Skift hold

Imagine converting a roadside billboard that you stick up once a season into an electronic display with real-time prices and images. This is how to think about Google Enhanced Search Ads.

Sean O’Neill

Google has long allowed hotels to buy ads at the top of its search results. Yet these paid listings only share generic, static information about a property. Google said on Monday it had changed that by allowing hotels to add “rich data” – such as real-time rates, images and user-reviewed star ratings.

Google said a small group of hotel advertisers using this rich data saw “up to 20% increase in click-through rates” in previous tests. A Google spokesperson confirmed that the updated ads are available globally.

Hotels are the first to use Google’s new “rich data” ads in their search results. But the company said it is testing whether it could expand this ad format to car rental companies, tours and activities, and live event operators.

Make ads more dynamic

Google’s change Monday affects so-called “search ads,” or the ads a user sees when they type in a search term like “destination X hotels” or whatever. calls out keywords, such as the brand name of a hotel and a location. These are described as “ads” or “sponsored ads” in search results.

A Google ad that Skift saw on Monday using the traditional ad unit was purchased by Minor International for its property, the Anantara Siam Bangkok Hotel. This ad showed only the name of the hotel, with a link to the website, and generic, static information, such as that it is open 24 hours a day and that if you stay longer you can save up to at 20%. The traditional search ad has no prices, images, or reviews.

Skift was unable to find an example of a hotel using Google’s new ad format in the wild. However, Google illustrated what it would look like when a hotel enhanced its existing search campaigns with real-time hotel prices, images, and other relevant details.

Uncertain impact

It’s unclear whether Google’s new tool, called Travel Feeds for Search Ads, will directly encourage many hoteliers to advertise with these search-based ads. Some in the industry expect at least some adoption.

“Showing prices and dates in ads is important when it comes to clicks and conversions,” said Martin Soler, a consultant with Paris-based hotel marketers. “The information will be better for travelers, allowing them to avoid having to click and enter dates before knowing if a given hotel fits their budget. Travelers are therefore more likely to interact with advertisements.

Some hoteliers may feel like they already appear in Google search results with organic links, partly through their search engine optimization efforts and partly because they appear for free in other ways on Google.

In early 2022, Google made it possible for hoteliers to benefit from free hotel booking links through Google.com and Google Maps, as reported by Skift. These free links appear in “Google Hotel Ads,” which is typically a widget that prominently displays information about a hotel and provides links to multiple providers for booking rooms.

Although hotels can pay to gain more visible placement in Google Hotel Ads widgets, few choose to do so and instead accept free links as sufficient.

Monday’s announcement instead focuses on sponsored ads at the top of search results. This does not impact the Hotel Ads product.

Ads placed at the top of search results are “even much more important” than the so-called Hotel Ads widget that Google sometimes includes next to search results, said Rudolph Dekker, head of travel at provider Adchieve.

Dekker argued that the impact of Google’s new data-rich search ads would result in “higher click-through rates” for hotels than they received. Hotel advertisers will get this benefit without paying more, as Google has upgraded its ads to be more data-rich, for free.

“Traditional hotel results, Google Hotel Ads results in Maps, and organic results are all pushed down the list with this change,” said Deep Kohli, vice president of client services at Koddi. “It’s another place for clicks to go, so we should expect to see marginal changes between traffic sources and be prepared to shift dollars to the best performing campaigns.”