Google has announced the rollout of Performance Max for travel goals, a digital advertising campaign for hotel advertisers. The new tool, powered by Google’s AI, aims to help hotels expand their reach and increase bookings across Google.
The new campaign, which will be available worldwide in the next few weeks, taps into the surging demand for travel and enables hotels to create advertisements in multiple formats and reach more travelers through a single campaign across YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps.
“Travelers are crossing destinations off their bucket lists again, with searches for ‘book a flight’ growing more than 70% in 2022. They’re also spending more time researching in advance: 40% of leisure travelers say they now invest more time and effort planning trips than before the pandemic,” said Michael Trauttmansdorff, director of product management, Travel Ads. “Hotel owners need easy ways to stand out and connect with people looking up their options across Google.”
Hotel advertisements will be added to Performance Max later this year.
HOW IT WORKS
Advertisers will select their properties from a map using Google’s hotel picker tool during campaign setup. It will pre-populate hotel ads across all formats, including creative elements like images, copy and URLs. Advertisers will be able to edit the pre-populated assets as well as upload their own.
The Insights page will give advertisers a clear understanding of their performance, customers and business via information like demand forecasts and search trends. Advertisers will have access to more streamlined property-level reporting along with travel-specific campaign recommendations.
A single campaign can support up to 100 hotels with different locations, messages and images. It also shares and measures the campaign performance for each location in the hotel’s tab.
According to Google, Bangkok-based Minor Hotels used Performance Max for travel goals to accelerate its campaign creation process and grow its reach on Google. The hotel group received budget optimization recommendations per property, enabling it to cut down on cost per acquisition by 51%, increase its return on ad spend by 76% and increase bookings by 86%.
Performance Max for travel goals will separately track and share campaign performances for each location, helping hotels understand what is working. Advertisers can also view traffic by hotel property for a comprehensive understanding of demand across different locations.
Advertisers using Performance Max reported over 18% more conversions at a similar cost per action. Citing the example of Greece’s Corissia Hotels & Resort, Google said the company used Performance Max for travel goals to grow its distribution channels and reach more prospective guests. Within a month of using the new feature, its campaigns yielded a 32% increase in revenue and a 26% increase in total direct bookings.