In the aftermath of the pandemic,
the travel industry had a difficult conundrum to solve: drastically cut
marketing spend while losing as little revenue as possible. Hoteles City,
previously the fastest growing hotel chain in Mexico, with 150 hotels and
counting, had that exact issue.
They needed to spend a lot less on
digital marketing, but still wanted to drive significant revenue. In other
words, they needed to improve their efficiency to a completely different level.
The challenge: how to radically increase profitability?
Many advertisers struggle to scale
and optimize their search campaigns. It’s a complex product that takes specific
expertise and is very time-consuming to optimize.
The basic Google Ads solutions only take campaigns so far in terms of results
and don’t enable hotels to compete efficiently against the bigger competitors,
such as OTAs and metas.
As a result, most hotel companies
don’t even bother trying to really take advantage of the huge opportunity of
search ads marketing.
Hoteles City leveraged Equeco’s
custom technology to drastically improve their methodology, and level the
playing field. Equeco automatically created thousands of new keywords based on
actual Google searches.
These highly targeted keywords, constantly refreshed and optimized by Equeco’s
tool, helped Hoteles City scale their marketing efforts and significantly
increase their ROI.
Automatically finding the relevant keywords
How does it work? Well, the
typical “templated” keywords Hoteles City used to advertise on were mostly
their hotel names, for example “hotel Hoteles City junior tijuana otay.”
This approach assumes travelers are
searching for the hotel name exactly or puts all of its faith in Google’s broad
matching technology to capture other queries.
However, Equeco has found
tremendous value in mining all those varied user queries and creating keywords
out of them. For example, some of the queries for the above-mentioned hotel
are:
- Hoteles City junior tijuana
- city junior tijuana
- hotel city junior tijuana
- hotel Hoteles City junior otay tijuana
- hotel Hoteles City jr tijuana
- city junior otay
- city junior express tijuana
While many of these queries were
previously targeted in broad match, the campaign had much better results once
those keywords were added. This is because Hoteles City improved both its reach
and the relevancy of its ad copy and therefore its overall quality score with
Google.
Equeco’s technology allowed
Hoteles City to find the actual keywords that mattered to its business and
maximized its return by replacing the manual keyword guesswork with automated
keyword research.
And because Equeco works in all languages, it also helped Hoteles City yield much better results from its all-important U.S. campaigns as well, driving much greater volumes of longer stay international travelers.
The result: thousands of keywords leading to highly targeted ads
Most advertisers rely on
advertising on their product names as keywords and rely on Google to do the
hard work to find more queries. While those tools undoubtedly work well, the
competition is also using them, so it takes something more to outperform the
market.
Hoteles City today automatically
manages thousands of keywords, 93% of which were discovered by Equeco. The tool
had a transformative impact on the account’s performance, improving ROAs by 80%
in its first month and subsequently taking over the entire account’s management
to great effect.