- Optimize Your SEM Campaigns on a Regular Basis:
Changes may occur in the hotel's marketing strategy throughout the course of the year, so it is necessary to periodically evaluate whether your SEM campaigns are consistent with the property's current marketing objectives. Important elements to consider are:
- a. Leisure travelers versus business travelers
- b. Weekend stays versus weekday stays
- c. Specials/promotions
- d. Average length of stay
- e. Shift in the Average Daily Rate (ADR)
If there are changes in the overall marketing strategy, the SEM campaigns must reflect those marketing shifts. Campaigns, keywords, and ad copy need to be updated to reflect the evolution of the property's marketing endeavors.
- Audit Your Feeder Markets:
As the economy grows and changes over time, new feeder markets may develop for individual properties, and old feeder markets may wane in importance to your property. It will be vital to perform a Feeder Market Audit to evaluate if the geographic markets that are being targeted by the SEM campaigns are consistent with the traffic of the overall websites. If there are any discrepancies, the SEM campaigns' geographic settings must be altered to best take advantage of the shift in the markets that are converting for your site.
- Perform a Budget/Impression Share Audit:
As marketing efforts increase the amount of traffic to your website, it will be necessary to evaluate if your current budget is large enough to capture a competitive portion of the impression share. In order to continue to bring new users to the website, budgets must accommodate the organic year-over-year increase in the cost per click (CPC) in the bidding module, as the SEM world becomes more competitive. You must evaluate how much your SEM budget should be increased to maintain a comparable or larger impression share than you held the previous year.
- Get International Exposure:
As the global economy continues to grow, it will be important for hotels to explore potential new markets to expand their business. Setting up international SEM campaigns can be tricky, but there is usually less competition in foreign markets, which will decrease the cost per booking. Targeting English speaking foreign countries like Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia can make the setup and testing process fairly simple. Marketing messages can be tailored to attract inbound non-American English-speaking travelers with specials and promotions to help offset the lower conversion rate associated with long-distance travelers.
Non-English-speaking markets can be much more complicated. Not only does the ad copy and keyword list need to be translated and transposed to accommodate for the nuances of each language (e.g. Mexican Spanish vs. Argentinian Spanish), but the landing pages must be in that language in order for SEM to be an effective marketing tool. It is very important to research the foreign markets that could potentially generate inbound traffic to your destination and your hotel in order to capture the most qualified traffic.
Non-English-speaking markets can be much more complicated. Not only does the ad copy and keyword list need to be translated and transposed to accommodate for the nuances of each language (e.g. Mexican Spanish vs. Argentinian Spanish), but the landing pages must be in that language in order for SEM to be an effective marketing tool. It is very important to research the foreign markets that could potentially generate inbound traffic to your destination and your hotel in order to capture the most qualified traffic.
- Launch SEM Tablet Campaigns:
The exploding usage of tablets like the iPad has created a completely new "tablet" category, which needs to be treated differently and marketed to separately from desktop and mobile devices. Tablet searches represent a hybrid between a mobile search experience and a desktop user website. Until 2011, tablet searches were indistinguishable from Mobile searches, but in 2012, Google bestowed the ability to market to tablet searches separately. This allows advertisers to better optimize their results since mobile campaigns and tablet campaigns can have vastly different user experiences and expectations. Example: Mobile searches typically land on the mobile website, while tablet searches end up on the property's desktop website or a specially optimized tablet site. By creating separate campaigns, you will be able to better optimize results for mobile and tablet campaigns.
- Tailor SEM Ad Text According to Device:
Since search is being divided into different categories (Desktop, Mobile & Tablet), it will be important to write the ad copy with the targeted device in mind. A smart phone user will be more likely to interact with an ad that recognizes the type of device that the user is employing (e.g. iPhone vs. Android) and promises a continuation of that experience. For example, someone using a smart phone is more likely to click on your ad if the ad explicitly denotes it will take the user to a mobile smart phone page rather than a full desktop site, which is less usable on a mobile browser.
- Add Google+ Extension:
Google+ has recently been extended beyond individual registrations to business pages. These Google+ Business Pages will allow you to build a following similar to Facebook on the Google network for your hotel. You are now able to connect your Google+ Business Page for your property to your Adwords account. Anyone who +1's the site, the Google+ Business Page, or the ad will appear listed as an extension in the ad along with the total number of +1's the account has received. This free new feature could potentially give your ads an advantage over those of your competitors.
- Use Google Phone Tracking:
Google now includes call metrics in its Ad Rank calculations. Advertisers will now be able to choose a bid-per-call option that allows them to bid for phone calls (in addition to clicks) when they create Google search ads for computers and tablets. The click-to-call feature assigns a unique phone number to businesses to make call tracking possible. Google has already connected more than 12 million calls for thousands of businesses. The bid and the call volume will factor into an advertiser's Ad Rank and will impact the position of the online ads. Google has found many businesses value phone calls highly and treat them as leads. The idea behind this new addition to the equation: If an advertiser gets a high volume of phone calls and they bid for the calls, those calls will improve their ad rank and quality score. In this way, advertisers can now tie an offline action to an online advertising search through Google.
- Perform a SEM Conversion Funnel Analysis:
In 2012, analyzing the four-step path from impressions to conversion will become instrumental in the SEM optimization effort. By adding click-to-booking initiated rate and booking initiated-to-booking rate, in addition to the click through rate and conversion rate, you will get a better understanding of the complete booking process, and where your SEM campaigns and landing pages need improvement.
- Implement Ongoing SEM vs. Total Website Analysis:
Comparing the SEM conversion funnel to the Total Website conversion funnel is an interesting way to analyze how effective marketing campaigns are at converting traffic. This will allow you to compare the performance of the SEM campaigns versus the overall website while taking into account extraneous factors such as seasonality and revenue per booking. This analysis will help explain fluctuations due to seasonality, and allow you to adjust budget allocations accordingly to take advantage of low and high seasons throughout the course of the year and make the best use of your marketing funds.
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