How To Maximize Your Google Hotel Ad Metasearch Production

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November 28, 2023 by

Whether you’re a seasoned hotelier or just getting started in hotel marketing, chances are you understand metasearch, OTAs, and the importance of direct bookings when it comes to maximizing your hotel’s revenue. If this sounds foreign to you, then I recommend you read our blog on what is a hotel metasearch engine.

Optimizing Your Google Hotel Ad Strategy

The metasearch auction allows your hotel to compete directly with OTAs with a price-by-price comparison when a user completes a branded hotel search. Your Google hotel ad strategy should involve optimizing your Google Business Profile, analyzing and reacting to key performance indicators like impression data, and an understanding of the variables that can impact your click-through and conversion rates. I’ll touch more on these strategies below.

Impression Share Data & Metasearch Production

Impression share metrics are a few of the KPIs to analyze when considering if you have room to grow monthly production from your hotel ad campaign. An important thing to remember is that hotel ads are very much at the bottom of the conversion funnel. Users who enter your booking flow via metasearch are users who have discovered your brand, conducted their research, and have decided to go through with booking your hotel. Analyzing these metrics from this perspective will make the most out of your optimizations.

Within the scope of metasearch, the following metrics can be viewed as the beginning of the customer journey.

Eligible Impression - The total number of opportunities that your Hotel ad was eligible to show (i.e., entered the auction) based on the targeting criteria over the specified time period.

Impression - How often is your ad shown? An impression is counted each time your ad is shown on a search result page or other site on the Google Network.

Impression Share - Impression share (IS) is the percentage of impressions that your ads receive compared to the total number of impressions that your ads could get.

If your Google hotel ad campaign is experiencing a low number of impressions, several factors may be at play, including aspects related to your Google Business Profile, pricing model, or inventory-related issues. For example, if you’re dealing with low impressions, improving your photographic assets on your Google Business Profile could help. Be sure to showcase your property's best amenities and demand drivers.

And if your pricing is substantially higher than your competitors, that can also discourage clicks and impressions.

Lastly, if your hotel is consistently out of parity with the OTAs, and the ad price doesn’t match the booking price, otherwise known as a price accuracy discrepancy, your hotel listing can be penalized by Google and suppressed within market searches relevant to your property.

If your hotel is struggling with a low impression share, that means potential guests are clicking through to your metasearch listing but the ad for your “Official Website” isn’t present. The issue here is that several OTA listings for your property will be served to the potential guest. Most likely this is caused by one of two issues; 1) You’re sold out, in which case you may want to ensure you black out those dates with your OTA listings, or 2) You ran out of budget. Increasing budget can be an easy way to increase your impression share percentage and direct bookings.

Optimizing Your Click-Through Rates

Both click-through and conversion rates are very telling KPIs when it comes to analyzing the state of your hotel's booking flow.

Click-Through Rate - The percentage of users who have clicked on your ad divided by the impressions your ad has received

Conversion Rate - The percentage of conversions divided by the number of interactions

A low click-through rate can indicate a number of things to be looked at further, but generally, an incomplete or inaccurate Google Business Profile, price competitiveness issues, insufficient ad callouts, or a low position in the auction will have the largest impact on your CTR.

A well-optimized Google Business Profile should list all possible amenities and features relevant to your property, as well as high-quality imagery displayed at the profile level. If your property has a member rate available, then we highly recommend that you channel your member rates to your metasearch channel and work with your connectivity partner to set up slash-through pricing. This allows you to be in compliance while offering a better price than OTAs and showcasing it with a single slash. This subtle change has been known to improve CTRs.

Another technique to increase CTR is by creating ad callouts that resonate with the users viewing your hotel ad. Rate or promo-driven ad callouts have historically performed best.

