My Method... How this hotel chain increased paid search return by 80%

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.