We’ve been very lucky to work with lots of smart partners over the last couple of years. In that time we’ve collected a handful of best practices that any Hotel Ads advertiser can implement. The four activities below only take a few minutes to put in place, but can each have a significant impact on your campaign performance by driving lower CPCs and higher volumes.

Set a Default Bid

Because of the timeline for data matching and the complexity behind rate & availability connections, it can be difficult to know when a new property is in the system and ready to be bid. One potential downside is that you might be missing out on visibility opportunities in your portfolio. You can get around this by setting a default bid for your campaign.

Default bids can be as simple or as complex as you want. We generally recommend a conservative default bid to get properties online quickly with little risk, but one high enough that will get them some activity and visibility.

Set a Maximum Bid Cap

When we first bring on a client, one of the things we always do is look at their peak CPCs over the past few months. The highest CPC for a single click we’ve tracked was north of $150. For one click! This can happen when campaigns aren’t configured correctly and it’s a lot more common than you might think.

To set a maximum CPC, log into the PFE and set it through the Budget tab:

 

 

What should your Maximum Bid Cap be? You can easily determine this in Koddi by reviewing your performance by CPC, or you can manually review it by aggregating your performance data in Excel, grouping CPCs using a function like MROUND, creating a Pivot Table, and finding the point at which your return is no longer acceptable.

Measure Hotel List data quality

The quality of your Hotel List feed can have a huge impact on volume, because it’s impossible to show offers for unmatched properties. Data quality is a tough metric to stay on top of for a few reasons; it’s a little hidden, it’s often downstream of another automated process, and it’s often dynamic.

To check your Data Quality, check out the Matching Report:

 

 

Improving your data quality efficiently will be the subject of a future blog post, so keep an eye out. (If you subscribe below, you’ll get e-mail updates for our future posts.)

Watch and measure Price Accuracy

Maintaining a high price accuracy is extremely important in Hotel Ads because it is one of the core metrics that determine a rudimentary form of Quality Score. The higher your Price Accuracy, the lower your CPCs and the better chance you have at maximizing volume and return. You can review your Price Accuracy in the Partner Front End:

 

 

The possible Price Accuracy scores are Excellent, Good/Poor, At Risk, and Failed. Anything below Excellent can be problematic, so that should be your target. Even accounts with Good Price Accuracy scores could end up paying inflated CPCs. Volume can start dropping significantly after Poor, and a campaign risks being completely shut off below that.

Price Accuracy is measured when Google’s crawlers check your landing pages to ensure that what users see in your offer is in line with what they see on the site. These crawls happen on an ongoing basis, so it’s key to watch Price Accuracy every day. Improving here can be a challenge or a little daunting because it often involves coordinating with multiple teams, but we’ve seen it pay off many times over.