For those of you that have attempted to venture into the world of pay-per-click advertising, you quickly learned how overwhelming of an experience this is, especially for someone who has zero or minimal knowledge of search engine marketing. I bet you felt like you weren’t in Kansas anymore: keyword research, CPC, and quality score – OH MY!
Luckily for you, Google has unleashed a new product that makes playing the PPC game much less daunting! AdWords Express is the easiest way to advertise on Google, takes minutes to set-up and requires very little management. Simply choose a category that is most relevant for your ad, write a short headline and description, choose a budget you feel comfortable spending monthly and VOILA! You’ve just created an advertisement for your business. From there, AdWords Express will automatically estimate the number of clicks you will get for your designated budget – remember you’re only paying for clicks!
How can hotels utilize AdWords Express?
AdWords Express will capture customers by using a technique called radius targeting. For instance, if you’re a hotel in Chicago wanting to utilize PPC to target travelers within the city, this product will be perfect for you! Customers who enter “hotel” as their search query, and are within 25km, will be shown your ad. Adwords Express will also target customers who are outside of this 25km. If a customer in Atlanta is searching for a hotel in Chicago and enters “Chicago Hotel” within Google, they will also be shown your advertisement because they used your city identifier!
How to creatively use AdWords Express:
- Advertise your hotel – people in your area are searching for you!
- The family down the street has family in town and needs to research places for accommodating them
- The local business needs meeting space to discuss their latest figures
- The local soccer club looks to host a holiday party
- A wedding planner or bride is planning an area wedding
- Advertise your hotel restaurant or spa – don’t just think about room nights!
- What if the competing hotel around the corner doesn’t have a restaurant or spa? Just because you may not get the revenue from a guest staying at your hotel, doesn’t mean you can’t capitalize on them using other services you offer.
- Capture local business employees who are looking for a great place to grab lunch or have an after work beverage.
Because AdWords Express also displays your ads on mobile devices, this is a great way to capture people at the most critical time within the purchasing process – when consumers are looking to act! By using services like AdWords, you are able to streamline your business directly to the consumer searching for you – possibly for keywords you were not able to rank for organically! Sometimes you have to pay to play.