Analyzing your Google hotel ad’s meet/beat/lose data is also a powerful tool to understand the causes for a low CTR. These competitive metrics will tell you the percentage that your hotel ad had served a rate that was in or out of parity, or more simply put, how often OTAs served a rate more competitive than yours. If your hotel is consistently serving a rate that is higher than the OTAs, your CTR will certainly suffer. On the other end, if your property is experiencing price accuracy discrepancies, you’ll have a poor conversion rate because users are bouncing when they don’t find the price that originally caught their attention in the auction.

If your CTR is abnormally low, and your beat percentage is healthy, then you should look at your Google Business Profile, pricing model, parity discrepancies, or connectivity issues between your metasearch partner and your Google Business Profile.

Optimizing Your Conversion Rates With A Positive User Experience

Within the scope of metasearch, a low conversion rate usually indicates an issue in the booking flow experience. Ask yourself, does the user land within a checkout flow? Are there unnecessary pop-ups or scrolling needed to find the hotel room the user was interested in? Does the price in the metasearch auction match what is found in the booking engine, does your booking flow provide the user with a positive experience? A poor user experience will lead to users bouncing to the next available booking option, thus, a low conversion rate.

Google grades each property based on its ability to provide its users with a positive user experience, and one way of doing so is by measuring the advertiser's ability to remain compliant with their pricing policies. If your property is constantly fighting to stay compliant with Google’s Price Accuracy Policy, then over time you’ll receive a poor score that negatively impacts your auction positioning, advertising cost, and free booking link placement. Ensuring your property remains compliant with Google's policies is key to competing with OTAs in the metasearch auction and generating direct bookings.

Users are expecting to complete a purchase when they click through from your hotel ad. Things such as strange or conflicting rates or promotions, confusing acronyms, a plethora of rate options, and so forth all lead to a poor user experience. Users will bounce from the slightest confusion or inconvenience.

Is your property struggling to compete with OTAs in the metasearch auction? Reach out to us today, and we’ll get you on track.

Price Accuracy, Rate Parity, and Hotel Metasearch Conversions

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October 24, 2023 by

Price Accuracy Vs. Rate Parity

Price accuracy and rate parity are two of the most important factors to control when it comes to hotel metasearch. The two are not directly related but are often confused with one another, and both play a vital role in driving the most direct booking conversions. Price accuracy refers to ensuring that the rates displayed in the metasearch channel reflect the real rates in your booking engine. Rate parity refers to how often you are being undercut on rates by OTAs selling your rooms through their sites.

Price Accuracy

Did you know that price accuracy improves your metasearch conversion? Did you know it can actually lead to increased costs, higher CPCs, and less visibility if your prices aren’t accurately reflected in your booking engine? In fact, Google says your price accuracy score affects the auction positioning and advertising cost of your Google Hotel Ads metasearch listings. Ensure price accuracy while improving your conversion rate with these simple booking engine best practices:

  • Publish your BAR rate - Don’t get undercut by the OTAs in the listings. Make sure you always offer potential guests the best available rates.
  • Ensure your lowest rate is listed first - Google’s policies indicate your rate should be prominently displayed on your booking engine landing page and that the lowest rate (the rate shown in Google Hotel Ads) be the first listed rate available. It also helps ensure a smooth customer journey when the first price listed is the price they see in your booking engine.
  • Add any and all public promotions to your channeled metasearch rate/inventory feed - If you offer deals and discounts that the OTAs can’t match, listing those rates on your metasearch channels will give a greater incentive for guests to book direct.
  • Be thoughtful about how many rate types you display on your booking engine page - Guests may be overwhelmed if there are too many rates available on your landing page. The goal should be to decrease friction at all points in the booking process.
  • Use understandable language -  Communication is always key. Make sure any callouts or text in ads are compelling and concise. Language on the landing page should match your Brand voice and be easy to read.

Rate Parity

Rate parity can have a massive impact on your conversion rates for hotel metasearch, but what is it exactly? In short, rate parity means ensuring you aren’t being undercut on the best available rate. Below is an example of a hotel experiencing rate parity issue; notice how Priceline and TripAdvisor both offer rates lower than the official site.

