In Google Hotel Ads and hotel metasearch marketing, hoteliers commonly focus on one metric above all others: Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). ROAS is simple to understand. Spend $1,000 and generate $10,000 in bookings, and the campaign appears successful with a $10:1 ROAS.
NB: This is an article from gcommerce
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But focusing only on ROAS can lead hotels to overlook a much more important metric: Impression share.
When hotels optimize only for ROAS, they often sacrifice visibility in the auction and ultimately bottom-line revenue. That means they lose bookings to Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) that could have been captured directly.
What is impression share for hotel metasearch?
Impression share measures how often your hotel appears in the auction compared to how often it could appear.
For example, if your property’s metasearch listing received 50,000 impressions over a period but only appears in 22,500, your impression share is 45%.
That means more than half of the potential demand never even sees your direct booking rate. Those travelers will still book somewhere. In most cases, they will book through an OTA.
Impression share is the first step to competing with OTAs
OTAs dominate hotel distribution because they are consistently present in metasearch auctions. For a hotel to compete with OTAs, the first requirement is simple. The hotel must appear in the auction.
However, visibility alone is not enough. The direct channel must also maintain rate parity with OTAs. Ideally, the hotel should offer the same rate, or slightly better, than the OTAs.
When parity is strong and impression share is high, hotels dramatically increase their ability to capture direct bookings.
A real example: Impression Share vs ROAS
Both scenarios assume the same total market demand of 50,000 eligible impressions, the same conversion percentage (Conv%), click through rate (CTR), and cost-per-click (CPC.)
Watch what changes when impression share grows.
Metadesk generates $20,487 more net revenue simply by capturing more demand in the auction with higher impression share. The point here is many hotels believe their Google Hotel Ads campaigns are performing well because ROAS appears high.
But ROAS alone does not tell the full story.
If your campaign is not present in the auction, i.e. you have low impression share, OTAs capture those bookings.
