Hotel Advertising & Marketing Best Practices [Infographic]

Search marketers in hotel advertising have to work hard for their conversions. As we learned in our epic Google Ads Industry Benchmarks study earlier this year, travel & hospitality advertisers can expect to convert at rates slightly lower than the average across industries, at 2.57% (compared to 2.70% CVR in general).

Of course, those are just the average conversion rates and you know that the best advertisers can achieve CVRs 2x, 3x or even 5x better than average!

How can you hit that unicorn status in your hotel marketing and advertising campaigns? New search marketing insights based on internal Google data reveal hotel advertising trends that can help you improve campaign performance, increase the average click through rate on your ads, and boost your average conversion rate.

Top Hotel Marketing Queries: What Are People Actually Searching For?

The top hotel industry search queries offer a revealing peek into the mindset of searchers. Two of the top three queried terms are the names of popular hotel/travel research and booking engines TripAdvisor and Trivago.

Also in the top ten: popular hotel brands Marriott, W, Hilton and Holiday Inn Express. With all of those branded searches, where’s the opportunity for individual hotels or smaller regional booking engines using PPC? As you can see in the infographic below, the seventh most searched query related to hotels is “hotels near me.”

Google revealed recently that mobile hotel queries on Google.com increased 49% in 2015. These on-the-go local searches for hotels in a person’s immediate vicinity are a great opportunity to tap into high-intent searches with hotel advertising that targets specific locations, particularly at certain times of day.

Check out our ad scheduling tutorial to see how to put dayparting to work across your hotel ad campaigns. It enables you to increase your bids for those valuable times of day when people are most likely to be looking for a place to rest their head for a night.

Improve CTR and Lower Costs with AdWords Hotel Ads

If you’ve been reading the WordStream Blog for a while, you’ll know exactly what I mean when I say that super engaging, compelling ads are the key to raising your average CTRs, which lowers your costs per click by way of a better Quality Score.

If you’re new around here, you’ll want to check out our “What is Quality Score” lesson in PPC University.

The gist of it is this: Google rewards its best advertisers by giving them discounts on their costs per click. How does Google decide which ads are best? Consumers tell them which ones are awesome and which ones suck simply by clicking on the ads or choosing to pass them over. Crappy ads don’t get clicks, and Google will show them less often as a result.

Worse, they’ll make you pay more for the clicks you do get.

Thankfully, Google actually wants you to succeed – both of you make more money when your ads are great. So over the last year, they’ve really ramped up their industry-specific offerings with Google Ads (formerly known as AdWords) products like Hotel Ads.

Basically, this ad format offers a way better user experience by surfacing richer content in search ads when people are looking for a hotel, including prices, reviews and ratings, photos and more. It allows consumers to comparison shop right on the SERP.

Hilton had early access to the ad format and saw a 45% increase in conversion as a result of using it. You can learn all about AdWords Hotel Ads here.

More Search Marketing & Advertising Insights for the Hotel Industry

This new infographic from Google shares insights and tips to help you get in front of those 75% of consumers who use Google Search when they’re looking for hotels. The proliferation of mobile and rise of last-minute, near-me searches presents an incredible opportunity for advertisers to connect without blowing the budget.

Use Google Ads targeting features and tools to up your hotel marketing game in a big way this year. Check out the infographic below, then head over to WordStream’s PPC University for lessons in mastering Google Ads extensions, deploying geotargeting, and using dayparting for maximum effect across your hotel advertising campaigns.