Promoted Hotels Ad placements are being reintroduced by Google in Q4 2019. Promoted Hotel ads are different to hotel ads as Promoted Hotel Ads aims to increase the prominence of a hotel on destination searches.
The format will be similar to the Promoted Hotel Ads we saw earlier this year, but Google will be rolling out some new and exciting features in 2020. The proposed format will see one or two ads per search featured at the top of the results, along with prominent brand labelling and campaign specific imagery and text. The new format will also include a sponsored tab in Google Trips where a hotel can advertise fenced rates to promote special offers, events and deals. As part of Google’s roll-out, there is the potential to introduce a platform for centralised campaign management, which means we can expect monitoring and reporting to be streamlined.
BIDDING
When Promoted Hotel Ads made an appearance last year it was on a fixed bid basis, whereas going forward advertisers will be able to increase or decrease bids. The most exciting proposed feature that is planned for Promoted Hotel Ads is the ability to bid on length of stay and check in dates, particularly useful for periods of low hotel occupancy or when a hotel is reopening after renovations. The auction will be a hybrid of existing automated auction and partner active bids. The hybrid auction will consider a mix of active bids in Promoted Hotel campaigns along with existing Hotel Ads bids, meaning advertisers won’t be paying to promote another advertiser’s rate.
WHAT NEXT?
Presently, only white-listed partners can designate ad groups as Promoted Hotels and many of the new features, including the ability to set bids for specific dates, won’t be fully rolled out until the latter half of 2020.
*Timings have not been officially released.
It is important to stress that these are estimated timings based, in part, on the roll-out of other similar products. As with many new products in this field; features, and iterations thereof, can be tested, trialled, introduced and withdrawn without notice.
As Promoted Hotel Ads will mostly appear on non-brand specific queries such as generic destination searches, it is expected that ROI will be quite low with the focus of the campaigns to be primarily awareness based.