If you are interested in learning whether your prices are competitive against OTAs, how often you and your competitors are competing against each other for the main keywords that you are target and how to reach high-income segments in the USA, that information all available in Google Ads. We quickly summarise some features and reports in Google Ads that are very useful but not well known.
Hotel Performance Report
If you are running Google Hotel Ads, you will definitely want to check out the Hotel Performance report.
This report will give you insights into how your Hotel Ads perform across some hotel-specific metrics such as length of stay and advance booking window. There is also a great metric called Hotel Price Difference % which shows you whether your hotels website was cheaper than the OTAs in the auction or not. Having a best price on your official website is one of the most important strategies to drive direct bookings and this report will give you insights as to whether you are being undercut by OTAs and how often your rate is uncompetitive against at least one OTA. To access this report, go to reports – predefined reports – hotel – hotel performance.
Auction Insights
Our clients often want to know which competitors and OTAs are targeting the same keywords. Well, there is a great tool to find this data called Auction Insights. The Auction Insights tool allows you to see all the other domains entering the same Google ad auctions at the campaign, ad group, and keyword level. It also compares your performance with all the competitor’s in the same auctions as you.
There are a number of metrics that you can look at in your auction insights report such as:
Impression Share
Impression share is the number of impressions you received divided by the total number of impressions you were eligible to receive. You can see your impression share and your competitors impression shares for all the auctions that you were eligible to enter. Your impression share is determined by a range of factors such as your bid and your quality score. If you have a lower impression share than your competitors and a high ROI from your ads, you should definitely increase your bids to get more impressions.
Another interesting metric is the overlap rate. This shows you how often another participant’s ad received an impression when your ad also received an impression. For example, if one of the competitor’s in your auction insights report is showing 90% in the overlap rate column, this means that in 9 out of every 10 times your ad showed, the competitor’s ads also had an impression which indicates that they are bidding on the same keywords as you.
Google Discovery Campaigns
At Google Marketing Live 2019, Google announced that they were going to be rolling out a new type of campaign called Discovery Campaigns. This campaign type is now available to all advertisers globally.
Discovery Ads are a visual ad format that run across the Google Discover Feed, YouTube home feed, and also Gmail. The ad look and format changes based on which of those properties it shows up on, but they provide a rich, visual experience for the user (see example from the Google discover feed below)
Discovery campaigns are an attempt by Google to try and capture some top-of funnel advertising dollars that are being spent on social media platforms such as Instagram & Facebook. They show ads when people are most open to discovering something new (for example, as they are scrolling down the Discover Feed on their phone). With this campaign type, you add numerous assets and copy ideas and then Google’s machine learning algorithm selects the version most likely to be clicked on by a particular user.
You can target these ads at a range of different audiences such as in-market, affinity and custom intent audiences. It is critical that you have high quality creative assets for this campaign type. We recommend testing this campaign type with more visually appealing hotels.
Google Search Partners
Search partners are sites that partner with Google to show search ads. Search partners extend the reach of Google Search ads to hundreds of non-Google websites, as well as YouTube and other Google sites. For example, sites such as ask.com use Google to power their search engine and they are part of the Google search partners (see example below).
Income Targeting
If you are focused on targeting the US market, Google Ads gives you the ability to target or increase bids based on household income. Apart from the USA, this targeting is also available when you are advertising to people in the following markets – Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Singapore and Thailand. The seven different subsets available for income targeting are:
• Top 10%
• 11-20%
• 21-30%
• 31-40%
• 41-50%
• Lower 50%
• Unknown
If you are a luxury hotel, you might want to focus your targeting on the top 10% or top 20% as these are the people who will be most likely to be interested in staying. For the US market, according to Google, household income targeting is “based on publicly available data from the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS), advertisers are able to target ads to certain areas according to their average household income. “
Final Thoughts
Bookings have increased in Ireland in recent weeks and it is important to scrutinise whether you are getting value for money from your marketing spend. Some of these features will provide great insights into this. For example, the Hotel performance report could inform you if you have a price competitiveness issue vs the OTAs and the auction insights report could tell you what other hotels are actively competing against you.
