Booking.com Launches New Sponsored Ads Platform

Metasearch is Evolving

Online travel agent giant Booking.com has announced that they’re launching a new sponsored ads platform that combines inventory from Booking.com, Priceline, and Agoda all in one place. After being tested in the USA with positive results, the platform is now being rolled out across Europe and strives to increase visibility for hotels across OTAs. One of the aims is to make it easier to manage your setup and optimisation for each channel with customised targeting.

Our metasearch team is always keeping up-to-date with all the latest insights to ensure that your business is hitting every target, helping your hotel display live room rates across key metasearch engines. From managing your campaign build and communicating with connection partners, to optimising ads and monitoring performance, we can provide a metasearch solution that meets your business needs. You can find out more about our metasearch service for your hotel here.

How Do Network Sponsored Ads Work?

Booking Network Sponsored Ads offers dynamic targeting capabilities, allowing you to choose specific targeting dimensions for a single ad group, providing more value to each ad campaign. The available targeting types include:

• Multiplier: Allows you to place a percentage increase to your base bid
• Boost: Increases the bid amount on specific targeting characteristics by a set amount
• Exact Match: Allows you to define the specific audience that your ad is eligible for

Essentially, the new platform strives to allow hotels to reach people who are actively in the market for travel with dynamic targeting.

However, OTA commission must still be paid when advertising on this platform, which is a consideration which must be taken into account.

How Will Network Sponsored Ads Help My Hotel?

With the new platform comes the opportunity to reach a monthly user base of 654 million users, offering the chance for more visibility. Other benefits include displaying on top of a search in the best spot available based on your marketing spend. This means that, unless your ad is clicked on, you won’t be charged for the top position. There are three page placements available for your ad, depending on various factors such as spend.

In addition, a new user-friendly reporting option has been implemented that provides campaign performance tracking, revenue and bookings via their portal. Customisable reports can also be generated, taking the sting out of reporting and analysing your data.

Although an exciting new platform for metasearch, large chain hotels in particular should be focusing on sponsored ads for targeting international audiences.

This new network marks an important platform for metasearch as it enables a real presence on the two main global OTAs alongside Expedia and their own ‘travel ads’. However, other meta channel ROAs may be a more desirable choice to many smaller hotels as you only need to pay for bids, and not the OTA commission on top.

How We Can Help

We align our metasearch activity with your hotel’s business objectives and overall marketing strategy, we adjust our bids and budgets based on your occupancy rates, in order to maximise your advertising budget.We can deliver fantastic results with our holistic approach to metasearch, and we can help your business reach the top of valuable searches with our collaborative approach. Find out more about our metasearch and all of our other digital marketing services here.