How Paid Search Results Can Help in Hotel Revenue Management

Hotel with budgets turn to pay-per-click advertisements to generate interest. The results are almost immediate because the ads appear in the context of relevant content. However, the question is, can you make a good return on investment (ROI) on this initiative? A significant number of hotel revenue managers would say yes though their results may vary. Yet, there are also many who say that the effort involved isn’t worth it.

Sometimes, the difference between success and failure in PPC lies in testing. While most agree that testing to grow hotel revenue is important, they argue about the scope of the metrics. The ad copy you use, in particular, can provide results that are quite drastic. Take the case of using “Download Now” vs. “30 Day Free Trial”. Using the latter can increase your conversion rate by 8% which is no laughing matter.

To take full advantage of your PPC campaign, it is important to understand certain things about this strategy:

Different Ads Are Rotated Against Keyword Groups – Google Adwords and similar companies enable you to rotate different ads against selected keyword groups. This strategy creates rapid feedback that enables you to study the response rates of the campaign using metrics such as the conversion rate and CTR.

Testing Can Take a Long Time – granularity is an essential factor to look into. This is because your numbers aren’t exactly derived in aggregate stacks. For instance, if an ad group generate hotel sales of 100 sales a month, you can expect that a certain ad has a conversion of 40, another one has generates 20 sales, while several others make up the remaining. In this case, it is safe to drop the worst performing ad and focus your budget into promoting the best performing one.

Quality Scores – relevance and CTR are key considerations when you’re dealing with Google. Quality scores are determined by ad delivery, ad position, and CPC of the keyword. According to Google, there are other relevancy factors aside from this. Conduct testing to enhance the effectiveness of your campaign.