After running their Hotel Ads offering in beta last year, Bing has begun rolling them out as a general release to enable hotels to showcase their properties on Bing.com across devices. Hotel Ads is a new hotel search experience designed to showcase real-time room rates to potential customers on the Bing search results pages and within Bing Maps. Hotel Ads complement existing digital marketing initiatives, allowing hotels to reach travelers who are looking to book now.
Features
Bing Hotel Ads charge on a cost-per-click basis, similar to other metasearch channels like Google Hotel Ads and TripAdvisor. Bids can be set at a percentage of room price and fixed bid per night. Similar to Google Hotel Ads, percentage of room price bidding is the recommended bidding strategy due to its ability to account for rate changes and remain competitive with OTAs across multiple date ranges.
While bid optimizations are currently limited to the device-type level, other multipliers are still on the horizon as Bing works to add user country, check-in day of the week, advance booking window, and length of stay to the mix. Though, unlike Google Hotel Ads, there has been no information on potential bid optimizers on traveler-set dates and default dates on Bing.
Benefits
- Extends Market Reach: Bing has a significant presence in the United States, holding a 33% market share. Also, the search engine reaches 66 million users that are not reached on Google and draws 6 billion unique monthly searches and 140 million monthly users.
- Lower CPC: On average, the CPCs tend to be lower compared to other meta channels, like Google. This is attributed to fewer competitors on the platform for most hotel properties.
- Reach an Older, Higher-Income Demographic: 72% of Bing’s network is over the age of 35, with 45 to 54-year-olds being the largest age demographic at 20%. Also, over 33% of Bing searchers have a household income of over $100k.
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Recommendations
Bing Hotel Ads is a great addition to hotel brands who have the necessary budget, especially those already seeing high search volume on the platform or high conversions on organic traffic. For those already running SEM on Bing, layering in Bing serves as the next step to complement the overall strategy. The initiative maximizes exposure to potential bookers by extending a property’s reach to the 33% of the US market using Bing and the 66 million Bing users that cannot be reached through Google. Additionally, it helps reclaim market share from the OTAs to drive more direct bookings by competing with the OTAs who currently dominate the Bing Hotel Ads platform. Given Bing’s skew toward an older, higher-income demographic, Bing Hotel Ads can especially be an effective initiative for properties whose audience has a similar makeup.
As a Bing Partner and one of the first agencies to offer Bing Hotel Ads, contact us at hello@nextguest.com to get started today.
