July 24th, 2019

In this multi-blog post, we’ll share with you 7 best practices you can use to accomplish the goal of driving more direct bookings to your site. We’ll explore the strategies, techniques, and tactics you can use to develop a comprehensive online marketing plan that will keep your properties visible, build your brand, and increase direct bookings to help you grow your business!

In case you missed it-

Best Practice 1: Website Optimization
Best Practice 2: Email Marketing
Best Practice 3: Social Media Marketing

Best Practice 4: Paid Search

Paid search, also known as pay-per-click advertising or PPC, can be a great way to promote special events, offers, book slow rental periods or drive traffic to your website. Unlike the low or no-cost options we’ve already discussed, you will need a budget to effectively use PPC.

How It Works

The model for PPC advertising is relatively simple. Advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, you’re paying a fee to buy visits to your site, as opposed to earning those visits organically. Search engine advertising is one of the most popular forms of pay-per-click advertising. As an advertiser, you pay a fee (for example $3 per click) for a “keyword” for ad placement in a search engine’s sponsored links. When someone searches for that keyword you pay a fee. When PPC is working properly, the fee is trivial. If you’re paying $3 for a click that results in a 3-day booking, it’s more than worth the cost.

Set Conversion Goals

Defining your conversion goals is an important step when designing a PPC strategy. You need to weigh the cost per click, against how many clicks it will take to make a sale. The average landing page conversion rate is 2.35%, however, the top 25% of advertisers are converting at 5.31% or higher.

To determine the conversion rate you divide the number of sales by the number of visitors to your site. For example, if you had 300 unique visitors to your site as a result of your PPC ad, and that resulted in 15 bookings you have a 5% conversion rate.

If you paid $3 per click your cost for the campaign was $900. If each of those 15 sales were for a single night at a unit charge of $300 per night, You’ve made $4500 in revenue.

Based on the math, you’ll need to determine a conversion goal that is both realistic, and profitable for your business.

Choosing The Right PPC Channel

The two biggest networks for PPC advertising are Google and Bing. However, while they are the most commonly known, and the largest, they’re not the only ones out there. As the PPC model has developed, there have been many new entries on the scene with their own platforms.

These less popular networks can be a good value as they offer plenty of cheap keywords just waiting to be found by advertisers. Each typically has their own niche or specialization. You can find a good list of the best PPC networks for 2019 here.

Keyword Research

The success of any PPC campaign rests on the keywords you use. You’ll need to perform detailed research to determine which keywords are appropriate for your campaign. Google Keyword Planner, Google Ads (formerly AdWords) and Google Analytics are excellent tools for researching and narrowing down your list of keywords.

Once you’ve chosen your keywords you can develop your advertising budget. After you’ve entered a bid for a keyword you’ll see the daily cost and traffic estimates for those words. Multiply the total daily cost by 30.4 (the average number of days in a month) to determine a monthly budget.

Creating Your PPC Campaign

Once you’ve chosen your keywords and developed your budget you’ll need to create compelling ads that will encourage searchers to take action and click on your ad. Your ads should address the needs of your target audience to drive them to take action. It should also reflect and be relevant for the keyword you’ve bid on. Finally, you’ll need to create a landing page that is relevant to the keyword and your ad to convert visitors.

PPC advertising is a process. You will need to test keywords and ads continually to maximize your campaign’s effectiveness. Try A/B testing ad copy, headlines and keywords to optimize your campaign’s effectiveness. Remember, the difference between a successful PPC ad and an ineffective one lies in the copy, so test, tweak, and test again!