We are writing this piece as a companion to our hotel advertising services.
Google is a hotel search platform where you can compare hotel prices and features, like Expedia, Trivago, Tripadvisor or Booking.com. On a hotel search platform, travelers compare places to stay by a range of features. Roughly three quarters of all travelers in the world use one. Among these comparison platforms built for travelers, Google’s is growing fast.
Google Hotel Ads lets you build hotel campaigns and show travelers your prices and availability through hotel ads. Hotel Ads presents a listing tied to what the user searched for.
Google is integrating Google Hotels into its result pages, the SERPs, step by step. That lets Google display the ads more intelligently and more prominently. Unlike Google Search Network ads, Google itself decides which search terms your hotel ad will appear against.
Hotel Ads is what Google calls its hotel advertising product.
What Hotel Ads Looks Like
Can Only Hotels Sign Up for Google Hotel Ads?
No. Alongside hotels we can also advertise campsites, caravan parks or vacation rentals. As an online travel agency or a tour operator you can advertise the properties you have agreements with through Google Hotel Ads. As an agency you also get the chance to sell on your own landing page. At Türk SEM we recommend getting the customization right in the decisions you make about your advertising.
Tent campsites are not eligible for Google Hotel Ads as of 2024. (That may change in future.)
What Is Google Travel?
Google Travel is Google’s broad and genuinely useful product covering Google Hotels and Google Hotel Ads. Google Travel ( Google.com/travel ) focuses on travel subjects such as flights, hotels and vacation homes, among other things.
Google Travel can be reached through its own URL, and plenty of users end up using Google Travel components in the SERPs without realizing it while they look for somewhere to stay or a plane ticket.
Why Should You Use Google Hotel Ads?
You keep control of the data
Through a hotel ad, customers are taken to a landing page on your own website where they can book. You can use that customer data in your own marketing campaigns later, in email marketing for instance.
Everybody gets the same chances
You do not need experience with Search Network ads to run Google Hotel Ads. Excellent results can be had with new brands as well. All advertisers are treated equally in Google Hotel Ads.
You can take more bookings at a lower cost
Different bidding strategies mean you decide how much you pay, and you avoid dealing with the high commissions charged by the likes of Booking.com.
Because you set the bid, starting at a low threshold can be a real advantage (you could start at 1%, though 3 to 5% may work better). We are also seeing Google place Hotel Ads campaigns more and more prominently in the SERPs through 2024.
You can start for free with Free Booking Links.
Free Booking Links let your hotel appear organically, which means you do not have to bid or pay for them. All they require is sending your prices and availability to Google Hotel Center.
How Do Prospective Guests Find Google Hotel Ads?
On Google Search, usually with searches like “%CityName hotels“
A search on a general term, ‘Cappadocia hotels’ for example, takes you to a page on Google called the SERP (search engine results page). Google presents the sites it picked for you between the ads (SEA) and the organic results (SEO). On travel related searches, the part we see as Hotels | Cappadocia brings you a list of hotels with their prices.
Queries on Google With a Specific Hotel Name: “%HotelName”
When a traveler searches the name of a property (‘Sunshine Holiday Resort’, for instance), that property’s Google Business Profile appears on the right hand side in a desktop browser. On mobile the Business Profile appears right below the Search Network ads. It also includes Sunshine Holiday Resort’s own advertising through Hotel Ads and the ads of all the sellers.
Sunshine Holiday Resort Hotel chose Türk SEM for its advertising work in 2024.
Google Hotel Ads Impressions on Google Maps
Do you want to advertise your hotel on Google Maps? That is possible today. If a traveler searches ‘Cappadocia hotels’ on Google Maps, for instance, they will see almost every option with its price right away.
The Cappadocia region: the list covers hotels within the provinces of Aksaray and Nevşehir. Here too you can target the prospective guests.
How Does Google Hotel Ads Work?
So far we have gone through what Google Hotel Ads is. Now let us walk through exactly how it works, in 5 steps.
Step 1: Upload the Data
Upload a feed containing your property lists (CSV or XML). For verification, the phone number, latitude and longitude in the list have to match the data in your Google Business Profile.
Step 2: Set Up the API Connection
Set up a real time API connection between your booking system and Google to sync current prices and availability with Google Hotels.
Reference: https://developers.google.com/hotels
Step 3: Define the Action
Define the URL targets and upload the feed. This is how you tell Google where to send travelers when they click the price of one of your properties. In other words, you will be defining your booking link.
Step 4: Test It
Price accuracy is one of the most important parts of Google Hotel Ads. So in this step you will test the integration and verify that the prices shown in your ads match the prices on your website’s booking pages.
Step 5: Go Live
You have reached the last step. Now pick a bidding strategy that suits your campaign and put your ads live. Optimize your position against the various ranking factors.
What Are the Ranking Factors for Google Hotel Ads?
Simply being listed in Google’s hotel listings is not enough, improvements are needed. Because your prices are shown in your Business Profile, keeping them current matters enormously. Ask your customers for reviews to strengthen your profile.
Alongside keeping your Google Business Profile in the best shape, here is the work that helps you rank better in Google Hotel Ads:
- How closely the prices in your ads match the prices on your website.
- How user friendly your landing pages are and what your page experience score is.
- Your price compared with your competitors’ prices.
- The bids you have placed through your Business Profile.
- Whether you use room packages.
- Whether you have the official site badge.
- Whether you use callout extensions.
- The number of clicks you get (that figure shows Google how relevant your hotel site is to the term).
Finally: What Is Hotel Center?
For Google to show visitors the right data, it matters that Google knows your current prices and availability. That is why Hotel Center is your main workspace.
Prices in your booking system are synced with Google Hotel Center through a tool called the Google Hotel API. That API sends and updates your prices and availability automatically.
In the Hotel Center overview you see a summary of the quality of your properties, your prices, your landing pages and your reports. All of those factors need to be visibly in the best shape they can be.
If you work with an integration partner, you usually use their hotel API. They will also manage Hotel Center for you.
Google Hotel Center is not visible to the people searching, because it is a section built specifically for hoteliers.
At Türk SEM we have been working on hotel marketing for many years. We hold serious experience in running Google ads. Get in touch with our agency and we can talk about what we could do for you.
If you are looking for inspiration, have a look at our piece on hotel marketing ideas from around the world. You can see what we did for the hotels whose work we ran in our success stories section.
