At Koddi, we get excited about being able to gain the most granular insights into our metasearch campaigns bookings, so the more data we are given, the better we are able to optimize. One publisher, in particular, has taken this feedback and gone above and beyond in providing granular data for our clicks. Kayak recently launched an updated version of BOB (called BOB V2), and it came with incredibly precise insights into where your clicks are coming from and an increased ability to bid with multipliers on these various levers.

BOB V1

The original BOB format provided the baseline level of information surrounding your click data that you would expect. You were able to see which hotel was clicked on, and where (country) that click came from, and the device type. This allowed Kayak advertisers to set their bids at a hotel, device, and user country level. This was great but left many wanting for more. This is where Kayak’s BOB V2 came into play.

BOB V2: What’s New?

With the release of BOB V2 came a staggering increase in the amount of visibility advertisers received to where their clicks came from, as well as bidding multipliers for this new information. Outlined below are the new values that can be dynamically passed in your deep link structure to garner insightful information about which users are clicking on your advertisements, and better yet, all of these parameters can have a bid multiplier set on them to increase or decrease your CPC.

• Hotel ID (set as either a percentage of the daily rate or a fixed base CPC)
• User Country (multiplier value)
• Device Type (multiplier value)
• Days to Book (multiplier value)
• Stay Length (multiplier value)
• Saturday Stay? (multiplier value)

Days to Book

One of the more interesting additions to BOB V2 is giving insights to advertisers surrounding how far in advance your users are searching for their stay and giving advertisers the ability to set multipliers based on how far in advance the user is searching. Days to Book is an integer value that represents how many days in the future the check-in date the user was searching for is. This provides an interesting lever for advertisers to bid on. Some example use cases for this multiplier lever:

• If your analytics data indicates that users who book 60 days or more in advance have a higher likelihood of canceling their booking, you could reduce your multiplier.
• Alternatively, if you notice that users who are searching for same day bookings have a higher conversion rate, you could increase the same day booking window multiplier.
• As always, Koddi is already set and ready for ingesting BOB V2 clicks and your analytics. Leveraging 3rd party software that gives insights into where your bookings are coming from at a granular level can provide incremental bookings.

Stay Length

Length of stay is another new bidding lever that is available to advertisers in BOB V2. The length of stay lets you increase or decrease your CPC based on how many stay nights the user is searching for. Kayak requires a user to select their check in and check out date before receiving any prices for their search query, so you can feel confident that the length of stay data that you are receiving is accurate. The stay length provides an additional bidding lever that you can utilize to ensure that your meta advertisements are being shown to the users that you want. Some example use cases for this:

• If your property set has hotels that typically see longer lengths of stay, you can increase length of stay multipliers for queries that are looking at 3, 4, 5, or longer stay lengths
• Alternatively, if your property set focuses on 1 day stay lengths you can actively bid yourself up for 1 day length of stay.

Saturday Stay?

One of the unique bidding levers that was introduced with BOB V2 is the ability to have a multiplier that increases your CPC based on whether or not the search query included a Saturday night stay. This is a Boolean value that returns true if the query included a Saturday stay, and false if it did not. This is possibly the most valuable multiplier that BOB V2 offers. This allows you to tailor your CPCs for the consumers that you are looking for. Some examples of how this multiplier can be leveraged:

• If you have a property that is primarily focused on business travelers, you could reduce the “Saturday Stay True” multiplier to focus on business travelers.
• Alternatively, if you have a property that focuses on leisure travel you could increase the Saturday Stay True multiplier to help ensure you are focusing on leisure travelers

Maximum CPC

Due to Kayak being a first price auction with multipliers that layer on top of each other, one must be careful when setting bid multipliers. Fortunately for advertisers, Kayak had the foresight to include an additional column in their bid files that allows you to set a maximum CPC. The maximum CPC is set at a property level, which is ideal so that your higher average daily rate properties can have a higher CPC cap than your lower priced hotels. This maximum CPC cap ensures that the real CPC used for determining your position in the auction does not exceed the value you assign. This is a great tool to curb any surprisingly high CPCs you may encounter.

What Does This Mean for You?

BOB V2 offers advertisers additional multiplier levers to utilize and hone in on the exact users that they are searching for. Combined with the enhanced granularity you receive in your deep linking, BOB V2 is a large step in the right direction for Kayak.

While it can be difficult to keep up with changes when meta publishers overhaul their bidding structure, leveraging a third party bidding platform like Koddi ensures that you are always up-to-date with any publisher updates. If you have any questions about Kayak’s BOB V2, leave a comment for us below.