  • Always be the best - OTAs are always looking for ways to beat your official site rates, trying to steal your direct bookings. Because metasearch interaction and conversion rates are driven so heavily by price, it’s vital that you offer the lowest rate.
  • Monitor your listings - It’s important to be aware of how often your rates are not the lowest rates being displayed. Hotels with higher instances of being out of rate parity consistently have lower performance than those whose rates are in line.
  • Have a strategy - A rate parity strategy is a set of policies that work together to ensure that your prices stay in parity. It may seem trivial to focus on rate parity, but it has an outsized impact on your conversion rate.

Rate parity is one of the most essential ways to increase your CTRs and conversions, while lowering your CPCs and increasing spend efficiency. After all, if your customers can get a better rate somewhere else, why wouldn’t they?
We specialize in improving your metasearch conversions. Reach out to our hotel metasearch experts today at https://metadesk.pro/sign-up/

What Is Hotel Metasearch?

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October 16, 2023 by

Metasearch is an important piece of any successful hotel marketing strategy, but what is it? How does it work? Most people don’t know what a metasearch engine really does behind the scenes, but understanding metasearch can help you get the most out of your hotel’s marketing.

What Is A Metasearch Engine?

Before we get into hotel metasearch, let’s establish what a metasearch engine is and how it works. 

At its core, a metasearch engine is an aggregator of data. Standard search engines browse for relevant results based on a search query, and give you a list of resources to find the information you need. Metasearch engines, though, scan through resources for you and instead give you a potential list of answers. Metasearch engines take care of research and organization, leaving you with an easily digestible and comparable list of information. 

Think about search engines in terms of something a bit more familiar, like a library. A standard search engine is a lot like a library catalog. If you’re looking for the answer to a specific question, the catalog can help you find books relating to the general topic. However, metasearch engines are more like a good reference librarian, and they take things a step further. A librarian will use the same catalog to find relevant books, but they’ll also help you read through and interpret those books to give you a list of potential answers. 

Both the catalog and librarian will help you find an answer to your question, but the librarian will save you time and effort by prioritizing and listing out the most relevant pieces of information, just like a metasearch engine. Both types of search engine have their time and place to shine, but metasearch engines can make information much more digestible and easier to compare, since they handle the research and organization for you.

What Is Hotel Metasearch?

Hotel metasearch engines are just like other metasearch engines, but with a narrow focus on rates, inventory, and availability of hotel rooms. Hotel metasearch engines generate a list of rate options for a potential guest to choose from, pulling real-time data from various sources including your CRS/booking engine and online travel agencies (OTAs).

Hotel metasearch engines make booking a room quick and simple for guests, reducing the frustration and tedium that can come from manual rate shopping. Guests can also book with the confidence of getting the best deal, since rates are easily comparable in the side-by-side format of hotel metasearch engines. These engines can even automatically include discounted rates from exclusive packages and other offers, making it even more appealing for a guest to book through metasearch channels. 

There are a number of hotel metasearch engines out there, including Google Hotel Ads, Kayak, and Trivago. Each engine works a bit differently, but they all share the same purpose of aggregating room rates from various websites into one list. Here’s an example from Google Hotel Ads, though most hotel metasearch engines have a similar look.

To ensure that your official rates are included by these hotel metasearch engines, it’s vital that you connect with a metasearch partner. If you want to learn more, check out our post on metasearch basics. 

Takeaways

If you’re not on hotel metasearch, you’re missing out. Metasearch engines are more detailed than standard search engines, scanning through appropriate resources and pulling out a list of the most important and relevant information. For hotels, metasearch engines are able to provide a list of real-time rates to potential guests, simplifying the booking process and increasing the likelihood of a stay at your hotel. 

If you’re interested in learning more about hotel metasearch or ready to partner, contact Metadesk.

Metasearch Pricing Models Explained

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August 29, 2023 by

As metasearch continues to expand into one of your most important channels for direct revenue, it’s important to understand your choices in terms of pricing models. 

