Pay Per Click Campaigns for hotels: the

2020: the year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the annus horribilis for the entire tourism industry.
An unprecedented public health scenario. A sudden uncertainty that triggered a collapse in bookings and a dramatic spike in cancellations, with immediate repercussions on all operators in the sector.

But also the dawn of a new trend in digital travel.

Netcomm has published a study showing that a 10-year evolutionary leap towards digital took place during the first few months of the pandemic: in fact, from January to May 2020, the number of new online consumers in Italy alone tripled with respect to 2019. According to Think with Google (Big G’s idea reservoir), these new digital habits not only require companies to adapt quickly, but also to ensure that they are always involved in the decision-making process, in order to optimise the results at the appropriate times.

Below is an in-depth analysis of the “Always On” management of online advertising campaigns by Blastness, which confirms the importance of always being involved, and the increasingly important role that Google has come to play in support of hotels.

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With purchases close to zero, many have argued that Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns targeting room sales are an unnecessary waste of budget resources. Various players in the sector, even among the largest, have therefore opted to gradually reduce their online visibility activities, to the point of discontinuing them entirely.

Blastness, on the other hand, has maintained its continuous and flexible management of PPC campaigns, even in the midst of the pandemic, and despite its variable remuneration business model based entirely on the value of the conversions generated by its advertising activities.

The cautious “Always On” approach has allowed two major objectives to be achieved since March:

• Absolute and uninterrupted visibility for official hotel websites during a time of great need, despite the extremely low conversion volumes;
• The ability of the campaigns to handle large numbers of requests with maximum performance upon the relaunch of the market, eliminating the intermediaries, and moving purchases to the official websites, with clear benefits for the hotels

This graph shows the trend in the Impression Share (percentage of impressions that the ads receive compared to the total number of impressions they could obtain) for the PPC campaigns of a Blastness client hotel (but representative of the entire client centre): it can be clearly seen how all the other advertisers (including the main OTAs) began to drastically reduce the visibility of their campaigns during the week of the first Prime Ministerial Decree aimed at containing the pandemic (late February 2020), considering them to be an unnecessary cost, to the point of discontinuing them entirely after about a month, and then gradually resuming them upon the conclusion of the first lockdown (late May 2020).

The “Always On” strategy, on the other hand, guaranteed our PPC campaigns about four months of unchallenged visibility, with an ad viewing percentage of nearly 100%, and was thus a major factor not only in terms of purchases, but also in terms of the dreaming and planning phases, which also play an important role in the customer’s journey.

Guaranteeing the continuity of the advertising operations has allowed us to:

• intercept “residual” niche markets of users, who even make purchases at unexpected times;
• fully comply with the Google Best Practices, or rather the activities recommended to achieve maximum ad efficiency, which Blastness is constantly striving to adhere to as a Google Premier Partner. In fact, the process of recovering campaign performance following a suspension is rather lengthy, and can even delay the reacquisition of full visibility by several weeks.

As can be seen, at the exact moment the users returned to the market and resumed making online purchases, the competitive advantage acquired in terms of visibility guaranteed the prompt reactivation of the direct sales channel.

The “Always On” strategy for hotels PPC campaigns (which required meticulous setups and careful compliance with all the Best Practices of online advertising) was governed by the activities of the FOX Bid Management System (BMS): a proprietary and innovative technological platform based on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms, integrated with FOX Business Intelligence data, and designed to maximise ad performance at all times, and under any circumstances.

In order to ensure the optimisation of the results, the BMS uses the dynamic budget concept to adapt the visibility of the ads to the market demand, adjusting the investments based on the search volumes, and allowing for the management of large volumes of keywords for campaigns active in all countries.

With the certainty that the tourism industry will soon be witnessing a well-deserved recovery, Blastness remains Always On.