With a massive user base and market share, Google has played a significant role in the growing metasearch industry and according to netmarketshare, in 2018 Google accounted for 73% of search engine market share for desktop and 81% on mobile.
Many people turn to Google first for answers to their travel research questions, submitting millions of hotel search queries through the search engine every day. Smart brands are taking advantage of this advertising channel, and as a result, have found a huge opportunity to showcase their hotel properties to customers.
Whether you’re a seasoned metasearch expert or just dipping your toes into the metasearch pool, you need to know about Google’s hotel advertising product. This guide will introduce you to Hotel campaigns, one of the latest updates to Google Ads, and explain the key components that go into making a metasearch campaign on Google.
Since its inception, Google Hotel Ads has seen frequent updates and experimental revisions made to both its front and back end functions. The introduction of Hotel campaigns in 2018 marked one of the most significant structural changes to date. Hotel campaigns changed Hotel Ads’ structure by introducing a new campaign level.
This update transitioned Hotel Ads to a product that more closely mirrors the rest of the AdWords products. In 2019, Google announced that all Google Ads partners will be required to migrate their Hotel campaigns from the Hotel Ads Center to Google Ads.
Marketers that are familiar with Google’s paid search, display, and other offerings will feel right at home with this change. For marketers who have only worked in Hotel Ads, this shift will take a little getting used to.
So why is this change so significant? The additional campaign structure allows advertisers to set multiple bid variations for a unique property, as opposed to the previous structure, which only allowed for one variation. Base bids can now be set an ad group or hotel group level.
This means more flexibility in bidding and campaign optimization, but also brings added complexity to building and managing a campaign structure. Hotel campaigns allows advertisers to finely tune their marketing budgets and strategically segment their audiences.
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