If you’re looking for ways to increase direct bookings for your hotel, you should consider metasearch advertising. You would increase your online visibility and sell many more rooms, not to mention, empower your online hotel software.
Read on to find out more about metasearch advertising and its benefits to hoteliers, before exploring the top metasearch engines you should connect to your hotel booking software.
3 Essential Things to Know About Metasearch Ads
Before paying for metasearch ads, you need to know what they are and how they work.
Metasearch and Metasearch Advertising Are Two Different Things
Creating an account on a metasearch platform doesn’t enable you to sell as you do on various OTAs. But paying for metasearch ads on metasearch platforms allows you to display your booking engine or official hotel website along with other OTAs.
This still doesn’t mean direct booking, but rather a visibility boost that will lead to more direct bookings.
Metasearch Ads Make Online Booking Seamless
Metasearch platforms enable people to compare various hotels and their prices in a single centralized place. Instead of searching through different OTAs, all they need to do is visit a metasearch site.
Therefore, when you place your ads there, you essentially make online booking seamless for all the visitors. Whenever someone clicks on your ad, the metasearch engine will instantly direct them to your website or booking engine.
Some Metasearch Engines Enable Instant Booking
Google Hotel Ads and TripAdvisor enable visitors to book a room without ever leaving the site. This is even more convenient for users, which is another reason why you should harness the power of metasearch advertising.
3 Crucial Benefits of Metasearch Advertising
If this brief of how metasearch advertising works wasn’t enough to convince you to start using it, here are the top benefits that certainly will.
Increased Visibility
It’s obvious that better online visibility will drive more traffic to your website. Metasearch engines give you that visibility boost, especially when you pay for the ads. If you don’t pay them to advertise your hotel, they won’t display your direct booking rates.
Google Hotel Ads goes even further, as it displays hotels based on relevancy, depending on the filters and requirements of users. This means higher conversion rates and ROI for you.
Reduced Costs and Higher ROI
A metasearch advertising campaign would cost you less and bring you more ROI. To display your booking rates on OTAs, you need to pay from 15% to 30% for commissions. Metasearch engines operate on a CPC (cost-per-click) or CPA (cost-per-acquisition) model, which means lower commissions and higher ROI.
Connecting your hotel booking management system to metasearch engines will help you increase your conversion rates even more. You’ll be able to monitor your key performance metrics and maintain price integrity across every platform you use.
Directly Receiving Your Hotel Guest Data
When your hotel guests use metasearch channels to book a stay at your hotel directly, you instantly receive all their data, such as names, email addresses, and more if they book through your brand site.
You then own that data and can immediately use it to provide excellent experiences before, during, and after their stay, encouraging return bookings.
3 Best Metasearch Platforms for Hoteliers
There are many metasearch platforms for displaying your ads, but these are among the top you should use.
Google Hotel Ads
As you now know, Google Hotel Ads allows instant booking. It operates on both a CPC and CPA model. It would help if you used the CPC model first so that you can build up your ranking. Once you get an optimal ranking, switch to the CPA model, so that you pay a commission only when someone books a room at your hotel.
Google charges commissions that vary between 10% and 15%.
TripAdvisor
TripAdvisor also operates the same way, offering two different advertising models: TripAdvisor TripConnect CPC and TripAdvisor CPA. To display your ads there, you would need to pay a commission of 12% to 15% per booking, while you’ll get a 25% to 50% visibility in the listing.
Trivago
The Trivago service doesn’t offer instant booking but can also shorten the way to a direct booking. It works on a CPC-advertising model only, which means there’s no fixed commission. You pay for every click, but you get an additional visibility boost that leads to better conversions and ROI.
Using metasearch advertising is a surefire and a very cost-effective way to supercharge your direct bookings and grow your business. But to make the most of it and improve the booking experience, you should utilize hotel booking management software.
Mycloud Hospitality is a hotel booking management system that can help you get more direct bookings, lower your costs, maximize your revenue, manage social media and reputation, and ultimately delight your guests. Request a free demo today to see how it fits your needs.
About The Author
Deepak Chauhan
Deepak Chauhan is responsible for marketing and positioning of “mycloud” platform and is a veteran in the hotel software industry with over 25 years’ experience giving him a strong understanding of the product requirements in the industry. He has very rare mix of working in operations of various hotels and chains for over 10 years and then co-founding a software product and service company, servicing 5 star hotels and chains for 14 years.
Deepak has led the development and marketing of cloud based hospitality systems to meet the specific, business objectives of small and mid-size properties across the globe and has worked closely with a diverse group of hoteliers and hotel technology vendors.
