To answer your questions:

1. PPC campaigns for hotels cannot always be evaluated based on booking revenue due to a lot of issues.( private browsing,primitive booking engines etc.)

2. To optimize these campaigns you start looking at factors like your cost per click, click through rate and the time on site from PPC visitors. Hotels pose a major challenge when it comes to campaign optimization due to lack of data. Experience of who you work with is what makes all the difference.

3. Smaller boutique hotels have a lot of opportunity when going up against the big guys in PPC as they can outsmart the competition in conversions and performance. With PPC you do need a certain base $ amount to compete in your market. Once you are in the game, the bigger guys usually are the ones making the most mistakes. Smaller independent hotels can creative and be the David to the Goliath in the market.

Please let me know if you have specific questions and subscribe to our blog.

Thanks.

Vikram
vikram@evisionworldwide.com

If you aren’t using booking revenue as the way of evaluating and testing success, how do you optimize campaigns? Just click through rates? Particularly for terms like “atlantic city hotels” where you are bidding against Donald Trump’s pocket book – it can quickly break the bank for a smaller boutique hotel…conventional wisdom is to target the less expensive, longer tail terms first. Is that different here?

Just doing my best to understand this way of looking at hotel PPC. Thanks again.