Ads campaign that’s tailored for hotels can help your business? Fill out the form below and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.