An independant hotel bids on an expensive key word

We all know how expensive PPC campaigns could be on search engines, knowing that the travel industry is one of the biggest advertising revenue generator for Google or Yahoo.

An independant hotel - the Fenbridge Hotel in Gatwick Airport - has decided to bid on the simple word "hotels" on Google. I can't imagine how much this is going to cost him. Also why would you click on the link? If people just type "hotels" on search engines, they probably want to find more than one hotel.

I remember that the cost per click on "hotels" is around £1.5 these days . Ouch !!!

Comments

[Sante]

The reason why the "travel industry is one of the biggest advertising revenue generator for Google or Yahoo" is due to a very loose and poor quality job that is done on PPC campaigns - I see it time and time again.

Home made campaigns suffer from bad setup and keyword management: I like to say that a keyword is a state of mind, a world of personal needs and expectations and you need to be there with the right offer at the right time otherwise you're simply throwing money out of the window.

Another issue is with web agencies managing PPC campaigns.

I have recently tapped into such a campaign offering villas and the song remained the same: a mess.

This is one of the reasons why people are spending so much with diminishing returns.

Setting up a well thought out PPC campaign is a great effort, not many are willing to put in all the hours required ...

[mgmgrand]

Very often the keywords are going to bring lots of traffic turn out to be very expensive as the competitor is also bidding on those terms. It is often a good idea to avoid the popular terms and stick to the cheap 'long tail' terms. I agree, in the case of "hotels", that itself an expensive keyword.

[mgmgrand]

Hotel Website Segments -Business or Pleasure in the Hotel Business Review,at an aggregate level, leisure travelers come out narrowly on top in the realm of online customer satisfaction, but business travelers show evidence of stronger booking and task completion metrics. The article will detail which areas of the website pose the greatest challenges to maintaining customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ROI among these two segments.

Hotel, Reservations, rooms
booking, stay, room accomadation

[Mikey]

It’s unfortunate that small business don’t understand the subtle and fickle nature of PPC. One can really suffer if they don’t understand how to target a phrase. "travel industry is one of the biggest advertising revenue generator for Google or Yahoo" could partly be due to the fact of wayward campaigns but I also think it is the nature of the beast. Hotels have to advertise online. Everyone plans/books/prepares trips online and a hotel NEEDS to be at that right place at that right time (the right state of mind have you). Although I must say, I couldn’t even fathom how much money they went through… that is if anyone clicked on the ad.

[Martin Rusteberg]

It actually all makes sense... Google Adwords offers a feature called targeting by location (https://adwords.google.com/select/targeting.html) through which you can address people searching for a hotel.

In regards to the cost - is not going to be as high as imagined as the CPC is determined by factors such as site quality, CTR (and this will count only for the term based on the location!), bid and many more.

Try it for yourself - there's some smart e-marketers out there that take advantage of it!