Hotel PPC Agency

What is Paid Ads Management for Hotels?

The act of creating and optimizing paid advertising campaigns for hotels is known as hotel PPC management. That is an incredibly simple explanation though, so let's dive a little deeper.

To provide expert PPC management, a paid ads agency for hotels should get to know you and your goals. You can use this information to determine the next steps, since PPC advertising for a local hotel differs from paid ads for an ecommerce-focused hotel.

For example, local hotels are often only interested in contact form submissions or phone calls. This can be accomplished through paid advertising that builds traffic to an optimized landing page or sales funnel. If those digital assets don't yet exist, or need substantial improvement, we recommend you start with Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms.

Alternatively, ecommerce-minded hotels tend to be interested in online sales. Using PPC advertising, you can boost traffic to a page optimized for products or categories. In some cases, it might even make sense to include Google Shopping Campaigns in your strategy. We've even utilized sales funnels to help sell products, subscriptions, and services.

The next step in hotel paid ads management is understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale. For some hotels, that means looking to platforms like Google Analytics. However, there are other options out there too, like Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam.

To be successful with paid advertising, your hotel should utilize multiple advertising tactics and marketing tools. For example, the best hotel paid advertising services will include tactics to:

• Drive traffic to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc) from search engines, social channels, and third-party websites.
• Make money online or through qualified leads for your hotel.
• Integrate third-party attribution tools to better understand ad attribution.
• Showcase social proof through case studies, white papers, video testimonials, and other factors.
• Build and nurture relationships through user generated content, story creation, and email address collection.
• Test ad creatives across various ad placements and between different media formats.

Types of Paid Ads for Hotels

There are numerous ways to run PPC advertising for your hotel. Let's discuss some of the most common paid advertising being run for hotels.

1.) Local Ads

If you have a hotel, you can run local ads on almost any advertising platform. Depending on the nature of your nearby hotel, you may find better success in one platform versus another. It is important to try out every available option to see which works best for your needs. Let's talk about a few local advertising choices.

From Google, you'll have two options.

As a first step, you can run traditional Google Adwords, possibly using their newer Performance Max campaign type. This is a very dynamic ad campaign type which utilizes multiple headlines, images, videos, and service locations to allow the Google algorithm to find the best combination of assets to bring you customers. We often use Performance Max campaigns for professional services companies, such as accountants, lawyers, dentists, and physicians.

The second option from Google, if you are in a qualifying business industry, is to check out their Local Service Ads. Using Local Service Ads, you get charged a flat fee for each lead the platform generates. Home service contractors, such as plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers, frequently use Google Local Service Ads.

You can also use Facebook Ads to target people in your local area. This is a little more straightforward, since it just involves setting up a campaign that has ad sets with geographic restrictions. We often rely on local area Facebook Ads for all types of hotels.

2.) Social Ads

Almost all online ads you see on social networks qualify as social media ads.

The trick to social media advertising is keeping the ad creatives fresh. If you don't rotate out ad creatives every few weeks your campaign performance will slowly decrease. For higher spending ad campaigns, you might need to look at weekly ad creative tweaks.

One of the best things about social ads is that you can target audiences who aren't yet aware of your product or service. It's quite the opposite when you run search ads since you only get to show them when someone searches for what your hotel offers.

That benefit can also be a curse though, since conversion rates are often lower when people aren't closer in the revenue funnel of making an immediate purchase.

3.) Search Engine Ads

If you know people are searching online for the products or services you offer, you'll want to invest in search advertisements.

There are some people out there who refer to this as hotel Search Engine Marketing, or SEM for short. This is just a different way of explaining search ads, which are advertisements placed on the search results page of a search engine above the SEO placements.

If you've been running search engine advertising on Google for a while and have been successful at it, we suggest considering copying the campaigns over to the Bing Ads platform. As of an October 2022 study from StatCounter, about 3.57% of online users rely on Bing for their primary search engine.

4.) Display Ads

You'll find display ads on all kinds of message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (sometimes even local news stations), gossip websites, and more.

These are commonly used within the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms.

To get started with display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different image sizes. It also helps to have a general idea of your target audience, but both ad platforms have their own algorithms that help you produce results from your ad spend.

5.) Retargeting Ads

Not everyone is going to convert during their first experience with your hotel website, landing page, or sales funnel.

It is almost always recommended to set up retargeting ads to help bring people back to your website after they've had time to think through different options.

