Have you ever faced a situation where your hotel has received different metrics on conversions for the same period? For instance, your ad agency claims they have generated 200 room nights for you and your internal team working on SEO says you have done 150 room nights. However, your business has done 300 room nights in total. So which of these numbers hold true?

Consider a scenario where your hotel is based out of New York City. You advertise your hotel on a billboard outside John F. Kennedy International Airport. Potential guests may see that billboard and immediately book a room at your hotel, or they might do nothing at that moment and make a reservation in a couple of days. The intriguing question here is: Did the billboard help in converting those customers? The answer is yes!

Hotel e-commerce works in a similar way. A potential guest may visit your website directly. The same guest may also use other channels to visit your website before actually making a booking. For instance, your customer might visit your website via Google Ads. A couple of days later he/she might do an organic search (type in your hotel’s name on Google) and reach your website. They may further browse reviews on social media before finally making a booking. In this case, all three channels were important in converting your visitor into a customer.

The concern that arises here is that of attribution. Should hotels consider a last-click attribution model or should they look at it from a multi-touch attribution standpoint?

Last-click attribution gauges the point of contact when a customer last clicked or engaged to make a booking, giving that touchpoint 100% credit for the conversion. In the example above, if social media is indeed credited for the conversion, then it does not provide an accurate picture of what motivated the customer to visit the hotel’s social media handle in the first place. This gives a limited understanding of consumer behaviour. A standard marketing funnel consists of the following stages: awareness, interest, desire and action. By measuring only the last clicks, we focus only on action while ignoring the remaining stages.

Now, if your hotel has a Google Ads account and runs paid campaigns, Google Ads helps you analyse customer behaviour better by providing you with an attribution duration (time decay). It provides more attribution to ad interactions that happened closer to the time of conversion. Attribution is distributed using a 7-day half-life, which can be customised further to a fortnight, a month, etc., depending on your goals. What this means is that an ad interaction 8 days prior to a conversion gets half as much credit as an ad interaction 1 day before a conversion. These dashboards are represented in a multi-channel conversion visualizer which ultimately helps you understand your customer behaviour better.
 

The Simplotel Advantage

At Simplotel, we help hotels optimise their Google Ads. We also run effective Google Ads campaigns and ensure optimal spending to maximise your conversions and ROI. Get in touch with us to learn more!