Should hotels “bid brand” or not? Some may say that if you have a solid organic presence there is no point to allocating budget to a brand PPC campaign. However there are some very compelling reasons why they could be loosing out significantly with this short sighted approach. A recent study by Bing reveals some very strong motivation for hotels to bid on their own brand names!
So why should hotels bid on their own brand?
REASON 1: Competition from OTA’s
You can bet that even if you are not bidding on your brand terms, OTA’s (Online Travel Agencies) are! As users plan their next holiday their searches usually start fairly wide with terms such as “hotel london” or “luxury hotel london”. At this stage they may click through to any number of hotels. They may even click through to your hotel website through one of your PPC ads. Once they have drawn up a short-list they begin scouring the review sites to see what kind of experience they will have at each property. Then when they have made up their minds they type in your brand name and if the first link they see in the search results is hotels.com you have basically wasted the click from your competitive campaign as well as lost out on a direct booking!
REASON 2: Increased Visibility
Simply put 2 is better than 1. In a search result page with only so many links, representing your brand in both the organic and paid sections pays off. In addition paid ads allow you to present your brand exactly as you wish. With complete control of the wording of your Ad and landing page you can make sure you present the best of your brand. With the addition of sitelinks to your Ad you can boost your visibility massively. As the screen-shot below demonstrates , sitelinks on your Adwords Ad and organic listing massively increase your sites visibility. Of the more than 20 links on the page, you can be sure that at least 12 of them will lead to your official website.
REASON 3: Low CPC and High CTR Keep Costs Down and ROI Up!
CPC or cost per click on your brand terms will generally be a lot lower than for the competitive terms. Your Adwords quality score for a brand term should be fairly high as the relevance from keyword through Ad to landing page could be in the 8-10 range. A brand terms CTR or click through rate should also be much higher that a competitive term with a range of 15-20%.
At the end of the day a brand campaign that uses a small section of your overall PPC budget can be a massive boost to overall ROI. Contact UP today to see how we can drive your ROI up through brand based bidding!