You can run retargeting ads on any ad platform, too.

6.) Shopping Ads

This type of search ad was popularized by Google Shopping Campaigns.

To get started with Google Shopping, you just need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), a Google Merchant Center account, and a Google Ads account for your hotel.

With these tools in place, you'll be able to provide Google Ads an updated list of all your accurate product data, including the title, SKU, image, price, and availability. From there, they will be able to find the right types of search queries to display your products at the top of the search results page.

7.) Video Ads

You can run video ads on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and other social networking websites.

If you are interested in running YouTube Ads, you'll just need to set up a video ads campaign in Google Ads.

To run video ads in Facebook or Instagram, you'll need a working Facebook Ads account.

Both ad platforms offer excellent conversion opportunities with video ads. We frequently use video ads to showcase product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!

If you have the budget to support ad creatives in video format, look to implement them into your paid advertising campaigns.

Tips for Managing Paid Ads for Hotels

We are a team of paid advertising specialists with extensive knowledge in the latest PPC trends for hotels and other industries.

Here are some of our best tips to follow for keyword research, audience research, landing page / sales funnel optimization, conversion rate optimization, and ad creation.

1.) Keyword Research Tips

Keyword research for hotels is mostly used for Google Ads and Bing Ads search network campaigns. After all, search ads only show up based on what your hotel targets on Google or Bing.

For example, a person looking for a hotel nearby might search "local hotel" on a search engine. Knowing to target that exact phrase wouldn't require in-depth keyword research.

What if, however, that exact match keyword wasn't producing enough search volume and the hotel wanted to increase their traffic and conversions? To solve the problem, keyword research would be required.

The next steps might involve the PPC advertising manager discussing with the hotel about what types of products / services they want to target more often and within what geographic areas. It might also require some broadening of the keyword targeting.

For instance, the paid ads manager might discover high search volume for "nearby hotels" or even "hotel services." The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. In the second phrase, a service is being targeted, which might result in a more lucrative conversion opportunity.

You can also benefit from keyword research when building out negative keyword lists. Negative keywords are used to stop your paid ads from showing in search queries that you know won't bring in guests.

For example, someone searching for "free services from hotels" or "how to advertise to hotels" isn't likely to convert with your hotel. Your PPC advertising may appear if you use broad keyword targeting without negative keywords such as "free" or "advertise".

You can see that as you scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend, the needs for keyword research become more complex.

2.) Audience Research Tips

When you hear audience research talked about for hotel paid advertising campaigns, it is often within the scope of scaling social ads on Facebook and Instagram. There are options within Google Ads and Bing Ads for audience targeting as well though.

We'll review some audience research and targeting history within Facebook Ads.

Hotel paid advertising managers used Facebook's custom audiences extensively in the past. After all, one of the most appealing features of the Facebook Ads platform was the data it collected on its users, which hotels lined up to exploit.

As time went on, data privacy and machine learning both had an impact on custom audiences.

When Apple released its iOS 14.5 update, they included a pop up message that allowed users to easily opt out of personalized ad tracking. This had a negative impact on Facebook's ability to track user behavior on mobile devices. In fact, it even affected the accuracy of ad attribution reporting.

Then came improvements to their machine learning algorithms, which greatly diminished the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences for most ad agencies for hotels. Their algorithm has become so good at understanding your ideal audience that you typically do more harm than good by choosing your own interest-based targeting.

While there will still be plenty of hotel paid advertising firms relying on custom audiences, the trend is moving toward broad targeting. You can see it in every update within Facebook Ads Manager as they slowly remove interest-based targeting options, or push for "Advantage Detailed Targeting."

This blog article from Social Media Examiner does a good job of talking about recent changes to audience targeting, if you'd like a second opinion.

This isn't to say audience research and targeting is going away. There will always be targeting options that can be manipulated within hotel ad campaigns to squeeze a little extra performance.

3.) Landing Page Optimization Tips

The quality of your landing page will be a big factor in the success of your hotel PPC advertising campaigns.

When we take on the management of a paid advertising campaign for hotels, we start by looking over the landing pages to see if they follow best practices. Here are some of the factors we look for in this review:

• Is there a benefit-focused headline?
• Are there any images above the fold?
• Is the content written in a compelling manner?
• Am I able to find a lead form right away?
• Are the call to actions easily noticeable?
• Does the page load quickly?
• Is there social proof?
• Am I able to load the page on a mobile device?

