Google Hotel Ads Date Picker Updates

Today we were QA’ing some new ads and noticed a little something extra pulling our attention towards the date picker in Google’s hotel search experience:

Screen Shot 2016-03-08 at 4.12.59 PM

Notice the blue bar above the hotel list, prompting users to choose their dates? This is a subtle change to the UI but it could have a very meaningful impact to advertisers due to a nuance of Hotel Ads.

The importance of default date

Default_vs_SelectedIn a post last year, our own Eric Mendes showed how frequently users engaging with Hotel Ads didn’t actually change the Check In and Check Out dates before clicking through.

Back then, we found that more than half of users didn’t change their stay date before clicking through.

On Hotel Ads, this is a bit of a double edged sword. The default date (which is set to Sunday 1-2 weeks out) is for a one night stay. CPCs for one night stays on Google tend to be very low, which helps ROI.

Clicks on default dates consistently have lower conversion rates than clicks where the user has specifically selected a date.

There’s another consideration though… non-default date clicks convert better, but they are also more expensive. This happens because Google charges more per click the longer the stay. Smart advertisers take advantage of these effects as components of their Hotel Ads strategy, so any changes here are worth watching.

It’s not just about CPC and ROI

So if Google stands to make more, and advertiser stand to sell more, why doesn’t Google force date selection for all users, instead of using more subtle UI hints like the blue prompt above?

We’ve actually seen experimentation around this before, going back at least two years. The problem with forcing date selection is that you add friction to the process, and may cause less users to click through ads. So even if there’s a CPC and ROI benefit, it has to offset the traffic volume loss to be a positive move. (Let’s give Google the benefit of the doubt and assume it also has to be good for users, too.)

What should advertisers expect?

We believe this shows a few things coming:

  1. Traffic shifts from one night stays to longer stays
    We’ve consistently found that users search for longer stays when they use the date picker. If this UI enhancement goes live for all users and gets decent adoption, advertisers will want to pay close attention to the performance on default date and non-default date segments.
  2. Searches that span further into the future
    In addition to longer stays, this could shift searches further into the future. Right now Google has a disproportionate number of searches for stays occurring in the next 14 days. Many advertisers are still not sharing inventory for more than a few weeks into the future. If they don’t make the inventory available, they will miss out on this shift in searches to competitors.
  3. The potential for higher CPCs, balanced by higher conversion rates
    If there is a shift – which will be apparent in the data – then it is worth testing and potentially rebalancing the multipliers being used in current campaigns. Advertiser should not continue to rely on legacy multipliers, or they risk losing profitable traffic.
  4. A similar experience on Mobile and Tablet
    Right now we’re not seeing this experience on Mobile and Tablet, but it’s about time for more experiments to be launched on those channels. The blue highlight is reminiscent of other UI hints used by Google, so it’s unlikely that this is the last we see of it.
  5. More UI enhancements to the hotel search experience
    With lots of other updates lately, it seems like a good bet we’re not done seeing these tweaks to the UI. More traffic coming through Hotel Ads that converts better should help fuel more channel growth this year. In fact, there’s another subtle change in the experience above… see the little arrow to the right of the rate in the Hotel Ad above? That’s new too.

…and let’s not forget it’s ITB week, so it seems likely we’ll see more updates coming.

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Google