After several months of testing with select partners, Google has rolled out a beta version of its premium ad placement product and renamed it from Google Promoted Hotels to Property Promotion Ads.

What are Property Promotion Ads?

The Property Promotion Ads product introduces a new way for hoteliers to appear in the top position of a user’s hotel search results. Promotional ad listings are shown anytime a traveler submits a search for a hotel destination without specifying a specific property name (e.g. “hotel in Dallas, TX”). While metasearch is traditionally utilized to reach travelers near the bottom of the funnel, Property Promotion Ads unlocks access to users higher in the funnel, allowing advertisers to introduce their brand to an entirely new customer base.

Where Do Property Promotion Ads Appear?

On desktop searches, Property Promotion Ads listings will appear in the first two positions; while on mobile searches, those same two listings will appear staggered somewhere among the first page of results.

The examples below show results for the search, “hotel in Dallas, TX.” The desktop experience reveals two promoted ads at the top of the search results. When we entered the same search on mobile, the promoted ad for Motel 6 appeared in the fifth position and the Extended Stay America ad served in the ninth position.

How Do Property Promotions Ads Work?

Property Promotion Ads feature one important auction dynamic difference over the former Google Promoted Hotels platform. Previously, through Google Promoted Hotels, Google would determine the winner of a promoted placement auction using an advertiser’s metasearch campaign base bid and promoted hotels bid. The highest effective bid between the two would then determine which of the advertiser’s campaign budgets was spent.

In theory, this allowed advertisers a more flexible approach to promoted placement bidding, however, in practice this potentially caused confusion for advertisers who wanted to keep separate promoted placement and metasearch campaign budgets. With Property Promotion Ads, if there is a Property Promotion Ads bid set, only the advertiser’s promoted placement bid is considered in the auction, making monitoring and budgeting more straightforward.

Getting Started

The arrival of Property Promotion Ads is especially timely as hotel partners continue to search for high visibility opportunities during the COVID-19 crisis, when every booking counts. By maintaining continuous visibility through promotional placements, advertisers now have access to one of the most powerful and direct brand value-add tools ever offered through Google Hotel Search.

Koddi partnered with Google to include Property Promotion Ads functionality natively within the Koddi platform. By working with Koddi, advertisers are empowered to make bid adjustments and measure uplift and incrementality in their promoted campaigns.

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