Performance Max for travel goals

Performance Max campaigns were introduced back in November 2021. If you haven’t tried them yet, you definitely should because they generate great results. We will assume that you are already well acquainted with them, and if you are not you can read one of KG Media blog posts from 2021: Performance Max campaigns.

In this article we will focus on a new type of Performance Max campaign: Performance Max for travel goals.

This type of campaign is designed to help hotels generate additional bookings. In the following, we will briefly explain the difference, or rather the advantages of this campaign compared to the traditional Performance Max campaigns, and the image below will serve us for this purpose:

The Performance Max for travel goals campaign currently has three main advantages, namely:

• Show up on search for property related queries – in short, this means that the ads will generate additional relevant search traffic for queries that match your hotel, or what Google knows about it. This especially applies to long tail keywords, such as “pet friendly hotel in Dubrovnik with swimming pool”.
• Per-property reporting for up to 100 properties –This refers to reporting at the group item level, or individual hotels within the same campaign. In traditional Performance Max campaigns, there is still no detailed reporting at the group item level, so you cannot accurately determine which group of items is generating the best results. Why is the limit at 100? Because this is the maximum number of groups of elements within one PMax campaign.
• Pre-populated imagery and copy – this means that Google will automatically generate assets, i.e. elements of your ad (images, titles, description lines and landing page), which will drastically reduce your effort when creating the ad itself. However, this does not mean that you should leave everything to chance, it is best to check the ads and manually add or refine certain elements. Google mainly uses information from your Google My Business profile to create your elements.

There are two more significant advantages of these campaigns, which have not yet been implemented, but are announced for the second half of 2023. These features are:

• Enhanced travel specific audience signals – this refers to enhanced audience signals for hotel accommodation – we’ll know more when the feature becomes available.
• Expanded ad reach through Hotel Ads – this means that ads, in addition to the 6 existing platforms (Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover and Google Maps), will also be displayed on the Google Hotel Ads platform, which appears on the right side of the search results. These ads show real-time prices and availability, making them an excellent generator of direct bookings.

Considering all of the above, we can see that these campaigns have numerous benefits compared to traditional Performance Max campaigns, but they will experience their full potential only after the last two features become available. Nevertheless, the only drawback of these campaigns is that they exclusively focus on hotels, which means that other types of accommodations are not supported at the moment, but they may become available in later stages.

Regarding the campaign setup itself, before launching, you need to create a hotel feed for the properties you want to advertise in the campaign. To create a feed, click on Tools & settings at the top of the page and select Business data. Then, click on the + sign to create a new feed and select Hotel properties feed. You can then create the feed itself in two ways:

• Choose hotels from a map – when selecting this option, enter the name of your hotel in the search box, after which a map with the location of your hotel will open. Then simply tag your hotel, which adds it to the feed. You can add more hotels in the same way (up to 100 per campaign).
• Upload a list of hotels – another way is to upload a list of your hotels. Before that, of course, you need to create a list, which is very similar to the first procedure. Open Google Maps, find your hotel and copy the link to the google sheet. Add links for all hotels in this way. Put the Google Maps URL as the header of the sheet, then share that sheet and upload it to Google Ads.

Then you start creating a new campaign. Choose your goal (Sales) and conversions (Purchase), choose the type of campaign (Performance Max), after which an option will appear where you have to check “Hotels”.

The further process of creation is identical to standard Performance Max campaigns, so we won’t go through it.

Article originally posted by KG Media, under the title Performance Max for travel goals.