The new alternatives of advertising on the internet offer a range of possibilities that go hand in hand in tasks as incipient as publicizing the hotel even in more advanced strategies of loyalty and positioning, but you have to know its use and its scope.
by Pablo Guevara *
One of the great concerns of anyone who has a website linked to their business, whatever its nature, is to appear on the first pages of any search engine, especially Google.
Beyond the organic traffic that your website has, getting an additional increase means having greater possibilities of a query or reservation, in the case of the hotel industry, and for that the most widespread and promoted tool is Google Adwords.
Brief explanation for those who do not know it: the first thing I must do is choose where I want my advertising to appear (you can choose between all the countries of the world, regions, cosmopolitan cities, etc.), then I choose in which language I want it to arise (if I choose Canada I will opt for French and English, while for South Korea I would lean towards hangul).
I must also limit the amount of money I want to spend per day and the end date of the campaign. In the second instance I have to choose the keywords (being in hospitality, those that the target uses are selected. To search for hotels in Argentina, for example "Hotels in Argentina", "Lodging in Buenos Aires", etc.), so when the target types them in your search my hotel will appear as one of the first options.
You also have to write an advertisement that consists of four lines where the hotel information and the contact appear. These ads are the ones that appear on the right of the Google page. They are rectangles that contain several notices together and at the end it says "Powered by Google".
You can choose to make a notice with video or images, but the cost rises considerably.
In this way the campaign is finished and begins to govern from that moment. The Google method uses the following to make the payment: depending on the ranking of the country, the number of times that the keywords I used and other algorithms were used in the searches is deducted from the daily value I want to spend: a specific amount for each click that someone makes to fall on my page. Countries like the US, Britain and Australia are always going to be more expensive than Japan, India, etc.
In general terms it is an excellent tool to generate more traffic and a temptation for those e-commerce sites that point directly to people's pockets (rational profit). But how does it impact the hotel industry?
According to an article that talks about whether it is worth investing in Google Adwords for hotels, he comments that by implementing this mechanism you can increase hotel reservations by up to 25% after a campaign.
I differ completely and I go on to give my point of view:
- It is not possible to control who clicks on the advertising. It is due to a multiplicity of factors, including that many people mistakenly click on a link that does not interest them or perhaps entered to see what it was. As these two examples there are countless cases that lead to people, who are not from our target touch the notice or enter by the keywords. This is because the system is based on shooting without discriminating in variables that are important for the hotel industry.
- The nature of hotels, being an intangible service, generates complications for a person to be interested in the first instance. In fact, users who consult or book is because they previously arrived at the hotel through sites linked to the industry where the hotel contact appears, call it Fodor's, Travel + Leisure, Tripadvisor, etc. It is proven and proven that those people who enter through a Google advertising (artificial) to our site generate half of ATS (average stay on the site) than entering organically.
- The costs are too high considering that you need at least reserve for each amount spent on Google Adwords. In fact, having spoken to several hotels, most of them suspended the attempt because they had not received a single query.
- It is complex to face the fierce competition that exists next to giants like Expedia that spends the modest sum of US $ 6 million weekly (source: Advertising Age) in this tool.
- Sites pre-selected with AdSense from the country I'm interested in also don't generate traffic.
I start from the basis that more than one of you receives daily emails from online advertising and marketing agencies offering the service of making campaigns with this methodology and that the results are phenomenal.
That's why, as always, I invite you to write your experiences with this tool, either to refute the article, agree or simply make more inquiries about how it works.
Any comments I will gladly receive in the [email protected] emails - [email protected]
* Pablo Guevara is an advertising professional specialized in hotel marketing. He currently works as a strategic partner in the agency Our Hotel Your Home based in Argentina providing a strategic comprehensive service to hotels in South America and the Middle East. In his past he worked in local advertising agencies (JWT, Initiative Media among others) and international (Windfors, Tbilisi, Georgia). Among its most important clients are: Unilever Regional (Axe, Rexona, Sedal, etc.), Shell, Kimberly Clark, Grupo Clarín and Brahma.
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