Performance Max Offers Improved Reporting for Hotel Marketing Campaigns
TLDR:
Yes we’ve published another article detailing new functionality in Google’s Performance Max advertising platform.
This platform, as we’ve discussed, operates as a “black box” for marketers. We feed it audience data, creative assets, budgets, and goals — all the pieces of a marketing strategy for hotels. Performance Max then places ads and optimizes for us. We didn’t know where in Google’s universe the ads appeared, and it didn’t share information about which creative assets drove results. Now, that’s changing, with creative performance reports, recommendations, and impression share reporting.
Performance Max for Hotels: A Refresher
Google Performance Max is a marketing platform we’ve recommended for some time, despite its drawbacks. Marketers feed this AI-enabled system sets of ad copy, images, video and other creative assets. We tell it what we want to achieve (find people who will book rooms at this hotel through this booking engine), give it a budget, and define the type of audience we’re after. Google’s machine-learning backbone goes to work from there, assembling and displaying ads in Gmail, YouTube, search results, and on third-party pages around the internet. Over time, it dials in on the intent signals — like searches and browsing behavior — that suggest a potential booking. People exhibiting those behaviors are served the ads.
It’s powerful and it works. However, as marketers accustomed to reviewing performance at a very granular level, we don’t see much. The key performance indicators (KPIs) aren’t really revealed, leaving us in a position to “trust the system” and manage the budget carefully. This can be frustrating. Google must have heard this feedback thousands of times, because this is changing.
Performance Max Offers Increased Insights and Reporting
As reported in Search Engine Land, Google is making new Performance Max insights available to hotel marketers. These include a range of tools that help us develop effective marketing strategies for hotels. Creative reporting, for example, has been built into other Google tools, like search campaigns, for a while. It ranks individual assets like images, headlines, and descriptive copy with a quality score, helping marketers replace underperforming assets with new versions informed by the top performers. Impression share reporting helps us understand how we’re faring against the competition. If other hotels are bidding on the same people, we’ll know sooner if they are outbidding us and displaying more often to the same coveted customers. Pacing insights show progress against budget. Hotel marketers can review revenue vs. spend and make adjustments if results aren’t as strong as we’d like. Performance Max is starting to look more like other ad platforms, even though it distinguishes itself significantly in how it operates.
Better Insights Suggest New Marketing Strategies for Hotels
What do these Performance Max updates mean for your hotel? We believe that the new reporting and insights give us much more flexibility when it comes to testing and dialing in marketing strategies for hotels.
Once the Performance Max back-end is built for a hotel, adding and swapping assets takes a matter of minutes. While the AI targeting can take several days and even weeks to learn and hit its stride in terms of audience targeting, the relative simplicity of making these updates suggests that hotels can try a wider range of approaches for attracting guests in their ad creative. For example:
- Specific amenities and packages
- Nearby attractions
- Lifestyle creative
- Special offers
Identify these different angles and select creative assets that speak to them. Then, let Google find the appropriate targets. If they don’t result in bookings, they’ll be automatically de-prioritized and marketers will know via Google’s creative reporting.
Likewise, each of these strategies will carry your budget differently as Google finds different audiences to bid on. Hotel marketers using the impression share reporting tools can uncover different ways your budget can work as efficiently as possible.
Interested in how Performance Max can help your hotel expand its marketing strategies? Reach out to us! We’d love to discuss your specific needs and build a plan that gets the most out of your marketing budget.
In the meantime, read how we’ve used Performance Max to generate serious revenue for one hotel. Or, download our guide to the platform for a more in-depth walkthrough.