by Adam Blackford-Mills
There’s more to improving paid search than just pouring money into the budget of your campaigns. When you’re working within a strict budget, adding more money to the budget may not be an option. Fortunately, there are ways to optimize your paid-search strategies in order to get your campaigns working harder and securing more bookings.
Paid search will continue to push the boundaries of personalized user engagement in 2019. It allows hotel owners to occupy valuable digital real estate in Google search results, on-page display ads, and social media. Paid search allows hotel owners to put their hotel in front of a specific audience, at the exact moment they’re thinking about booking a stay.
We gathered five easy tips to help you secure more bookings with paid search.
Dive deep into your data
In today’s digital space, we’re bombarded by more ads than ever. The way to be heard over the noise is to create unique, personalized ads. The way to deliver this is to know your audience as well as possible.
Many ad platforms allow owners to draw insights about their target audience while the ad campaigns run. This is important because we all respond to ads differently. The trick is building campaigns around those specific audiences as well as specific service offerings or seasonal deals.
Optimize your ads
One of the hardest parts of managing a cost-effective paid-search campaign is balancing the cost of time. Setting up your ad campaigns and monitoring their success requires time, which in turn requires money.
Adjusting your bids, descriptions, and landing pages are all ways you can tweak and optimize your ads to boost performance.
The longer your ad campaigns run, the more data you can capture. You can use this data to inform your campaigns moving forward, making them more successful and cost effective.
Customize experiences with re-marketing
If your ads are working well and getting plenty of click-throughs, but your customers are not converting, your online booking system might be causing them frustration.
Fortunately, if a potential guest gets to the booking stage and doesn’t convert, you can capture them with re-marketing ads. Re-marketing ad campaigns fire automatically with a tasty offering to convince people who are already interested in your hotel to take that final step and book a stay.
Your re-marketing offering needs to be specifically crafted to draw a guest back in. You don’t need to waste time telling them who you are, you need to create an offer or discount that is difficult to refuse.
Highlight your USP (unique selling point)
Focus on what makes your business unique. Not only is it more cost effective to target niche keywords, you can target your offering to an audience that is specifically looking for what you offer.
By focusing on what makes your hotel special, you can stand out from the crowd in the ad space, while not having to spend as much money across popular search terms.
Keep testing. Keep refining.
All of the above tips can be made better by testing. Audience insights can only take you so far and sometimes you just have to try something new!
A/B testing is a great way to try different ads on different audiences. While this will require some upfront investment, the more testing you do, the better the payoff will be in the long run.
After a while, you will have a better understanding of which landing pages, copy, and call to actions work best. Once you generate a baseline, you are able to improve each and every campaign using logical, proven decisions vs. emotional, gut-reaction experiments.
About the Author:
Adam Blackford-Mills is digital sales and marketing director at digital marketing agency MRS Digital. He has 10+ years of experience in sales and digital marketing.