At Metadesk, we talk to hoteliers every day and have encountered a wide variety of various pricing models for metasearch advertising. Here’s a handy breakdown of pricing models you might consider, or in some cases, be stuck with. 

A Media Placement Fee

We mostly see this pricing model offered by booking engine providers, and if you’re like most hoteliers, your metasearch presence is facilitated by your booking engine. 

Most booking engines charge you a percentage of what you allocate as your metasearch media budget, usually between 10% - 15% applied to a media budget ranging from $1,000 - $3,000 per month.

Booking engine providers love this because it’s a low labor source of revenue - they simply need to maintain a tech connection that publishes a live feed of your rates and availability to metasearch channels and collect a tidy fee.

If the percentage you pay in media fees + your metasearch advertising budget is lower than your OTA commissions, this model can be a win. But a problem we see more and more is that OTA’s are spending huge amounts of advertising dollars to dominate metasearch. And if your booking engine doesn’t allow for any media strategy whatsoever, you’re at a huge disadvantage.

Best for:

This pricing model works well for advantaged hotels that tend to fill up based on their location or surplus demand in their market.

One main drawback is if you want to use metasearch for more, like targeting need dates or a certain type of traveler, forget it. Your booking engine isn’t capable of incorporating any type of strategic targeting on your behalf. 


Flat Fee + Media Budget


The second-most common pricing model we see at Metadesk in the industry is a flat fee + media budget. We commonly see a range of advertising budgets of around $1,000 - $1,500 with the management fee ranging from $400 - $75 on the low end ($75!!).

At first glance, this seems like a great deal for hoteliers, especially with macro-economic factors like rising marketing costs and operational overhead.

But what we find is that for a management fee so low, the metasearch provider must work hard to limit their labor cost; the aim is to avoid providing support, and typically nobody is actively managing your advertising campaigns.

Instead, these providers try to manage your strategy with algorithmic and programmatic functions alone, which can be problematic without oversight provided by humans. One common problem we see is your rate strategy being compromised by automated price-matching to meet or beat the unscrupulous practice of big OTA undercutting your rates in auction.

In regards to budget, the issue here is two-fold: Many properties would prefer not to pony up even that small amount of cash each month if it can be avoided, and on top of that, the budget can oftentimes be too small to really compete with big OTA.

Best for:A flat fee + media budget is best for small to mid-sized hotels, with mid-range annualized ADR, in low to non-competitive markets.


Pay-Per-Stay Commission Model


A performance-based model that charges a commission for only stays that take place, this model works well for hoteliers that need more from metasearch and who have decided to prioritize ways to increase direct bookings.

Hoteliers like this model because it aligns their interests with that of their metasearch partner. They’re only billed for stays that take place; typically cancellations, and even reservations created by your loyalty members, are excluded from billing.

Another big advantage of this model is the fact that the 3rd party provider assumes all of the financial risk and funds your advertising budget.

It also means that, in theory, your budget is uncapped and only limited by the travel demand in your market. Your metasearch partner will keep spending as long as they’re generating reservations. This means that instead of your cash flow that determines your advertising budget, which can be arbitrary and restrictive, it’s market demand.

Best for:

This pricing model works well for properties in a competitive market that need to utilize metasearch as a strategic advertising channel to help address need periods (like mid-week vs weekend, on vs off-season, etc.) and target individual travel segments.

One huge plus is that properties using this model don’t have to come out of pocket for their metasearch advertising budget.  

Organic Only Flat Fee

If you’ve never heard of this pricing model, it’s because we just invented it 😎 And as we write this piece, this model isn’t available anywhere else.

Despite a flat fee + media budget model being very low cost in nature, some hotels simply don’t have enough inventory to make the math make sense. They may struggle to see a return on even a low budget amount of $1,000 per month, and giving away a percentage of the channel is not a great idea when your total monthly profit is low figures.

