As metasearch marketers say goodbye to 2017 and prepare for 2018, one question on everyone’s mind is, “What is new in metasearch for 2018?” One answer to that question is Bing Hotel Ads!

In 2017, Bing rolled out a controlled beta test of their new Hotel Ads offering to select advertisers. With the start of the new year, Bing is gearing up to bring this beta test into a general release. This is a big change in the marketplace giving customers more booking options when booking a hotel through Bing.com and giving advertisers a new metasearch channel to directly display ads to Bing customers.

We are happy to announce that we have been working closely with Bing through the beta phase and have now launched full support for Bing Hotel Ads through Koddi. All Koddi advertisers will have access to Bing Hotel Ads through Koddi upon the product release from Bing.

What will Bing Hotel Ads look like?

A sample of Bing’s new Hotel Ads experience is below. Some key features of Bing’s product include:

• Options to sort search results by “Best Match”, “Price”, and “Rating”
• Hotel cards with multiple feature images
• A TripAdvisor integration that clearly displays number of reviews and TripAdvisor ranking to the user
• An interactive map fueled by Bing Maps that allows users to refine and customize their search

What does this mean for advertisers?

The launch of Bing Hotel Ads means that advertisers have a new metasearch channel to directly interact with potential customers. Creating and managing an efficient campaign will require excellence in the key areas that come together to form what we call the revenue equation. We describe it as:

Revenue = f(Demand, Core Data, Distribution, Optimization)

Demand

Think of demand at the hotel level as the total potential volume for a hotel or set of hotels. Bing Hotel Ads has the potential to bring a new set of customers into the digital marketing strategy for an advertiser that has not been directly advertising on Bing before. As metasearch grows, finding new and growing groups of customers is an important part of maintaining a healthy portfolio.
Demand is also heavily influenced by hotel information like customer reviews. Bing Hotel Ads have a unique value proposition for customers because they have integrated customer reviews in a few, very visible ways on the hotel card and through the sorting options. This means to be successful, it will be crucial that hotels have plenty of positive reviews.

Core Data

As with all metasearch channels, advertisers will need to provide hotel information to Bing to be able to match their hotels correctly to the hotel listing and participate in the auction. The more complete and accurate the hotel information, the easier and faster the matching process can occur.
With the launch of a new product, there are likely to be many advertisers getting started at once. The advertisers that are able to supply excellent core data can potentially have an advantage of being able to match more hotels quickly. This efficiency can result in a first-mover advantage of a longer period of time participating in the auction while other advertisers work through the matching process.

Distribution

The impact that distribution has on your total metasearch revenue is determined by two sets of factors: accuracy and speed. Accuracy is affected by how well rate, availability, and room data match up to the data source and the overall completeness of data. Speed is the amount of time it takes for the metasearch engine to consume and reflect the data from its source.
Updating distribution of rates to a new publisher can take some additional technical resources and time to set up properly. As with core data, the advertisers that are able to accomplish the distribution of rates in a timely manner will have a potential advantage over others. The ongoing accuracy and speed of distribution will be the key to an ongoing successful campaign.

Optimization

The final element is also the one that responds the most dramatically and immediately to change and effort. Optimization represents all of the activities that go into the day-to-day management of a campaign. This can include bidding, reporting, analysis, and testing.

Bing Hotels will be launching as a pay-per-click (CPC) campaign with a flexible account structure in which hotels can be organized into hotel groups, sub-accounts, and accounts. The diagram from Bing below displays what the account structures will look like.

In addition to campaign organization, advertisers will be able to leverage a variety of dimensions from Bing to optimize their campaign including device type, stay length, and day of the week.

Koddi & Bing: A Winning Combination

At Koddi, we are passionate about collaborating with our partners in the metasearch space. We have been working closely with Bing on their product development and integrating with their new product.

We are excited to continue our partnership as the Bing Hotel Ads product launches and grows and work closely with our advertisers to navigate this new landscape. Reach out to your Koddi account manager to learn more and subscribe to our blog for more updates about exciting new things happening in metasearch!