Pedro Colaco, CEO and President of GuestCentric, explains how hotels can improve their ROI by marketing on Google and other online channels.

In late 2019, Google became more aggressive with its advertising tactics to reach the online travel market. Pushing down free search listings to make room for more paid results increased competition for these properties and disrupted the OTA [online travel agent] Dominance.

What does this mean for your hotel’s positioning on Google search engine as OTAs spend less on Google campaigns during the economic downturn? Should Hotels Invest in Google Metasearch or Could Google Be Your Hotel’s Worst Best Friend? Read on to find out.

Google disrupts OTA dominance, but do hotels have a chance to assert themselves?

Historically, OTAs have driven Google’s search engine results through optimized content and pay-per-click advertising. However, in the last few months of 2019, Google started moving more ads to the top of the search engine and moving down free organic listings from OTAs. This resulted in significant customer acquisition costs for OTAs, which in turn impacted the hotels ability to rank high in Google search results.

Regardless of the glitch, OTAs still had much larger budgets behind them and thus had a better chance of maintaining the top spot on Google. However, the economic downturn in the pandemic has resulted in lower investment in Google.

In April 2020, Bookings.com announced it would cut Google’s ad spend from $ 4 billion in 2019 to between $ 1 billion and $ 2 billion in 2020. Expedia has also cut its Google marketing budget to less than $ 1 billion in 2020. down from $ 5 billion in 2019.

Google – Your Hotel’s Worst Best Friend?

With reduced investment from OTAs, hoteliers and other competitors seem empowered to compete on Google. Hoteliers have also received the keys to manage the distribution of their inventory directly on the Google platform. But what will happen when the upturn comes and OTAs invest heavily in Google campaigns again?

Although the economic downturn appears to have leveled the playing field for hotels, Google will ultimately continue to favor the highest bidder. Will independent hotels – with fewer resources and less financial leverage – stand a chance against OTAs when bids return to pre-pandemic levels?

The silver lining is that in parallel with paid advertising, Google has been stepping up its Google My Business tools to provide business owners with visibility. Additionally, more and more guests are turning to hotels for refunds right after a disastrous tug-of-war with OTAs.

Hoteliers should focus on increasing their company’s online visibility and adding value to potential guests visiting the hotel website.

The next step for hoteliers

Google is likely to build its position in the travel industry, either through takeovers or by marginalizing competitors. The trend is unlikely to reverse, so it’s time hoteliers woke up from their metasearch-centric approach and invest where the volume (and ROI) is.

Below is a brief summary of our recommendations:

  • Optimize your hotel website and booking engine for mobile phones: Our latest research from Hotelier Pulse shows it mobile accounts for 30% of all hotel bookings. Mobile booking has increased dramatically during the pandemic and your digital sales and marketing tools need to be tweaked to meet the demands and demands Increase booking conversion.

  • Stimulate shopping behavior on your hotel website and booking engine: It is of vital importance that both your website and booking engine are optimized for direct optimization. Some ways to optimize it are adding pictures to your special offers, making sure that both the website and booking engine are mobile friendly, and offering shopping activation / recovery widgets. For example, our research shows that including shopping activation and shopping recovery widgets can increase direct bookings by up to 60%.

  • Be smart with your bids: Google Hotel Ads campaigns are very sophisticated and contain hundreds of variables. This complexity and complexity will most likely increase with the forthcoming merger of Hotel Ads / Ads. Loss of rates is one of the main reasons why many campaigns are not performing well. Therefore, bids should be very dynamic based on your future rates, availability and feeder market depending on the seasonality.

  • Continuous update and interaction with Google My Business: Make sure your Google My Business listing is always up to date as this is the primary entry point for most Google users. Answer each user’s questions on Google My Business and answer Google reviews. If you only have time for one platform, ditch Tripadvisor and focus on the Big G.

  • Diversify your traffic channels: Focus on other aspects of digital marketing to encourage direct bookings, such as: B. Social media recommendations, influencer marketing and user-generated content.

  • Most importantly, you never lose sight of the customer experience at all stages of interacting with your hotel. During this time when every guest counts, referrals are your friend.

This is an edited version of the an article that appeared on Hotel Technology.