How do Microsoft Advertising Lodging Solutions help you grow your hotel business

As a hotel, it is crucial to be able to reach new potential customers to make sure you make yourself known in a competitive sector and increase your direct bookings. This is what Microsoft Advertising Lodging Solutions is helping you to achieve. Indeed, for the travel sector in 2022, Microsoft sees 28.2 billion monthly searches with 215 million unique monthly searchers. 49 million of desktop searchers are specific to Microsoft Advertising and are not reached on Google. Today, Microsoft Lodging Solutions, as part of Microsoft Advertising, consist of metasearch advertising that enables hoteliers to promote their property on Microsoft Bing search engine, as well as their direct rates to travelers searching for an accommodation. Let’s dive into Microsoft metasearch advertising, and how your property can benefit from it.

What is metasearch ?

Metasearch, also called price comparison sites, are literally meta-search engines that compare the prices of a hotel posted on multiple websites. It makes a synthesis of the rates from different feeds online to propose to the traveler the best offer from several booking sites, according to the chosen hotel, the selected dates and the duration of their stay.Basically, metasearch allow travelers to compare the offers of different actors, put online for the same hotel. Thus, they can choose a hotel room while being sure to benefit from the best price available.

Please note that metasearch engines are not to be confused with OTAs (Online Travel Agency) which offer travel or stay deals. The main OTAs competing with hotels are Booking.com and Expedia.

Metasearch advertising is prominent in the travel and hospitality sector nowadays. They help you increase your visibility and direct revenue, but only if you leverage them strategically.

What are Microsoft Advertising Lodging Solutions? 

Microsoft Lodging Solutions are targeted, and rich metsearch ads that combine strong intent matching with rich visuals and in-depth information. The goal is to prompt action within the traveler’s search experience, map experience and across multiple Microsoft properties. 

Today, Microsoft Lodging Solutions harbor two main solutions available worldwide for hoteliers and hospitality industry parties: 

• Hotel Price Ads, which is currently available in 155 markets (in January 2023).
• Property Promotion Ads which is currently available in 148 markets (in January 2023).

What are Hotel Price Ads? 

Hotel Price Ads are a metasearch solution that allows your hotel to appear on Microsoft Bing’s sponsored reservation module and include data on rates, hotel room inventory and availability. These rich, and contextually relevant ads appear on Bing Maps (multi-property), Bing search results page (single-property) and Microsoft Bing Travel. The latter is a new consumer experience, recently launched by Microsoft to ease the customer’s journey when looking for traveling options and accommodation. 

Multi-property ads are triggered when a user shows interest in a certain area, destination. Whereas single property ads are triggered when a user has shown intent or expressed an interest in a hotel.

Example of metasearch advertising on Microsoft Bing search results page (SERP):

There is 1 bidding method: 

• Cost per Click (CPC): you pay a specific amount every time a user clicks on your offer in the list of rates on the metasearch page to be redirected to your hotel website. In short, with CPC, each click generates a cost for your hotel and you only invest in the traffic that the metasearch ad brings you. The more you bid, the more your price offer will be displayed at the top of the list of proposals suggested to travelers.   

What are Property Promotion Ads? 

Microsoft Property Promotions Ads are exclusive premium offerings that enable you to reach travelers on different Microsoft channels including the top position on Microsoft Bing Maps, on the right rail on Microsoft Bing search results page, Microsoft Bing Images, Microsoft Bing Videos, and Microsoft Bing Travel. It is a curated experience, where advertisers are in control of the hotel property content to showcase, including property images, rates, room inventory and availability.

These sponsored ads allow you to put your hotel at the top of the results when a traveler is searching for a hotel in a specific location or with certain amenities. For instance, if your property is located in Chicago, you can appear in the top position for Chicago hotel searches.

The bidding model is CPC: as mentioned above, you get charged per click on the ad that sends the customer directly on your website.

One of the key benefits, as well as increasing your popularity in your destination, is that this type of ad is exclusive: your website rate will be  shown exclusively, no other advertiser will be displayed. It means that your hotel prices are not in competition with other advertisers. When a user clicks on your ad, only your official rates appear and not those of other distributors, which brings great visibility to your hotel.  

Why two different ad formats? 

Microsoft Lodging Solutions offer two different ad formats to enable you to be present throughout the customer decision journey: 

• Property Promotion Ads is more “upper funnel”: i.e. when people start thinking of going on vacation at a specific location. These ads help you create awareness and inspiring brandness, helping travelers looking for a hotel at their destination.
  
• Hotel Price Ads is more “end of the funnel”: i.e when people are closer to making a booking decision. The goal is to drive consideration and engage ready-to-book travelers to make them book a room at your hotel.

How to launch Microsoft Lodging Solutions for my hotel?

Essentially, what you need to implement Microsoft Hotel Price Ads for your hotel is your hotel feed, your hotel information and an ARI flow. You can give these elements to our teams and we will take care of the rest to set up your campaigns: easy as pie!

What are the bidding strategies available? 

The recommended bidding strategy for Microsoft Lodging Solutions are the following: 

• Cost per Click (CPC): more mature bidding method in terms of the algorithms that are running to have the optimal results. You have 2 options for CPC: 
  • Fixed bid per night: set a static dollar amount that you chose to bid.
  • Percentage of room price: set a percentage based on your inventory as a bid.
    
• Bid multipliers: 7 bid multipliers are available to offer more granularity to your bidding strategy. You can apply a bid multiplier to channels that work best for your activity, in line with the online goals you set for your hotel. It gives you more control and you can choose to bid more based on a device type, a traveler’s country, etc. to take advantage of channels and criteria that work best for your campaigns. 

You can launch CPC campaigns on the markets you want thanks to our metasearch manager platform Meta I/O. You can easily manage your metasearch campaigns through a single environment. 

Please note that, Microsoft Advertising also offers Pay per Stay but it is not recommended: this bidding model is more complicated and needs more involvement from the advertiser. Also, it is not as mature as a Cost Per Click  in terms of algorithms.

What are Microsoft Advertising Lodging Solutions new upcoming features?

Microsoft is launching Room Bundle: it provides rich details to users when they are about to book, when they have made their decision and have chosen the hotel they want to stay in. It will only be featured on Microsoft Bing Travel: you click on the hotel, then it helps you choose a room thanks to room bundle information (amenities, furniture, room price, square footage, etc). 

Advertisers will be able to bid on Room Bundle based on their availability and travelers will be able to choose between different options from one or multiple advertisers. Microsoft will be piloting this new solution in the first quarter of 2023. 

Conclusion

Metasearch advertising improves your hotel’s bookings and gives more visibility to your official rates to help you convert more travelers into clients. Using metasearch offerings like Microsoft Hotel Price Ads contribute to the growth of your turnover. 

When appearing on metasearch, you can greatly increase your traffic and your direct booking rate. With Microsoft Hotel Price Ads, once a traveler clicks on your rates on your metasearch page, they are instantly redirected to the booking page of your website. 

You can now improve your visibility to ready-to-book travelers with Microsoft Hotel Price Ads and Property Promotion Ads. By redirecting these potential customers to your booking page, you will increase your direct revenue. Typically, users land on your website with a strong intention to book. Therefore, you will most often receive highly qualified leads. 

We are here to help you set up efficient metasearch advertising strategies, get in touch with our team!