Every other business in this guide series wants customers who are nearby. A dentist wants patients who live within a short drive. An electrician wants homes inside the service area. Point their campaigns at the town they work in and they're aimed at the right people.
A hotel is the opposite. Its customers are, almost by definition, people who don't live there. Chapter 5 showed it in one pair of numbers: "hotels in new orleans" drew 40,500 searches a month across the US and 3,600 from the New Orleans area itself. A campaign aimed at the hotel's own city is aimed at the one place its guests mostly aren't.
This chapter covers the settings a hotel campaign needs before launch, starting with the one that matters most: where the ads show.
Nearly Nine in Ten Searches for a City's Hotels Come From Outside It
We compared Keyword Planner's US volume with its New Orleans-area volume for the same searches, our example market. For every generic or neighborhood search we checked, 80% to 95% of the volume came from outside the area. "boutique hotels new orleans" drew 22,200 a month nationally and 3,600 locally. "luxury hotels new orleans" drew 27,100 and 5,400. Pooled by type, generic city-and-hotel searches were about 13% local, and neighborhood and landmark searches about 9%.
So where do the other searches come from? We pulled three of the biggest searches ("hotels in new orleans," "french quarter hotels" and "boutique hotels new orleans") metro by metro. Their combined national volume came to about 112,200 a month. The New Orleans area itself was the largest single metro at 10,100, which is still only 9%. Then came Houston at 5,680, New York at 5,600, Dallas at 4,680 and Atlanta at 4,220, followed by Mobile-Pensacola, Chicago, Los Angeles, Baton Rouge and Jackson.
The striking part is how spread out it is. The 17 outside metros we pulled added up to 43% of the searches. The rest of the country, every metro we didn't pull, added up to about 48%. No single feeder market carries a hotel. A campaign that picks the five obvious cities would still miss half the travelers.
Google Recommends "Presence or Interest" for Travel. We Target the Whole Country Instead.
Google Ads gives a campaign two ways to read its location setting. With "Presence," the ad reaches people physically in the targeted area or there on a regular basis. "Presence or Interest" adds people who have shown interest in those places, which Google says can come from the words in their searches, places they were recently or content they've looked at about the location.
Google recommends Presence or Interest and makes a specific case for travel: its help page says advertisers in the travel, real estate and education verticals who switched to it saw 5% more conversions on Search, based on Google's internal data from 2022. That's a real claim, but it's three industries pooled together, not hotels, and Google is grading its own setting.
The same help page also includes a hotel example, and it's telling. A hotelier in Spain who wants English-speaking guests who live in England targets his ads in England. He doesn't target Spain. Google's own example aims the campaign at where the guests live.
That's the setting we use, with one simplification. The campaign is set to Presence, and the location is the United States, or the countries a hotel's guests actually come from. The keyword carries the destination. Someone in Houston searching "boutique hotels french quarter" is in the targeted country and has named the place, so they see the ad. Nobody is reached because of an article they read last month.
Two reasons drive it. The first is control. "Interest" is decided by Google, and it can include people with no plan to travel. The second is clean reporting. With Presence on the whole country, the location report shows where your travelers really were when they searched, metro by metro, so you can see which feeder markets book.
The one setting to avoid is Presence on the hotel's own city alone. On the example market's numbers, that would show the ads to between 5% and 20% of the people searching for the hotel's core terms.
In the campaign's settings, it takes two choices. Under Locations, enter the United States, or each country your guests come from. Then expand Location options, skip the pre-selected "Presence or Interest" and tick Presence, so a hotel's ads go only to travelers who are actually somewhere in those countries.
Should the hotel's own city be excluded? No. Locals book staycations, and travelers already in town search for a room for tonight; at 9% of the searches in the example market, they're a real slice. Leave the city in, and let the location report show whether those clicks book. If they don't, lower bids for the city rather than shutting it off.
A Small City Two Hours Away Can Send as Many Searches as Chicago
Look closer at the metro list and a second pattern shows up. Big cities send a lot of searches because they have a lot of people. But some small metros within a few hours' drive send far more than their size suggests.
Mobile-Pensacola, a market about a sixth the size of Chicago's, matched Chicago exactly at 3,190 searches a month. Baton Rouge, about a tenth of Chicago's size, came within 450. Jackson, Mississippi, out-searched Washington, D.C. These are drive-in markets: people who can decide on Thursday and be checked in by Saturday. Your hotel has its own version, and it's usually a ring of smaller cities within a long drive.
Two places tell you which they are. The first is your own guest records. The property management system knows the home city or ZIP code of every guest who booked, and a quick count of last year's stays gives you a feeder list based on bookings, not searches. The second is Google Ads itself. A few weeks after launch, the matched locations report shows clicks, cost and bookings by the locations your ads matched.
Start wide, then lean in. Launch on the whole country, and once the report shows a metro booking well, raise bids for it or give it more of the budget. Starting narrow means guessing which cities matter before you have any data, and the metro pull above shows how easy it is to guess wrong.
A Hotel's Own Name Is Searched Locally. Watch Who Clicks the Brand Campaign.
There's one exception to the pattern, and it belongs to the brand campaign from Chapter 2. Searches for a specific hotel's name skew much more local than searches for the city's hotels. In the example market, the hotel names we checked drew between 30% and 45% of their volume from inside the area, against 5% to 20% for generic searches.
Some of those local searchers are guests already in town looking up the address, which is fine. Some are locals booking a staycation, which is great. But some are looking for something else entirely: the hotel's bar, its restaurant, a wedding they're attending in its ballroom. Chapter 5 found one hotel's bar drawing 14,800 searches a month on its own. That last group is our reading of the data, not something Keyword Planner can measure, but it's worth checking for.
Keeping brand in its own campaign is what makes this visible. Its location report and search terms report are separate from everything else, so you can see how much of it is local and what those locals typed. If brand clicks from your own city keep coming in with words like "menu," "brunch," "happy hour" or "parking for the game," add those as negatives on the brand campaign and let the restaurant's or bar's own page catch that traffic.
Search Partners, Display and AI Max Stay Off Until the Bookings Say Otherwise
The rest of the settings are faster, but each one matters, and several are switched on by default.
Networks: Google Search only. A new Search campaign can also show on Google's search partner sites and on the Display Network. Turn both off at launch. Google's own help page warns that clicks from partner sites "may not always reflect highly targeted traffic." Display can be tested later, as its own campaign with its own budget, once Search is booking.
AI Max: off. Build a hotel's Search campaign today and AI Max comes pre-checked. It widens matching and writes ad text automatically, which works against the exact match discipline of Isolation from Chapter 6. Turn it off when you build the campaign. Text customization, which older accounts know as automatically created assets, goes off too, because from September 2026 Google moves any campaign still using it into AI Max. Dynamic Search Ads stay off too.
Language: write the ads in it. That same month Google began retiring the language setting on Search campaigns, so the language of the ad text now decides who sees it. A hotel courting travelers from Mexico City or Montreal writes those ad groups in Spanish or French and sends them to pages in the same language.
Tracking: on. Auto-tagging stays on so the booking tracking from Chapter 1 can tie each booking to its click. Call reporting stays on so calls from ads count. Ad rotation stays on "optimize," which lets Google favor whichever ads in an ad group earn more clicks.
Budget: start low. For the first days, set the daily budget lower than you plan to spend. It gives you a look at Google's bid estimates and the first real impressions before the full budget is committed. Then raise it to the level Chapter 3's math supports.
Next: Performance Max for Travel Can Spend Your Budget on Your Own Hotel's Name
With Search settled, Chapter 10 moves to Performance Max, Google's all-channel campaign type, and the setting a hotel has to get right before it launches: keeping Performance Max away from the brand searches its own Search campaign already owns.
The series so far covers booking tracking, the order of searches, the commission math, ad groups that match, the negative list, exact match before the long tail, hand bids before booking value and ads in guests' own words. The hotel guide's home page lists all fifteen.
When we run a hotel's Google Ads, the campaign targets the country and the bookings name the feeder markets. Running it yourself? Count where last year's guests lived from your reservation records, and compare that list to where your ads are set to show today.