There are so many factors that come into the design and development of a quality landing page. Here is a great blog article about what makes a results-driven landing page.

Please, don't spend money on paid ads until you have a landing page that follows best practices! Ideally, you should never consider your landing page to be finished. Try running A/B testing every few months to continue refining your sales pitch.

4.) Sales Funnel Tips

As an alternative to a landing page, you might want to consider building out one or more sales funnels. We rely heavily on sales funnels for lead generation, email audience building, and even online purchases.

For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from your local area. While managing their online advertising we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. Here are some of the funnels we made:

• We used squeeze pages to help capture email addresses while building awareness for the program.
• We used lead magnets to provide people with healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peaks in exchange for an email address.
• We used application funnels to push people toward the idea of wanting to apply to participate in exclusive programs.
• We used sales letter funnels to serve as the registration system for the online program.

There are many different types of funnels, so your hotel isn't limited to only these options. Just keep in mind these can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product or service, building out an email subscriber base, and selling a product or service online.

5.) Conversion Rate Optimization Tips

Having a clear understanding of your conversion rate is critical to making informed advertising decisions. The average conversion rate is between 1-3%, but that varies greatly between industries, products, and services.

Let's run through a basic scenario to help illustrate the impact of conversion rates.

1. You sell a $100 product or service on your website.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 people who visit your website you sell 1 product or service.
3. You have a $1.00 average cost per click (CPC), meaning for each person who visits your website you spend $1.00.
4. To sell 1 product or service, you need 100 clicks from PPC advertising, which would cost you $100. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
5. Your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 1x, meaning for every dollar spent in paid advertising you get one dollar in return.

For most hotels, this return on ad spend wouldn't be acceptable. Sadly, we often see this type of ROAS when jumping into new client accounts.

To improve the situation, you hire a paid ads company to modify your campaign settings, ad creatives, and landing page experience.

Let's assume those improvements bring your conversion rate up from 1% to 2%. That means for every 100 visits to your website you now sell 2 products. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling that product or service, if your margins are good.

Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your PPC advertising.

6.) Ad Creation Tips

This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account, but it also applies to Google Display Ads.

When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads for hotels, you are mostly targeting a cold audience that is more interested in quickly scrolling by advertisements in favor of seeing what their friends and family are up to online.

You should develop an understanding of how to capture someone's attention in a split second.

To do this, you need to build out attractive ad creatives that make someone stop for a second and say to themselves, "wait a second, what...?"

This doesn't happen by running the same ad creative over and over and over again. Even if it is a great ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people nearby.

If you don't change out your ad creatives and test new ideas, you'll suffer from what is called "ad fatigue." This is the state in which your target audience has already seen your ad so many times that they instinctively scroll by it without ever interacting with your brand.

Don't be caught in this situation. You should understand when to pause an ad because it isn't performing as well as it once did. You should understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.

Why Choose WebCitz to Manage Your PPC Tactics

We want to be the paid advertising partner of your hotel! As a full-service PPC management firm helping hotels, we have multiple internal teams focused on search engine marketing, social media advertising, sales funnel development, and ad creative testing. Hotel-focused PPC management firms don't all operate this way, since most only have one person in charge of everything. You might not be testing campaign optimizations and creative ideas often enough with those hotel paid ads firms to get the results you desire.

There are many factors to consider when researching paid ads companies for your hotel. With more than 20 years of experience, you know you can trust the paid ads strategies and tactics we suggest for your hotel. These are often the same PPC strategies we use for our own lead generation.

In addition, you should choose us as your PPC advertising firm because you are confident we can help your hotel grow. Our paid ads experts are a good option for numerous reasons:

• We have been in business since 2004, which means we have more than 20 years of experience.
• We rely heavily on sales funnels and paid advertising to shore up our organic search placements.
• We do not outsource website advertising packages for our hotel clients, including PPC management, sales funnel development, or ad creative services since we have our own internal advertising team.
• During normal business hours, you will likely receive an answer within a few rings from one of our teammates.

Get in touch with our paid ads consultants to discuss what we can do for your hotel! We often provide complete paid ads management plans to hotel-related small businesses, but we can also augment the marketing department of larger hotels to fill in missing skill sets.

When it comes time for your hotel to start the search for a paid ads marketing agency, we hope you keep our team in mind for the task. If you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to send an email or give us a call to start a discussion with the helpful staff at our paid ads firm.

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