In this episode of Industry Spotlight, we discuss Google’s recent announcement that it will be bringing Hotel Ads into the main Google Ads platform with the launch of a new campaign type. Click here to subscribe to the Flaunt Digital YouTube channel…
See below for the full video transcription.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:
Chris: So last week at the Google Marketing Live Summit, it was announced that there’s going to be a new ad format that’s added to the new Google Ads platform. And what it is, is it’s, basically, you’re able to bid on hotel inventory now. Whereas, before, in the SERPs, obviously, you were only able to show for organic listings. So, yeah. You’re going to be able to submit all your hotel inventory dates, your price, and availability, all that kind of thing.
You’ll need three different feeds in order to be able to show for. And you’re going to be able to buy traffic on a CPC basis, just like you would any other ad format. I think there’s a couple of other different bid models that you can operate with it but, yeah, it’s a little bit like the old Google local inventory ads, if anybody remembers them. So it’s going to work in a similar way but, obviously, you get to select your dates, and, you know, your pricing, and view it on the map, try and figure out where it is if it’s in your locality.
So I think you’ll start to see a lot more of that coming through over the coming weeks. It’ll be interesting to see how it performs versus other text ads. As always, it’s always interesting to use new ad formats.
Jamie: How is that going to work with hooking into booking engines and stuff. Does that mean, like, booking.com, for example, would be willing to promote your hotel, but they’d have to submit all the details.
Chris: I’m guessing so. Yeah, so it might cause a little bit of competition between those aggregators and stuff. Whether the hotels will just do it themselves, I’m guessing it is primarily for, like, your bookings.com, that will access the full network and inventory of that kind of thing. So they’ll just have massive feeds.
Jamie: What happens, then, if the same hotel has been submitted twice, in two different feeds, two different providers or aggregators?
Chris: Yeah, well, I guess they’ll have different pricing for what they want to show for it. Might be that there’s…it might be that, how now, if you can select, like, a listing on Google, it’ll just populate with different aggregators and their pricing. I guess, if you’re the cheapest one, you offer the best prices, for example, you’ll get the deal.
Jamie: Interesting.
Chris: Yeah, it sounds like it’s going to be a bit of a tricky setup, though. I think you’ve got to…yeah, you’ve got to be a bit of a big-time advertiser to get that all sorted and get it all lined up. If you imagine trying to, you know, like a Trivago, or a hotels, or a booking.com, somebody like that trying to get all that together, piece all that together. It does sound like it’ll be carnage to get set up.
Jamie: Wonder if they’ll layer into the flights, and then make a Google Holidays.
Chris: Yeah. It might end up going that way, to be honest.
Jamie: Package holidays from Google.
Chris: Yeah, I think there’ll be a lot of other people that have had the organic listings there get pushed out. I don’t think they’ll be very impressed by that.
Jamie: Nope.
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