April 25, 2024
TravelAds Sponsored Listings have a place in every hotel advertising plan. Why? Every successful hotel marketing strategy needs to be able to adapt to stay competitive. As the travel industry continues to be in flux, Expedia Group Media Solutions continues to update and improve TravelAds for hotels to connect with their ideal customers and fill rooms.
Why you should create a marketing plan that includes TravelAds
Strategically embracing sponsored listings like TravelAds is a cost-effective and powerful way to amplify your visibility. With TravelAds features like real-time reports and precise traveler targeting, you can improve your brand awareness and connect with motivated travelers who are ready to book.
How TravelAds features help you reach your hotel advertising goals
Let’s get into different TravelAds features and how you can use them to make your hotel advertising more effective, drive online bookings, and more.
Stay competitive with bid enhancers.
To increase the likelihood of your ideal traveler seeing your ads, we offer bid enhancers that let you bid based on length of stay, check-in window, and more. Bid enhancers are a specialized feature that help your hotel ads get noticed by travelers. TravelAds bid enhancers can consistently elevate your property’s visibility with travelers and drive demand, especially in the competitive hotel industry.
Using bid enhancers is one of the hotel marketing strategies you can use to reach your campaign goals, like the Tuscan hotel group Blinkup, who incorporated them along with different Media Solutions products to drive a nearly 600% increase in room nights and nearly 2 million impressions for their hotel ads.
Eliminate the guesswork with automated bidding.
Leveraging our bidding tools is a key part of staying competitive and optimizing your advertising campaigns. We know that the bidding process can be time-consuming and complicated. That’s why we created our automated bidding feature in TravelAds, which does the heavy lifting and bids based on your market goals and daily budget to help your hotel advertisements get noticed.
Showcase what makes your property unique with customizable content.
TravelAds is the ideal hotel PPC, or pay-per-click, advertising option, which allows you to highlight exactly what you want, when you want, with custom copy and photos. Draw attention to new property additions, showcase your story, or feature timely events with TravelAds.
Reach the right audience at the right time with precise targeting capabilities.
One powerful TravelAds feature is targeting, and there are a variety of different targeting options available to advertisers and marketers. These include:
- Device-based targeting, which allows you to tailor your ads based on whether your target audiences are using a phone, tablet, or a desktop computer. By understanding the context of how travelers engage with ads, you can optimize your marketing campaigns for better reach and relevance. Plus, you can tailor your hotel ads based on the device, like making your ads more mobile friendly.
- Custom audience targeting, where our travel advertising experts can help you layer multiple profiles to create highly defined and unique traveler profiles that you can act on to better engage your target audiences.
- Trip details targeting, which allows you to target potential customers based on everything from trip duration, number of travelers, and more.
Keep in mind that you can use our first-party data to help you target travelers and develop defined audience segments.
Capture the attention of travelers with scheduled ads.
With the scheduled ads feature, you can adjust which version of your ad is displayed across Expedia Group brands to appeal to travelers from specific regions or during specific periods. The messaging, imagery, and timing of a series of sponsored listings can be varied and dynamic. By strategically timing your hotel ads, you can capture demand during peak booking periods or target specific traveler segments.
Gain payment flexibility with pre-fund and post-bill.
These features give you added control over your payments. You can choose to fund your TravelAds campaign in advance with pre-fund or pay afterward with post-bill. Plus, you can update your funding method at any time.
- Pre-fund: Allocate funds for your campaign with direct billing or a credit card. Your hotel advertisements will stop running once your balance reaches zero, but you can add more funds at any time.
- Post-bill: Your campaign will start running immediately, and you’ll be billed at the end of every month. There’s no upfront commitment or pre-approval required. When you reach your credit limit, you can add funds with pre-funding or request a credit limit increase.
Manage your campaigns with real-time reporting.
Your TravelAds reporting dashboard provides instant insights into how your campaign is performing, and these multiple data points help you analyze and optimize your campaigns effectively. Key metrics you can view include:
- Ad impressions: The number of times your hotel ad was displayed to travel shoppers.
- Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of users who clicked on your hotel ad after seeing it.
- Clicked room nights: The number of room nights booked by travelers who interacted with your hotel ad.
- Clicked revenue: The revenue generated from hotel bookings resulting from ad clicks.
Real-time reporting gives you the adaptability you need to remain competitive. If certain aspects of your hotel marketing campaign aren’t performing as expected, you can adjust immediately.
Get competitive insights with the bid strength meter.
Competitive insights help you understand how you compare against market leaders in key indicators like CPC, ROAS, or daily spend to inform your strategy. Bid strength measures the relative strength of your bid against competing base bids. While it doesn’t guarantee a specific ad rank, this metric can be thought of as showing how likely you are to capture a Top 3 auction spot on a scale from one to 10. Understanding your bid strength empowers you to strategically navigate the competitive landscape and achieve your hotel advertising goals.
Make informed decisions with opportunities and insights.
Our opportunities and insights feature lets you refine your hotel advertising strategy and drive incremental room nights by applying personalized recommendations in the TravelAds portal. With this feature, you can easily pinpoint optimization opportunities based in data intelligence to help you make informed decisions to improve your campaign performance.
Build a TravelAds campaign
Remember, effective hotel advertising isn’t only about visibility; it’s about connecting with travelers, understanding their needs, and delivering a compelling message that inspires action. By strategically utilizing TravelAds features, you can create impactful campaigns that drive online bookings and elevate your property’s profile.
