Following fast on the heels of last week’s Google announcement of the rebranding of Google AdWords to Google Ads, yesterday’s Marketing Innovations Keynote announced a plethora of new product names and new features as Google revamps their entire marketing ecosystem.
NB: This is an article from Fuel
There are four new campaign types rolling out within Google Ads (previously known as Google AdWords): Smart Campaigns, Smart Shopping Campaigns, Local Campaigns and Hotel Campaigns.
We already knew that the new Google Ads platform would provide new features such as promotions as well as new targeting attributes such as parental status and household income. Both of which would benefit hoteliers looking to drive more qualified traffic and put more heads in beds. However, This new announcement of dedicated Hotel Campaigns seems to suggest that Google may be looking to roll their Google Hotel Ads (GHA) product into the centralized Google Ads tool.
All of these changes may have you a little confused. And rightfully so. This announcement of Hotel Campaigns is different than the Hotel Campaigns that Google rolled out withing Google Hotel Ads back in March. The previously released campaigns allow hotels to manage multiple bid campaigns from within Google Hotel Ads. The new Hotel Campaigns are going to be managed from within Google Ads’ main interface.
Though there weren’t a great deal of details provided during the keynote, Google did reveal a few important tidbits regarding the hotel-specific features.
- The ability to easily group hotels by important attributes such as brand or class.
- Improved bid controls and machine learning to maximize bookings
- The ability to manage a campaign around a target ROI goal
Google summarized the announcement by claiming that Hotel Campaigns will make it easier to connect with travellers at scale.
Despite the challenges with the existing GHA platform, Google claimed that the first 6 months of the year have seen a 65% increase in the number of leads that GHA has generated for its advertisers compared to the same timeframe the previous year. At this time, it is unclear what will happen to the existing GHA interface. Will it be eliminated or will it run in parallel to Hotel Campaigns? We reached out to Google for clarification and here’s what they had to say.
“Hotel Ads as a product (the auction, bids, feed setup, APIs) will continue to exist separately the change is that now, you will be able to see and update your Hotel Ads performance using the same front end and Tools as Google Ads. So we’re still in the earliest stages of testing so functionality isn’t 100% complete but, when it is ready, partners will be able to link their Hotel Ads Account to their Google Ads Account they will then be able to manage hotel ads performance (bids, campaigns, reporting) via the Google Ads Front end and API.”
This move is something that Fuel has been speculating would happen for several months. We welcome the change as the GHA interface has been somewhat limited and by opening up these features within Google Ads, we believe that it will make it much easier for Fuel and our clients to attract new guests and maximize ROI.
