We’ve seen a lot of interesting developments throughout November that will no doubt impact your property, especially with Priceline announcing changes to both their PPC and metasearch strategies which may affect hotels. Avvio’s Digital team will be closely monitoring this.
Here are my top picks of stories that are relevant to you. Enjoy!
Users in an unspecified five countries will have access to the service.
The change comes after a decision made earlier this year to "completely rewrite our hotel stack", says Oliver Heckmann, Vice President of Shopping and Travel at Google.
The change will include a ramping up of the platform's capability in terms of speed but it will also feature a new user interface.
What is very significant is that Google is also planning on moving its Hotel Ads service into AdWords, with a full launch anticipated in early-2018. This is one area we will need to watch closely as it will potentially drive the Meta channel but may have impacts on the hotel’s direct bookings, depending on the way this is implemented.
There is very little information available on this currently, but we will be sure to advise as soon as we know more.
For more information:
Priceline spent $3.5 billion on Google AdWords and hotel listings on TripAdvisor and Trivago in 2016 and are ultimately trying to define if it really helps or hurt in attaining a key goal: getting more direct traffic and one-to-one relationships with customers.
TripAdvisor has seen some admittedly lacklustre results in advertising its hotel booking product, seeing a reduction in hotel revenue even as its non-hotel revenue picks up.
Expedia-owned Trivago also announced this year that it would reverse course in advertising strategy after having to revise downward its 2017 revenue forecast. The company had for years prioritised a heavy-hitting TV advertising budget over digital advertising.
It is hard to imagine Booking.com changing some of its strategies such as bidding on hotel names/brands due to the strong conversion rates achieved with those. It may affect more of the general searches around locations like ‘London Hotels’ and ‘Dublin Hotels’ which ultimately cost a lot to advertisers.
The positive could be a potential reduction in average cost per clicks for hotels on both branded and generic campaigns in both Google and Bing.
Avvio will use Auction Insights Reports to monitor any changes here on both brand and generic over the coming months to better analyse this change and the consequences for hotels.
For more information:
In an interesting development for hotels Trivago and TripAdvisor (see story), are paying the price for putting all their eggs in a single basket with Priceline and Expedia cutting back on their metasearch spend. This is having an immediate impact on the metasearch bottom line, forcing Trivago in particular to reassess its business model.
Priceline has spent a lot of money on Trivago over the last two years, effectively funding a competitor in search channels and it makes sense to try to reset that auction.
Lloyd Walmsley, Director Deustche Bank Securities at the recent Phocuswright conference has come out to say the decline in metasearch advertising by the OTAs may be cyclical. “After a few quarters it wouldn’t surprise to see the OTAs come back aggressively into Meta. Ultimately they want to grow and scale and that requires growing traffic. They can come in with a reset auction and come out better after taking a pause.”
Trivago’s share price has more than halved over the past three months while TripAdvisor stock is down 30% over the same period.
This is one to watch and ultimately should benefit hotels in the metasearch auctions.
For more information visit:
traveltrends.biz/ttn555-hotel-metasearch-under-pressure-as-otas-pull-back-switch-tack/
In mid-November, Twitter officially rolled out this change to all languages “where cramming was an issue.” This includes all languages except Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, which will continue to have 140 characters.
For more information visit:
The key reasons are:
There is no doubt that when clients start investing in PPC or significantly increase their budget that it has an increase on other channel segment volumes for areas like SEO and Direct. That is why PPC results shouldn’t be judged in isolation and should form part of a bigger picture to boost overall traffic. Another good reason to boost your PPC spend or move to the CPA model for 2018!
For more information visit:
From this month, Snapchatters in Ireland can create and purchase geofilters straight from the Snapchat app on their phone. If Snapchat is suitable for your target audience, speak to your Digital Strategy Manager for more details.
For information on how to use this for in your property, visit:
