In previous months and years, we’ve shared how Google Hotel Ads mobile traffic has gone from almost nonexistent, to fast growing, to competing with desktop. We’ve shared that for some of our clients, we’re driving more mobile bookings than desktop bookings. In meetings and QBRs, we can’t shout loud enough about how critical mobile is to creating beats on 2015 and 2016 revenue numbers.

At the risk of being redundant, we want to be perfectly clear: you can’t afford to ignore mobile.

And here’s yet another example of why this is true. Check out how refined Google’s mobile hotel search experience has become:

If you aren’t deep in the details of metasearch results the subtleties in these two screenshots may not be immediately clear, but they are definitely significant.

The first thing that jumps out to me is that the date selection process is massively improved. Date selection on mobile tends to be painful. Google’s updated mobile date selector is bigger and clearer. Once you click in and choose your specific dates, the experience is fast, smooth, and responsive. Maybe more important than all of those is that it’s forgiving. When you make a mistake, it’s really easy to correct.

Second, check out just below the dates… inline filters that totally adjust the search results based on what users want to see. It is not very obvious from the screenshot, but you can actually swipe left to access more filters. When you click them, the result set is adjusted FAST. Like app-fast. This is mobile done right!

Here’s a quick rundown of the filters:

• Cheap: in Fort Worth, shows hotels under $100
• Deals: shows only hotels that are lower priced than normal, appears to follow normal deals logic
• Within 5 mi: shows hotels only within 5 miles of the city center
• Top Rated: only hotels > 4/5 user rating, but doesn’t sort by popularity
• Luxury: not a rich set, but looks like filtered to only 4 and 5 star hotels
• More Filters: allow you to customize your result set

The More Filters option allows you to select any combination of sorting by Price Rating, Relevance, Price Range, Hotel Class, User Ratings, and Amenities including: Free Wi-Fi, Free breakfast, Free parking, Pool, Pet-friendly, Restaurant, Bar, Air-conditioned (really,) Kid-friendly, and Fitness Center. These filters also stack, so you can select multiple filters at the same time and then quickly eliminate them if needed.

Finally, note that Deals have made it to mobile. In the result above, the Hilton Fort Worth is showing a blue Deal tag because for the selected date it is 20% less than usual. Based on the differences we’re seeing in mobile, desktop, and tablet results for the same queries and date ranges, it also seems likely that Google is optimizing the search result set to the user’s device.

Are you in the race?

It’s not novel to suggest that it’s time (and has been time!) to spend an out-weighted amount of effort on your mobile experience. Our dataset and research suggests that advertisers must get their mobile figured out and working if they want to maintain channel growth in 2017.

Google’s improvements here may make for a yardstick for your own mobile experience. Is your site as fast and as smooth? Are you exposing and reinforcing data being shown higher in the funnel? Are you responding to learnings about users as they self define through their research? More tactically speaking, is your site loading quickly? Are you deep linking to a relevant point in the conversion path?

Need more inspiration? One of my favorite posts ever on the Koddi blog is Winning Mobile Bookings in Metasearch, and it is chock full of data to help you make the case and align resources toward the mobile opportunity.