Unleashing the Power of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns: A Path to Maximize ROI for Hotels

Welcome to the wonderful world of hotel paid search marketing or Search Engine Marketing (SEM)! As a seasoned hotel digital marketing agency, and having worked at hotels in Thailand for many years, we understand the fine margins hotels work with and understand the importance of maximizing return on investment (ROI) wherever it can be done. One way to add some profit to your hotel’s bottom line is with effective pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. More specifically, Google ads.

In this article, I’ll try to break down the topic into more digestible chunks, with a few real-life examples thrown in, with the goal of helping you harness the potential of Google ads for your hotel.

The Google Ads PPC Market – Understanding the Basics

Imagine you’re at Phuket’s bustling Naka night market, where your potential guests are strolling around, actively looking for their next travel experience. Google PPC campaigns are one of the ways you can stand out in this crowded market.

With Google ads PPC, you place a bid on relevant keywords for your hotel, create interesting and hopefully compelling ads, and pay only when someone clicks on your ad. It’s like having your hotel’s billboard displayed exactly at the entrance to the market and helps ensure maximum visibility for your hotel.

Building your Strategic foundation – Keyword Research

To succeed in the online ads game, you need a solid foundation / strategy, and it starts with comprehensive keyword research about your hotel and its location. Keywords are the building blocks that connect your hotel with its potential guests and by understanding the search terms guests use and how they search to find a hotel like yours, you can craft targeted ads that appear when they’re actively seeking accommodations in Phuket.

If well executed, it allows you to reach guests who are pro-actively searching for a hotel like yours and are therefore more likely to book than the average person you can reach with other ad channels. Tools like Google Keyword Planner or third-party keyword platforms help identify relevant keywords that align with your hotel’s unique selling propositions.

Crafting Engaging Ad Copy – An Irresistible Invitation

In the PPC world, just as in the real world, your ad copy should entice potential guests to choose your hotel over the myriad of other options available to them in a market like Thailand. Just like when you are selling face-to-face , your ad copy should highlight your hotel’s unique features, benefits, and special offers.

Use language that resonates with your target audience, focusing on what sets you apart from the hotel competition and incorporate appealing visuals, call-to-actions, and compelling offers to increase click-through rates and drive more qualified traffic (guests) to your hotel website.

Landing Page Magic – Transforming Your Clicks into Bookings

Once potential guests click on your Google ads, they arrive at your hotel’s website landing page— which should be a digital representation of your hotel’s reception area. Like a warm and inviting lobby, your landing page should provide a seamless experience that convinces visitors to take the next step, enter the booking funnel and complete a reservation.

As CRO (conversion Rate Optimisation) experts, we know that optimizing your landing pages with persuasive headlines, clear call-to-actions, captivating imagery, and essential information about your hotel’s amenities, location, and unique selling points can be the difference between campaign success and failure.

Budgeting – Bidding Smartly to Maximize ROI

For Google ads, like with hotels, you need to budget your resources wisely to achieve the best ROI, think of ads budgeting like managing your foreign currency on holiday. Set a realistic budget and allocate it strategically across your different campaigns and keywords. It’s essential that you monitor the performance of your Google PPC campaigns closely, adjust your bids and allocate more of your available budget to the keywords, ads and campaigns that generate the most conversions. Remember, it’s not about spending the most, but about investing smartly to yield the highest returns for your hotel.

Targeting the Right Audience – Reaching the perfect guests for your hotel

There’s a common misconception among hoteliers in Thailand that traffic from all sources is equal and I’m here to tell you that it is not. It doesn’t matter how much traffic you get if none of the visitors turn into bookings. That’s why targeting the right audience is crucial for the success of your campaigns and generating a good ROI (Return on Investment) or ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).

It’s like sending personalized postcards to individuals who are most likely to enjoy your hotel’s offerings vs giving the same postcards to random people walking past in the street. It’s possible some will book, but more likely they will not. Play the odds and leverage the targeting capabilities of Google’s advertising platform to reach potential guests based on ideal demographics, interests, locations, and even previous online behavior. By presenting your ads to the right people at the right time in the hotel booking cycle, you can significantly increase the likelihood of conversions (bookings).

Tracking and Optimization – Fine-Tuning Your Performance

One essential part of Google ads that we haven’t really mentioned so far, is tracking & analytics. I have more than 15+ years of experience running ads and hundreds of millions of THB generated in ad revenue in the hospitality & real estate industry and can tell you that I rely heavily on data to make campaign decisions.

Running Google ads is like being a police detective, you need to analyze clues in the data to continuously improve performance and uncover the most effective strategies. Google’s new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Tag Manager (GTM) combined with a powerful and customisable hotel booking engine like The Percentage App, have powerful tracking functionality, allowing you to measure campaign performance in real time.

Advanced event tracking using the Data Layer, combined with the vast amount of data shown in your google ads account, allow you to see exactly how your Google ads are performing and see what your traffic is doing on your hotel website so that you can continually optimize and hone your ads. Here are some of the basic key KPI’s I like to look at:

• Impressions
• Interactions / Clicks
• CTR (Click Through Rate)
• Interaction Rates
• Conversion rates
• Optimisation score
• Cost per Conversion
• SIS (Search Impression Share)
• CPC (Average Cost per Click)
• Cost per conversion

With these insights, you can identify areas for improvement, refine your campaigns, and most importantly maximize your ROI.

The Power of Remarketing – Staying Top-of-Mind

Google ads remarketing campaign is your hotel’s way of staying top-of-mind with potential guests who have previously interacted or visited your website but for whatever reason, decided not to book. In the hospitality and travel industry, it’s very common for users to search around for the best deals on multiple channels, so keeping your hotel front-and-center when they are in their booking mindset can be an extremely powerful tool.

Remarketing allows your hotel to show custom / tailored ads to people who have already visited your website, with a view to encouraging them to revisit and make a booking this time. This strategy enhances brand recall, increases conversions, and maximizes the value of your initial PPC investment as these guests are further down the buying process than first time visitors often are.

Your Key Takeaways

Congratulations! You survived this brief run through of using Google ads to maximize your hotel’s digital ROI. By understanding the basics, conducting thorough keyword research, crafting compelling ad copy, optimizing landing pages, budgeting wisely, targeting the right audience, tracking performance, and leveraging remarketing, you can unlock the full potential of PPC to maximize your return and stay ahead of the competition.

Are you looking for expert Google ads campaigners for your hotel? At The Percentage Company we provide a wide range of affordable hotel digital marketing packages to help hotels navigate the digital marketing landscape with minimal fuss, leaving your team to focus on making your property the best it can be. Ask us about our extremely affordable 360 degree packages for hotels in Thailand today!