Hotel PPC Search & Display Advertising Explained

August 15, 2019

Pay-per-click search and display advertising are both effective ways for hoteliers to market their properties to online travelers. Both highly targeted strategies, these types of digital marketing campaigns drive qualified and likely to convert travelers to your hotel website.

What’s The Difference?

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Search Advertisements

Pay-Per-Click is actually a term that can apply to both search and display advertisements, depending on the way a display campaign is set up.

Pay-per-click (PPC) search ads are non-organic text search results that appear above and below organic search results on search engines such as Google and Bing. Each time a paid ad is clicked on, a small fee is paid to the search engine.

Hotel marketers bid on specific search phrases and keywords relevant to their property in an auction-like fashion. Bids are set at the max amount you’re willing to pay per ad click. Once a visitor arrives to the property’s site or a designated landing page, an amount no more than your maximum bid is charged to your hotel’s ad account.

In addition to having an optimized SEO strategy, pay-per-click search advertising allows your property to rank higher and appear more often on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) – keeping your competitors further down the page.

Display Advertisements

Unlike pay-per-click search text ads, display advertising typically relies more on graphic elements to communicate a property’s message. Display ads incorporate pictures, logos, text, and animations to create banners. Banners are graphics positioned on a website or within emails that come in a variety of more than 20 sizes.

These banners shown across the Google Display Network (GDN), which includes websites within the GDN, Gmail, mobile apps and more. Like search ads, display ads can be paid for on a pay-per-click basis; however, Google has also recently introduced the ability to pay for display ads on a Pay for Conversions model, where you’ll only pay when your click leads to a conversion.

Which One Is Better?

Although running a combination of PPC search and display ad campaigns can improve the quality and quantity of traffic to a property’s website, the two types of ads provide different types of marketing. Neither can really be considered better than the other; rather, the determination of which to use should be made based on the client’s goals.

Since the cost of PPC search campaigns is determined by how many clicks an ad receives, they can be more expensive than display ad campaigns. However, PPC search ads are being shown on search engines where advertising real estate is far less and therefore more valuable than the real estate available across other websites for display campaigns. PPC search campaigns also typically bring in more motivated traffic than display ads, meaning these guests have more intention of converting.

On the other hand, display ads have stronger impression potential. Even if your display ad is not clicked on, it is still displayed graphically which can boost brand recognition and awareness. Hotel marketers can also run remarketing campaigns with display ads to continue marketing to guests who have engaged with their website previously across other websites and social networks. Display ads are great for a hotel property that is looking to increase brand awareness whereas PPC search campaigns are beneficial to properties more focused on selling something specific.