Google aims to help hotels maximize their advertising efforts with new Performance Max for Travel Goal ads that effectively automate the ad creation process based on your existing hotel listings.
As explained by Google:
“Performance Max for Destinations creates ads in multiple formats that automatically appear across all Google channels and inventories, including Google Maps, Search, YouTube and Hotel Ads (coming later this year). During campaign setup, simply select your hotel properties on a map using our hotel selector tool. Then ads for your hotel—including creative elements like text, images, and URLs—are pre-populated in any format. You can edit any of these pre-populated assets or upload your own instead.”
The process streamlines the ad and campaign creation process and provides a series of automated prompts to create your ads. This could make it much easier to promote your hotels in all the different Google formats – that’s where your target customers are most likely searching.
Ad managers can manage their Performance Max listings in Google Ads Manager, where you have an overview of each item.
“The Insights page can help you better understand your performance, customers and business through information such as demand forecasts and search trends. For example, search term stats show you what guests are searching for when they see your ad. Performance Max for Destinations gives you access to even simpler property-level reporting and trip-specific campaign recommendations.”
According to Google, a single Performance Max for Travel Goals campaign can support up to 100 properties and pre-populate recommended images, messaging, and other creative assets for each location. The Hotels tab also allows you to measure and track campaign performance for each location.
And the process has proven effective — Google says advertisers using Performance Max get 18% more conversions, at a similar cost per action.
Entrusting your advertising budget and process to AI tools can be a little disconcerting, but these options are getting better and better to maximize performance. Meta has also reported similarly good results with its automated Advantage+ campaigns, and as machine learning systems get better at tracking and measuring user behavior, it stands to reason they’ll ultimately be better at allocating budgets and maximizing ad performance.
An experiment could definitely be worthwhile – learn more about Google’s Performance Max for travel ads here.
