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Case Study: Does increasing online budget increase direct hotel bookings?   

Overview

Aspect Hotel Park West is a hotel situated in Dublin, Ireland. Conveniently located just off the M50 within the Park West Business Campus, the hotel offers free parking and easy access to public transport, making it only an 8-minute train ride from Dublin city centre. Renowned for its comfortable rooms featuring Hypnos beds and power showers, the hotel caters to both business and leisure travellers. The hotel also boasts a restaurant and bar with a relaxed atmosphere and quality food and drinks, along with six modern meeting rooms that can accommodate up to 80 delegates. In the competitive hospitality industry, online travel agencies (OTAs) like Booking.com are significant players. They often dominate brand search impressions, which can be challenging for individual hotels striving to maintain visibility and direct bookings.

Our Objective

Our primary objective was to reclaim our brand’s search impression share from Booking.com. Search impression share shows how often your ads appear compared to how often they could appear for your chosen keywords (in this case our brand name). A higher impression share means your ads are being seen more often, which helps potential customers find you easily. We aimed to enhance our online presence, increase direct bookings, and ultimately boost our return on ad spend (ROAS).
Increase in conversions
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Increase in impressions
0 %
Increase in clicks
0 %
Increase in ROAS
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The Challenge

Aspect Hotel Park West was losing brand search impression share to Booking.com on our Google ad campaigns. This was impacting our visibility and reducing direct bookings, as potential guests were being redirected to Booking.com rather than booking directly through our website. Guests booking on online travel agents, increases the cost of each booking, meaning that consumers do not get the best value.

Process

To address this challenge, we decided to increase our budget for brand campaigns, particularly focusing on the Brand (IE) campaign, which was suffering the most due to a limited budget and high competitiveness.

Budget Increase: We raised the monthly paid search budget 57%

Campaign Focus: We allocated a significant portion of this increased budget to our brand campaigns, ensuring better visibility and competitiveness against online travel agents such as Booking.com.

Monitoring & Adjustments: We closely monitored the performance of our campaigns, making necessary adjustments to maximise our search impression share and conversions.

Results

Immediate results:

Search Impression Share: Within a month, our search impression share increased, leading to immediate improvements.

Conversion Value: There was a 30% increase in conversion value.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Our ROAS improved by 20%.

Sustained Success

Search Impression Share: By November 2023, we achieved a 75.15% search impression share, surpassing Booking.com’s 60.79%.

Conversions: Comparing November 2022 to November 2023, we saw a 35% increase in conversions.

Clicks & Impressions:

48% increase in clicks.

140% increase in impressions.

Continued Growth

Conversions: In January 2024, we experienced a 228% increase in conversions compared to January 2023 on our Brand Campaigns targeting the Irish market. Overall we had a 145% increase in conversions.

Clicks & Impressions:

94% increase in clicks.

134% increase in impressions.

Our strategic investment in increasing our brand campaign budget not only reclaimed our search impression share from Booking.com but also significantly boosted our overall digital marketing performance. Due to the success of this brand campaign strategy we are maintaining our position on our search impression share and still maintaining our direct bookings.

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