Hotel Metasearch Engine Marketing
Metasearch is a hot trend in hotels digital marketing and their popularity is growing on continuously. Metasearch engines are winning the market shares from traditional online travel agencies such as Booking.com and Hotels.com. According to the data this trend is not going to change. If you want to invest your marketing budget smartly it's a good idea to consider metasearch marketing.
What is a metasearch engine?
A metasearch engine is a search tool that sends user requests to several other search engines and aggregates the results into a single list. For a traveller, this might mean they’ll be shown a list of websites to compare hotel prices, availability and terms in real-time. A traveller can decide the best option to complete the reservation without the need to visit each site individually.
Why is meta searches important for hotels
Metasearch engines represent a huge opportunity for hotels – the easier travelers can find and book your hotel the better – but also a challenge. In a way, metasearch combines the digital marketing and distribution efforts of a hotel. Metasearch presents a booking channel and an environment to advertise your hotel. This is part of the advantage, since potential guests can discover and book you almost simultaneously, meaning there’s a bigger chance of impulse purchases and less chance of abandoned bookings. Given its popularity among travelers thanks to a comparative rate model, hotels should seriously consider investing some marketing budget in a metasearch engine, or look for ways to optimize their visibility and efficiency if they’re already engaging in this area. There are a few major players in the metasearch world and not all of them use exactly the same model, so it’s important you have a clear understanding of what is the best for your hotel or hotelchain.
Here are some essential things your hotel needs to know about this metasearch:
- Metasearch is growing strongly, dominating over traditional ads.
- There are a handful of key metasearch engines, such as Google Hotels, TripAdvisor, Trivago and Kayak. It’s recommended to focus on the key metasearch engines in the beginning.
- Sites like TripAdvisor can offer instant booking, meaning the traveler can stay on the same screen to complete their booking, providing a simpler and more seamless experience. Google used to have this option as well but Book on Google was closed recently.
- Metasearch advertising is largely based on a pay-per-click model, meaning the hotel will only pay for their advertisement when someone clicks on it. CPA model is nowadays getting more and more popular. In CPA-model Hotel’s only pay for the completed reservation. (CPA= Cost Per Acquisition).
- Some models include pay-per-impression, which are based around charging a predetermined fee for a certain amount of impressions.
- Metasearch creates interesting opportunities for hotels because it gives them better chances to compete against OTA’s and secure more direct bookings.
- Metasearch is a trending market, with smaller sites being bought by larger ones to create more marketing power. Besides the big metasearch engines, there are a lot of smaller ones that can work really well on some specific regions such as WeGo on Asian market.
- It’s important to use the right tools, like CRS’s, PMS’s, Booking Engines, and Channel Managers. This is because updating prices, terms and availability on each metasearch engine manually becomes too complicated and too much time taking.
- Metasearch marketing without the working booking engine is not recommended<
Advertising on meta search engines
Besides just relying on organic visibility, It is also possible to advertise on metasearch engines. For example, a hotel may bid on ' ‘Hotel New York’’ to show up as a top result everytime that keyword is searched. This search term triggers automatically Google to open their Hotel platform search result page.
As in any PPC - advertising in metasearch engine advertising hotels need to make sure the fee they’re paying for a click is worth the revenue the ad drives. Another factor is that if a keyword is very popular, a hotel would have to bid higher to secure the top placement, which might be risky. The key is to find balance. An experienced campaign manager can give an estimation of the recommended budget for the campaign management.
Higher conversion rates with meta search marketing
Also according to many case studies, conversion rates in metasearch engines are higher than in normal PPC-advertising. According to Google's reference with La Quinta Google says that their conversion rates have doubled With Mobile Hotel Ads. This makes sense because travelers who click the advertisement on the metasearch engine platform have much more information about your hotel before they click the advertisement compared to the normal Google Search Ads.
Traditional Google search ad.
Metasearch engine ad.
