PPC marketing is one of the most efficient, most rewarding methods of promoting products and services. According to stats, 35% of businesses use PPC to generate leads.
Yet, many hotels get caught up in the hype of PPC advertising without realizing they can invest huge sums and still not get the results they expect.
If you are having a hard time unlocking the true potential of your PPC campaigns, make sure to avoid these three mistakes.
CPL is Dragging You Around
A great deal of PPC managers believes CPL is an indicator of their PPC campaigns’ success. CPL can give you an insight into the results your campaigns are scoring. However, it’s still just a vanity metric or a campaign health marker at best. Excellent CPL doesn’t equal a profitable campaign.
Focus on the profitability of your hotel’s campaigns. Take a look at search terms that drive the most revenue, ad copy that generates the greatest ROI, as well as the keywords with the lowest CPS (cost-per-sale). Eventually, you will discover that some of your reportedly successful campaigns have two times higher CPL than other campaigns, which is where you want to invest some effort.
Low-quality leads won’t turn into loyal customers. Thus, develop a strategy on how to improve your keywords, bids, and budget, and you will see your leads going down, but profitability going up dramatically.
Bidding on Plenty of Extra Keywords
Out of all the keywords you are bidding on, only 12% generate sales. What happens with 88% of extra, non-performing keywords? These could waste 61% of your budget.
The main reason for the low performance of 88% of keywords is that you are using the default match type – broad match. You want to define which keywords and search terms are draining your budget.
Go to your AdWords account, click the Keyword tab, then move on to the Search terms. Here, create a filter for conversions. It depends on you how many conversions you are expecting from your keywords, but we would suggest typing in ˂1 to the filter.
You will get a report with poor-performing keywords, so you can exclude them from your bidding strategy. Even though your overall traffic will drop, you will get more quality leads that will convert. Low-quality traffic never converts, so narrowing down keywords you are bidding on to quality ones will bring you higher conversion rates and higher revenue.
Your Ads Are Easy to Forget, Spammy, or Irrelevant
Opting for PPC ads that sound indistinguishable, “me too” type won’t get you the desired results. Of course, PPC ads from one industry are competing for the same search intent. Still, boring ads won’t make your hotel stand out and get the attention you need.
You want outstanding, emotional, engaging ad copy that will intrigue your target audience. Keep the emphasis on the solution of their problem or a query. People assume companies that understand their problems and evoke their emotions can help them.
Writing better ads will help you increase your impression share and reduce the CPC in the long run. In other words, featuring interesting and engaging ads will increase your conversions and cut down cost per conversion.
Summary
The more you play it, the more complicated the PPC game becomes. In any case, you should adjust and improve your hotel’s campaigns, manage keywords, and implement updates if you want to generate targeted traffic.
PPC advertising is fairly time-consuming, but you can convert the average hotel campaign from poorly performing into well-paying ones if you avoid the above-discussed mistakes.
The State of Pay-Per-Click 2019 [Infographic]
Credit: Serpwatch
Related article: How to Boost Meeting Room Bookings at Your Hotel with SEO
If you’re looking for assistance with your digital transformation and content marketing you need a digital marketing coach! Are Morch offers socialized digital marketing services to help hotels acquire more customers and reach their customer service goals.
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About Are Morch
Hi, I am Are Morch. Your Digital Marketing Coach and Customer Experience Expert help hotels create unique and unexpected experiences by freeing up resources to focus on new ideas through value innovation and a growth mindset.
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