Google improves Promoted Hotels to increase the visibility and sales of your hotel

As we already mentioned a few weeks ago, Google has introduced a new form of paid ads, available on Google Maps and Google Travel.

These new payment spaces will be activated for generic local searches. For example, if your hotel is in Madrid, you may appear in a sponsored space in searches for "hotels in Madrid", "hotels near Madrid airport", "hotels Madrid center", etc, as long as your hotel is located in that area, or for searches with specific atributes or features of a hotel such as "hotels in Madrid with swimming pool", "hotels in Mallorca only adults", etc.

Previously known as Promoted Hotel, Google has decided to make changes to the product and relaunch it as Property Promotion Ads (as Roiback first announced), this new form of paid ads is a great opportunity to offer more visibility and sales to your hotel.

As Google Premier Partner, Roiback was one of the few companies chosen to be part of the Beta phase (testing and improvement period) of Property Promotion Ads. Below, we present its main features and why it can be an important competitive advantage for your hotel.
 

How does Property Promotion Ads benefit your hotel?

1. It offers more visibility: You will be able to bid for spaces that previously you could only opt organically within Google Maps and Google Travel.

2. Lets you reach new clients: You can bid on generic searches (eg "Hotels in Madrid"), attracting clients who have not already decided on a specific hotel.

3. Ads are exclusive: In Property Promotion Ads, only the ad of the partner that wins the bid is published, therefore only the ad of your hotel will be seen without competing with OTAs, giving the hotel exclusive visibility.

4. It allows a wide variety of advanced bids: PPA allows you to use all the bid multipliers that Google Hotel Ads offers, that is, you can optimize by devices, markets, days in advance or length of stay, among others. This offers you great flexibility in your optimization strategies. For example, to face the Covid-19 crisis, we could only bid for 3-month stays, which, added to a flexible payment or cancellation policy, could be a very good option to achieve long-term reservations.

5. It offers more flexibility: It can be an interesting and effective tool for seasonal hotels that want to promote an opening and maximize their visibility at any given time.

Frequently asked questions about Property Promotion Ads

- Is Property Promotion Ads the same as Google Hotel Ads?
Property Promotion Ads is an extension of Google Hotel Ads. Both Property Promotion Ads and Google Hotel Ads are based on the same integration of Google Hotel Ads. Property Promotion Ads is simply a new way to gain more visibility of your property within Google Maps and Google Travel, with a format very similar to the classic Google Ads.

- Is it possible to start using Property Promotion Ads? What requirements are there?
Yes, Property Promotion Ads can be used from today. The only requirement is that you contact your booking engine or connectivity partner to set up and activate campaigns. Your booking engine must have the certification and connectivity with Google Hotel Ads, the hotel does not have to have a previous campaign created in GHA to be able to activate PPA.

- How many sponsored spaces are there with Property Promotion Ads?
Currently, there are 2 sponsored spaces or slots where the ads are displayed.

- What bid model does Property Promotion Ads use?
The latest news about these campaign types is that they are now available in the 3 bid model types we have on Google Hotel Ads:

1. CPC
2. CPA or Commission (Pay) per Conversion
3. Commission or Commission (Pay) per Stay

- Can I have Google Hotel Ads campaigns with a commissionable model and Property Promotion Ads campaigns with a CPC model at the same time?
Yes, both actions are compatible and also recommended.

- Can I use the same budget I already have set up for standard Google Hotel Ads campaigns?
This only makes sense for CPC model because for the other two bidding models we don't set up any campaign budget, but it is possible through the budget sharing functionality from the Google Ads tool.

- Can I use Property Promotion Ads for brand searches (containing your hotel name)?
No, Google Hotel Ads campaigns already exist for the latter.

- Can I select the keywords to bid with?
No, you can't. Google will show your hotel based on combinations of target keywords that make sense of the data you have active in Google My Business address.

- Can I select a special callout for PPA campaigns?
No, in sponsored ads there are no callouts, the texts published are brief descriptions of the hotel's own GMB listing, they cannot be managed from the PPAs campaigns.

- Can PPAs campaigns be segmented by markets?
Yes, we can activate them only for certain markets such as the main markets of the hotel or only local market in the current situation. However, this strategy is only advisable when the campaigns are active to the CPC model, since to model CPA or Commission the more visibility the campaign has the better, since it will only be paid if there are reservations and commission model if consumed.

- Is the click charged twice for CPC model campaigns? That is, one when the PPAs are clicked and one on the hotel advertisement?
No, the click is only charged when the customer is redirected to the hotel's website. That means the first click on the ad has no cost.

- Are PPA campaigns created from the Google Ads platform?
Yes, since January 2020 no Google HA campaigns are managed from the old platform (Hotel Ads Center), all optimization is done from Google Ads.

- What can I expect from PPA? Will many reservations or visits going to come in?
As we have explained, it is a very new product and space. Soon we will have more information about the impact on traffic and sales. We must also consider that we are living in an atypical moment of depressed demand. We'll see its potential in a few months. If we should warn of something very important, PPA is a product much closer to the moment of consideration and inspiration of a customer and therefore the conversion ratios we have already advanced that will be completely different from those of standard GHA. According to Google, the KPIs we are used to for branded campaigns in Search or standard GHA are far from PPA results. We can say that PPA will probably have similar ratios to those of generic Search or Display campaigns. Even so, the volume of searches and results on maps and travel for this type of more local and generic Keywords is so brutal, it will surely be very beneficial for hotels.

We only see the official website of the hotel and it is located under the "Sponsored" tab. On the other hand, if you arrive at Google Travel from an ad that is NOT Property Promotion Ads, the availability is shared with the rest of the competitors.