This year Google began to transition Hotel Ads to joining Google Ads. One of the first steps was the launch of the new Hotel Campaigns structure on Google Hotel Ads earlier this year. Hotel campaigns brought many changes and enhancements for metasearch. One of these enhancements is the opportunity to utilize retargeting audiences from the AdWords accounts in their meta campaigns.

What are Google Retargeting Audiences?

Retargeting Audiences (or remarketing lists) are groups of users that have visited a website and are captured by codes that have been added to that site. These lists are customizable with rules that define when a user should be added to the list and how long they should remain a part of that list.

How to Use Retargeting Audiences

With the new Google Campaigns structure, you can utilize the remarketing lists you have created in AdWords and apply them to a specific metasearch campaign. For example, if you have an audience specific to mobile visitors or app downloads, you can add that audience to your mobile metasearch campaign as well.

We have the ability to utilize up to 50 different audiences to target per campaign. Once the audiences are added to your campaign, you can assign multipliers to each individual audience to optimize their performance.

Koddi’s Level of Granularity

The Koddi platform is able to view data on an individual audience level per campaign. You can see opportunities, impressions, clicks, bookings, cost, and revenue for each audience you are utilizing on your Google metasearch campaigns. We can use this data to analyze CVRs, CTRs, and impression share to optimize the multipliers on a campaign level for each audience.

Best Practices for Launching Audiences

When launching audiences in meta campaigns for the first time, one best practice we have found is using a test and control group to get initial reads in how the audiences will react with the campaigns. Using two similar groupings of properties, you can test for 2-4 weeks to gather data on the effects the test has on your KPIs.

One client that was an early adopter of Google audiences in metasearch saw immediate success when we ran our initial tests and continued to see success when rolled out to all properties. Audiences have seen a 21% higher CTR, 61% higher CVR, at a 33% higher ROAS (over the client’s goal.)

To learn more about metasearch advertising on Google, click here to download our free guide. This guide outlines everything you need to know about this update including best practices, a case study, and tips for getting started.