That’s why we’ve developed a low-cost way for hoteliers to display an organic listing only. And with a strategic rate strategy (sSuch as a loyalty or member rate channeled to meta) your official site will still be there at the moment of booking, alongside OTA channels with a higher rate.

Best for:

Small hotels, or those with a low ADR, where traditional metasearch pricing models just don’t work.


We hope you found this breakdown useful and informative. At Metadesk, we offer a range of metasearch products to best serve your unique needs.

Please reach out if you’d like to discuss your metasearch advertising strategy and which model might work best for your property’s unique needs.

The Importance Of Hotel Metasearch

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August 22, 2023 by

Hotel metasearch engines work as aggregators, pulling data from various sources to create a list of available room rates for a potential guest to choose from. They improve the booking experience for your guests, making it easier to reserve rooms and compare rates.

On the surface, hotel metasearch may seem like yet another distribution channel, but it's vital to any successful hotel marketing strategy. Metasearch can improve the guest experience, help you beat online travel agencies (OTAs) to recapture direct bookings, and effectively target "bottom of the funnel" guests. You should consider using hotel metasearch to take advantage of a significant marketing opportunity.

Improved Guest Experience

Gone are the days of browsing multiple websites for rates before booking a hotel room. Hotel metasearch engines will do the work of research and organization for your guests, removing the hard part of making a reservation. The guest experience starts long before they set foot on your property, and the ease of booking through a metasearch engine will create a positive association between you and your guests. 

This easy booking process can also increase the chances of a guest visiting at all. Because so many hotels already use metasearch, manual rate shopping needs to be updated. If guests can not easily find your official rates on a metasearch engine, they may be discouraged from booking. And if your competition is the one skipping metasearch, that same discouragement could lead a potential guest to your hotel instead.

Beating Online Travel Agencies

OTAs have been using hotel metasearch for years and will continue to do so for many more to come. If you want to maintain a competitive edge, it’s vital that you throw your hat into the ring as well.  

OTAs have large marketing budgets that can easily outshine your own marketing efforts, so you need to do everything you can to beat them out and capture direct bookings. If you're absent on hotel metasearch, this is an automatic win for the OTAs. Guests can't book direct if there's no direct listing available!

If you are present on hotel metasearch, your official rates can easily win out. Since hotel metasearch engines display booking options side-by-side, it's effortless for guests to compare. If your official rates are equal to or lower than those of OTAs, guests are more likely to book direct. And more direct bookings means more money in your own pocket.

Hotel metasearch engines can even update automatically with discounted rates, and this is a great way to stand out above OTAs. “Book Direct” offers and other exclusive packages will be reflected in the hotel metasearch feed, lowering your rates and making a direct booking even more appealing. 

Targeting “Bottom Of The Funnel” Guests

Hotel metasearch is about as “bottom of the funnel” as you can get. This is the final step between your guest and their reservation, and it shouldn’t be overlooked. 

If you’re not nailing the bottom of the funnel, you’re sacrificing the effectiveness of all your other marketing efforts. Even if you convince a guest to stay with you over your competition, that stay loses some of its value if the final booking goes to an OTA. You work hard with your marketing, so you should maintain a strong presence to the final moments. OTAs will use metasearch with or without you, so don’t skip out on your opportunity to compete. 

Getting Started With Hotel Metasearch

To get the most out of hotel metasearch, you need to connect with a metasearch partner. They can ensure your official rates are displayed in the lists created by hotel metasearch engines, allowing you to stay competitive on these channels. 


If you’re ready to get started with hotel metasearch, check out our post on metasearch basics or contact Metadesk.

[E-Book]Email Marketing Strategy Recommendations

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August 16, 2023 by

Is your team looking for new and effective ways to maximize your email marketing efforts? We are happy to say we have a new E-Book with our top recommendations that you'll definitely find useful.

The tips and strategies in our E-Book are tried and tested, and have been proven to yield great results. View the full E-Book here.

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