Most hotel marketers associate traditional ad buying as a hit-or-miss strategy.
Buy space in a magazine… pray for an unknown return.
“Programmatic advertising,” which has generated a lot of buzz in the last few years, is data-powered and designed to help hotels target their audience with remarkable accuracy, provide greater insight into who’s responding to the ad and eliminate the guesswork behind hotel ad buys.
What exactly is programmatic advertising?
Simply put, programmatic advertising is a way to automate and scale hotel advertising.
It gives hotel marketers the ability to deploy advertising to specific audiences (ie. Men with a household income of 150K+ that live in Fort Lauderdale) wherever they congregate across a vast global array of websites and networks.
For example, using Programmatic, hotel marketers can:
1. Target an audience (Adults 150K+) that have researched flights to any specific city/destination
2. Create an advertising geo-fence around any given area, so that every-time a person passes within a pre-defined threshold of that area, they can be targeted with relevant messaging
3. Utilize their existing CRM of past guests and target them virtually anywhere on the web, as well as identify “look-alike” users that have similar online behavior profiles
Because it allows hotels to efficiently buy ad space at scale and capture new audiences, many hotel marketers have increased their annual programmatic budgets by 40 percent since 2012. It has become the logical alternative to Google Paid Search advertising (CPCs), which costs continue to dramatically increase, up to $10 per click for non-branded keywords.
In 2017, programmatic advertising endured a lot of obstacles such as ad fraud (which also pre-existed with other advertising methods) and the looming 2018 GDPR Standards.
Despite the bumps, programmatic advertising remains an increasingly popular method to purchase and optimize hotel ads. The benefits are significant: including cost efficiencies, robust reporting analytics and quick turnaround time (campaigns can launch in just 24 hours!).
Here are a few pros and cons for hotel marketers to think about when considering investments in programmatic advertising:
