Somewhere right now a woman in Denver is typing "weekend getaways" into her phone at lunch. She has no city in mind, no dates and certainly no hotel. Three weeks from now, if things go your way, she'll type your hotel's name, tap the result and book two nights. Google watches the whole trip happen, one search at a time, and sells you a different kind of ad for nearly every step of it.
The temptation is to start at the top, with the dreamers, because that's where the big numbers are. This guide starts at the other end. In month one we buy the searches from people who have already decided, let Google learn from their bookings, and only then move up toward the people still deciding. It feels backward. It's the order that keeps a new account from paying for a lot of daydreaming.
A Hotel's Funnel Starts With a Trip, Not a Room
Most businesses describe their funnel in terms of their own product. A hotel's funnel starts before the product exists in the traveler's mind, because nobody books a room until they've picked a place to go. Below are the five stages as they look in one example market, New Orleans, each with a real search and how many times Americans type it in a month, according to Google's Keyword Planner. Your own city's numbers will differ; the shape won't.
- Not thinking about a trip yet. No search at all. The only way to reach this person is to show up where they're already spending time, such as YouTube. The marketing job here is creating awareness.
- Wants to get away. "weekend getaways" draws 18,100 searches a month. No destination, no dates. The job is driving interest.
- Has picked a destination. "things to do in new orleans" gets 74,000 searches a month, "best time to visit new orleans" 5,400 and "is new orleans safe" 4,400. They're planning the trip, not the stay. Still driving interest.
- Shopping for a place to stay. "french quarter hotels" (49,500), "hotels in new orleans" (40,500), "boutique hotels new orleans" (22,200) and "where to stay in new orleans" (2,900). Now the job is influencing a decision.
- Has picked a hotel. "hotel monteleone" draws 60,500 searches a month and "bourbon orleans hotel" 33,100. These travelers know where they want to sleep. The job is compelling the booking.
Look at where the money sits. The largest single number on that list, 74,000, belongs to people who haven't decided to stay anywhere in particular. The searches that name a hotel are smaller one by one, and most of them come from someone who already has dates in mind.
Your Hotel's Name Is the Bottom of the Funnel, and the Booking Sites Bid There Too
When we grouped more than two million monthly lodging searches in the example market by type, about two-thirds named a specific hotel. Generic "hotels in the city" searches made up roughly a sixth. The classification was done by rule, so treat the split as directional, but the pattern is hard to miss: travelers mostly search for hotels they've already heard of.
That's why the account starts with your own name, in its own campaign, and why that campaign gets the bigger share of the month-one budget. One hotel marketing agency recommends starting at about 80% brand and 20% everything else, then moving toward an even split once the non-brand campaigns prove themselves. That's one firm's opinion rather than a rule, but it matches the logic of starting at the bottom.
The catch is that you aren't alone at the bottom. Keyword Planner's top-of-page bid ranges for two example hotel names reach $2.93 and $3.35, close to the $3.07 for "hotels in new orleans." Keyword Planner can't tell you who is bidding, only that someone is. Some of that someone is the booking sites. Booking.com's standard contract with hotels says it may promote a property "using the Accommodation's name" in its marketing, pay-per-click ads included. A traveler who types your name can land on an online travel agency's ad above your own listing and book you through them, with a commission attached. Chapter 15 is entirely about winning that click back; for now, it's enough to know that your name is the most valuable search you own, and someone else is renting it.
One more wrinkle. In the example market, 30% to 45% of searches for a hotel's name came from inside the local area, far more than for generic hotel searches. Some of those are guests already in town. Some, we suspect, are locals looking for the hotel's restaurant, bar or event space. That's a reasonable guess, not a measured fact, but it's cheap to act on: watch the brand campaign's search terms for "menu," "happy hour" and "brunch," and add the ones that don't book as negatives.
Neighborhood and Hotel-Type Searches Are Where Strangers First Choose You
One step up the funnel are travelers who know the city but not the hotel. Their searches split two ways.
The generic city searches, "hotels in new orleans" and its cousins, are the most crowded auctions in the market. Every hotel and every booking site wants them, and a traveler typing them is comparing everyone at once. The searches that name a neighborhood, a landmark or a type of hotel are different. "french quarter hotels," "hotels near superdome," "boutique hotels new orleans," "historic hotels in new orleans": in the example market these made up about one in seven lodging searches, and each one tells you what the traveler cares about before they've seen a single listing.
That's where a boutique hotel's real differences show up. A 14-room boutique hotel uptown can't win a fight for "hotels in new orleans" against a 300-room tower and three booking sites. It can be the best answer to "boutique hotel on st charles avenue." These searches become Isolation's first keywords after your name, in tight groups by neighborhood and type. Isolation is our name for that first campaign: exact match only, with bids you set by hand. Chapters 4 through 6 build it out.
Things-to-Do Searches Plan a Trip. They Don't Buy a Room.
The destination stage is where the numbers get big and the bids get small. "things to do in new orleans" carries 74,000 searches a month and a top-of-page bid range of just $0.19 to $1.39. Cheap traffic from people who are definitely coming to town sounds like a bargain.
It isn't, at least not yet. Someone reading about swamp tours and jazz clubs hasn't started looking at rooms, and an ad for your hotel shown to them is a postcard, not a sales pitch. Postcards have their place, much later, in the campaign types built for reaching people before they search. They never belong in Isolation, where every click is supposed to come from someone ready to book. The same goes for "is new orleans safe" and "best time to visit": useful questions, wrong moment.
Google Sells a Channel for Every Stage. Month One Needs Only Search and Free Booking Links.
Google has an ad product aimed at nearly every stage of that trip. The rollout in this guide turns them on in a set order, and the order matters more than any single setting.
- Search, month one. A campaign on your hotel's name, plus Isolation on the neighborhood and type searches. This is where bookings start and where Google learns what a booking is worth.
- Free booking links, month one. Google shows a booking box when travelers look up hotels on Search and Maps, and listings there can carry your direct rate with a link to your booking engine. Clicks on these free booking links cost nothing. They need a price feed from your booking engine or channel manager, which Chapter 14 walks through.
- Paid hotel price ads, at the conversion gate. The same booking box, bought. These run once the account is recording roughly 30 quality bookings a month, at the same point Exploration launches. Exploration is our name for the broad-match campaign built from Isolation's winners.
- Performance Max for travel goals, usually months six and seven. Google's all-in-one campaign type, which it says reaches seven of its surfaces, the hotel booking box among them. It waits for months of clean booking data.
- Demand Gen, later. Google's video and image campaigns on YouTube and its feeds. This is where the postcard to the "things to do" crowd finally goes.
- AI Max, last. Google's newest automation for Search, including its new Search campaigns for travel, comes at the very end.
The months are the usual pace for an independent hotel, not a rule. The real gate is booking volume: we look for about 30 quality bookings a month before handing Google more control, and a larger hotel spending more can get there much faster. A big budget can also justify starting higher up sooner. For most independents, though, the bottom of the funnel has to pay for itself before anything above it gets a dollar.
A Wedding or Meeting Search Ends in a Proposal Request, Not a Room Booking
Every one of the 12 example hotels we profiled sells something besides rooms: weddings, meetings, group blocks or private events. Those buyers run a funnel of their own.
In the example market, couples type "wedding venues new orleans" 6,600 times a month. Planners type "meeting space new orleans" only about 90 times, and its estimated price for a spot above the results still climbs to $10.61 a click. A handful of searches can still be worth a fight when one of them books a conference. Neither ends in a booking with a price attached. They end in a request for a proposal, follow-up from your sales team and, if it goes well, a signed contract.
So they get a second goal. As Chapter 1 set up, each inquiry counts once, as its own conversion, separate from room bookings and kept out of the main bidding at first. They land on your wedding and meeting pages, not your booking engine. Once there's enough volume to justify it, they can get a campaign of their own that optimizes toward inquiries while the rest of the account keeps bidding on bookings. Mixing the two in one goal would teach Google that a bride asking about a ballroom and a couple booking one night are the same thing. They aren't, and your sales team already knows it.
Next: Every Hotel Click Competes With a Booking Site's Commission
You now know which travelers to pay for first and which to leave for later. Chapter 3 puts a dollar figure on them: what a click is worth when the alternative is paying a booking site a share of every stay, and what a guest who comes back is worth on top of the first booking.
Booking tracking comes before any of this. Chapter 1 sets it up, and each stage here gets judged on the stays it produces. The full plan for all fifteen chapters is on the hotel guide's home page.
Our Google Ads management for hotels starts at the bottom of this funnel: your name, your neighborhood searches and a booking engine that reports what each stay is worth. Running it yourself? Search your own hotel's name on your phone tonight and count how many ads appear above your website before you do.
