Strategy & approach
How is hospitality Google Ads different from running ads for an e-commerce store?
Three structural differences. (1) The booking decision spans 4-12 weeks for most leisure travel — your funnel needs awareness, consideration, AND conversion ads running concurrently, not a single performance-max campaign trying to do all three. (2) Hotel Ads (the price+availability units in Google Hotel Search) require a live feed from your booking engine or property management system — it's a meaningfully different surface from regular Search, with different bidding, different reporting, and different competitors. (3) The OTAs (Booking.com, Expedia) are bidding against you on YOUR brand name — your brand-defense campaign isn't optional, it's the foundation. E-commerce accounts don't face any of these.
We're a small property — do we have enough scale for paid ads to work?
Honest answer: there's a minimum scale below which paid hospitality ads don't produce reliable ROI. A 4-room boutique with $80 nightly ADR is typically below that floor because the absolute commission savings + direct-ADR premium can't cover even modest ad spend + management. A 15-room property at $200+ ADR is usually above the floor. The free audit produces a property-specific read on whether you're above the line — if you're not, we'll tell you honestly and recommend the unpaid plays (OTA listing optimization, SEO basics, retention) that actually fit your scale.
We're currently 90% OTA — can ads really shift that?
Yes, but the shift is gradual and requires the full playbook running concurrently: Hotel Ads competitive bidding + Search demand capture + retargeting the visitors who priced you on Booking but didn't book + booking-engine + rate-parity work + direct-booking incentive design. Single-tactic accounts ("just turn on Hotel Ads") usually shift OTA share 5-10 percentage points in 6 months. Full-playbook accounts shift 20-35 percentage points in the same window. We track and report the actual mix monthly so you see the shift happen.
Account structure & channel mix
Should we run Performance Max for our property?
Sometimes — but as a layered campaign, not your primary engine. Performance Max's strength is finding new audiences across YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail; its weakness is opacity (limited reporting on what's working) and a tendency to over-spend on remarketing budget that should be in dedicated remarketing campaigns. Our typical hospitality structure: Brand Search + Non-Brand Search + Hotel Ads as the foundation; Performance Max layered for top-funnel discovery once the foundation is producing reliable ROI. Hotel-property accounts that lead with Performance Max usually have one of two problems: inflated CPCs from PMax cannibalising Brand Search, or invisible budget waste on irrelevant Display placements.
What's the right ad-spend split between Search, Hotel Ads, and Meta?
No universal number — depends on your property type, market saturation, brand recognition, and OTA dependency. As a starting framework: hotel-segment accounts (where Hotel Ads has strong feed) typically run 35-45% Hotel Ads, 30-40% Search, 15-25% Meta, 5-10% Display. Villa/vacation-rental accounts (where Hotel Ads is weaker or unavailable) run more weight on Search + Meta + retargeting. The audit recommends a property-specific split based on your actual booking patterns + competitive set.
How important is a brand-search defensive campaign?
Essential. Booking.com, Expedia, Trivago, and meta-search platforms actively bid on your property's brand keywords ([Hotel Name] + booking, [Hotel Name] + reviews). Without a brand-defense campaign, prospects searching for you specifically click the OTA paid ad first, you pay the OTA commission, and you've lost the margin on a guest who already chose you. The brand campaign is cheap to run (CPC typically 60-80% lower than non-brand, conversion rate 5-10× higher) and intercepts those bookings direct. We've audited accounts losing 30+ direct bookings/month to OTA brand-name bidding because they had no defensive campaign.
Reporting & measurement
How do we measure ROI when bookings have a 4-12 week lead time?
Two-layer attribution. Layer 1 — direct: every booking from a paid ad gets a transaction ID, attributed in Google Ads + Google Analytics with the actual booking value (not just a "1" conversion event). Layer 2 — assisted: we track view-through and cross-device conversions, since many hospitality bookings start on mobile (researching) and finalise on desktop (booking) 2-4 weeks later. Monthly reports show both first-click and last-click attribution side by side so you see channels driving discovery AND channels driving close — they're usually different campaigns. The 90-day rolling ROI view is the most honest measure.
What dashboards or reports do we get?
A weekly performance digest (email, scannable in 60 seconds) covering: spend vs target, direct bookings vs OTA bookings, top-performing keywords + ads, channels driving the most-valuable stays, and the 2-3 specific actions we're taking next. Plus a monthly review video walking through the dashboard with commentary — context that raw numbers don't carry. The detailed performance dashboard (real-time channel mix, geographic + device breakdown, campaign-level ROAS) is shared with you on-demand so you can sanity-check any number at any time.
Working with FYI Digital
Who actually runs our account day-to-day?
Our lead hospitality strategist personally runs your account during the first 90 days, then continues as the strategic lead with a hospitality-focused analyst on day-to-day execution after that. You won't get rotated through junior account managers, and your strategist won't be split across 30 unrelated accounts. We cap the hospitality book to a number that lets each property get genuine attention every week.
How long is the engagement commitment?
Month-to-month, 30-day notice. We don't do 6 or 12-month lock-ins because the work either produces results that make you want to stay, or it doesn't and you should be able to leave cleanly. The vast majority of our hospitality clients are in year 2 or 3 of the engagement — the retention is the result, not the contract.
What if we already have an in-house marketing person?
We work alongside in-house teams regularly. We focus on the Google Ads + Hotel Ads execution and strategy; your in-house team handles the property-side work (booking engine, content, OTA listings, social, email) where they have context we don't. We have weekly syncs to align on calendars + promotions and avoid duplicating effort. This actually works well — most properties benefit from the depth a specialist brings to one channel while keeping ownership of the rest.
Hospitality-specific edge cases
We have multiple properties — do we need separate accounts?
Usually one account, separate campaigns per property. This keeps reporting clean (you can roll up to total or drill into per-property ROAS), lets us use shared learnings (a high-performing audience for one property often transfers to another), and avoids the budget-fragmentation problem of multiple accounts competing for the same internal team's attention. Exceptions: if properties span very different brand identities (luxury resort + budget hostel under different brand names) or different geographic markets with separate teams, separate accounts can make sense.
Our peak is 8 weeks long. Do we just go dark the other 44?
No — and that's the most expensive mistake we see. The 44 non-peak weeks are when next year's bookers are researching. If you're invisible during research season, you lose them to whoever IS visible. The right approach is a sustained brand-defense + retargeting campaign year-round (low spend, low CPC, very high ROAS) + aggressive demand-capture campaigns timed to your market's actual booking-window curve (which for most leisure markets means 8-12 weeks before peak, not the peak itself). We build the 12-month calendar so spend follows the booking-curve, not the spend-calendar.
A neighbouring property keeps undercutting our rates. Does that kill paid ads?
No, but it shifts the strategy. Rate-parity competition is what Hotel Ads + meta-search platforms exist for — they show your competitor next to you in real-time. Two responses: (1) compete on differentiation in the ad creative (your property's actual experience, not just price) so the cheaper neighbour wins price-shoppers and you win experience-shoppers; (2) build a "best-rate guarantee" direct-booking incentive (5-10% off the OTA-displayed rate when guests book direct via your site) so the comparison favours direct over OTA-listed competitors. Properties that lean into rate-parity competition by undercutting their own OTA price typically train the market down — bad for long-term ADR. Differentiation + direct-rate incentive is the durable play.
