Picture the searches for hotels in your city as the floors of a building. On the top floor, a handful of big, obvious searches: the city name with "hotels" after it, a famous neighborhood, "luxury hotel." Every hotel in town and every booking site wants that floor. Below it, a few hundred searches that name something specific: a balcony, a pool, a dog, a parking space, an airport shuttle. Below that, thousands of phrasings so specific and so rare that no tool will list them.
A new hotel account can't afford the top floor at first and can't see the bottom one. So it starts in the middle, with the searches it can predict and prove, and builds the ability to reach the rest. That's what BrandRocket calls working inside out, and this chapter is how it works for a hotel.
Nine City Searches Hold Two-Fifths of the Volume, and the Booking Sites Want Them Too
We pooled Keyword Planner's ideas for 12 hotels in our example market, New Orleans, removed hotel names and booking-site names, and kept the lodging searches tied to the city. That left about 1,280 distinct searches adding up to roughly 685,000 a month.
The top of that list is steep. Just nine searches, each with 10,000 or more a month, carried 39% of the volume. Another 101, between 1,000 and 10,000 a month, carried 44%. Those are the searches people picture when they think of hotel advertising, and they're exactly the ones the booking sites fight over. When we scraped the results page for "hotels in new orleans," Google's paid hotel price listings showed 30 entries, and across the two searches where those paid listings appeared, the booking link pointed to a booking site on 43 of 48. Booking sites' own text ads appeared on 3 of the 22 hotel searches we scraped as well.
Keyword Planner's top-of-page bid ranges for the biggest of them, "hotels in new orleans" ($1.04 to $3.07) and "french quarter hotels" ($1.19 to $3.57), are among the higher ranges in the list. None of that means a hotel should never touch a city search. It means the city search is the most expensive place to learn, and the least forgiving of a generic ad. A hotel earns its way into those auctions later, with an ad and a page that match better than a booking site's long list of options can. Your own market's numbers will be different. The shape, a few huge searches everyone wants, is the same in most cities.
Exact Match Buys the Hotel Searches You Can Predict, and Nothing Else
The middle floors are where a new account starts. These are the searches that name something a traveler needs, and in the example market they weren't hard to find:
- Balconies: 38 different searches, about 4,860 a month, led by "hotels in new orleans with balcony" and "hotels on bourbon street with balcony" at 1,300 each.
- Parking: 55 searches, about 3,620 a month, led by "hotels in new orleans free parking" at 1,000.
- Pets: 11 searches, about 2,860 a month, led by "pet friendly hotels new orleans" at 1,900.
- Pools: 17 searches, about 2,680 a month.
- Bed and breakfast: 24 searches, about 5,440 a month.
- Airport and shuttle: 27 searches, about 1,790 a month.
- Families: 9 searches, about 900 a month.
Each need that genuinely fits your hotel becomes an ad group, built the way Chapter 4 described: five or six closely related searches, an ad that repeats the need back, and a page that answers it. These groups are the whole of Isolation at launch. That's our word for the hotel's first non-brand campaign, and its two rules are simple: exact match on every keyword, a hand-typed bid on every ad group.
Take the balcony group as an example. In the example market it would hold "hotels in new orleans with balcony" (1,300 a month), "new orleans hotel french quarter balcony" (880) and a handful of smaller wordings like them. Its ad would say "Private Balconies Over the Quarter," if that's true, and send the click to the page for the rooms that have them, with photos taken from the balcony. The two Bourbon Street balcony searches (1,300 and 390 a month) could join it, or sit in a Bourbon Street group of their own if the hotel is on that street and wants to say so. Either way, the traveler who asked for a balcony sees a balcony twice before they book: once in the ad and again on the page.
Exact match is less narrow than it sounds. Google's definition of close variants means an exact match keyword can still show for misspellings, singular and plural forms, abbreviations and other forms with the same meaning. A traveler typing "hotels with balconies new orleans" can still trigger a keyword you wrote in the singular. The difference from broad match is discipline: an exact keyword stays with its own meaning, which is the point. In month one, the account needs clean bookings from searches you chose on purpose, because those are what everything later learns from.
Keyword Planner Can't Show a Hotel the Searches Too Rare to Count
Now look at the bottom of the same list. In the example market, 502 searches came back at 20 or fewer a month, and another 359 between 21 and 99. Together that's 861 searches, two-thirds of the list, holding under 4% of its volume. On the planner's own numbers, the long tail looks almost worthless.
That's a limit of the tool, not a picture of the market. Keyword Planner only reports searches common enough to count, and it groups close variants together under one number. A search like "quiet pet friendly room near frenchmen street with parking" may happen a few times a month, or a few times a year, and it will never appear in a download. Multiply that by every combination of neighborhood, need and date a traveler can type, and you have a floor of the building no report shows you.
In our experience running accounts, that unlisted long tail is where a hotel's search account grows once it's ready. We can't put a number on it, because no tool can, and anyone who gives you one for your market is guessing. What we can say is how to reach it without paying for every stray phrase along the way.
Broad Match Without Booking Values Is a Guess. With Them, It Finds the Phrasings You Missed.
The tool for the bottom floors is broad match, which Google describes as its most comprehensive match type and makes the default for new keywords. A broad match keyword covers everything the exact and phrase versions would, plus related searches the system judges relevant. Pointed at a new account with no history, it wanders. Give it an account that has already recorded real bookings with real dollar values, and it turns up wordings no one on your staff would have guessed.
So broad match lives in a second campaign, Exploration, our name for it, and it waits for a gate. To build it, duplicate Isolation, strip it down to the three to five keywords with real bookings behind them, flip those to broad match, and change the bidding to booking value (Chapter 7 walks through that setting). It launches once the account records about 30 quality bookings a month. Choose those seed keywords by what they booked, not by how many clicks they drew. A keyword that brought in four bookings worth $1,800 is a better teacher than one that drew 300 clicks and two one-night stays. Exploration copies what you show it, so show it your best guests. For most hotels that's around months two and three; a bigger hotel with more traffic can get there sooner.
The first month of Exploration is hands-on. For its first 30 days, open the search terms report each morning; it lists the exact wording travelers typed before seeing your ad. Sort what you find into three piles:
- New winners, phrasings that booked. Copy them into Isolation as exact match keywords, so you own them on purpose.
- Noise, other hotels' names, other cities, job searches. Block them on the shared negative list from Chapter 5.
- Still out, searches that spent a little and haven't booked yet. Leave them and look again next week.
Over time the two campaigns balance each other. Isolation holds the searches you've proven, at prices you control. Exploration keeps discovering. Some accounts eventually let Exploration carry most of the volume and pause parts of Isolation, then switch them back on to win back position on a search that matters.
Guests Write "Quiet" in Reviews. Almost Nobody Types It Into Google.
One finding from the example market is worth a section of its own. When guests left Google reviews for the hotels we studied and picked the highlights of their stay, "Quiet" was the most-chosen tag: 218 of the 784 reviews that used tags. In the same market's Keyword Planner data, "quiet" appeared in exactly one search, "quiet hotels in new orleans," at 20 a month.
Travelers care about quiet. They just don't search for it. They search for the neighborhood, the street or the balcony, and then decide based on whether the reviews say they'll be able to sleep. That makes "quiet" an ad and page message, not a keyword. A hotel half a block off a loud street should put "steps from Bourbon, quiet at night" in front of the people searching "hotels near bourbon street," and Chapter 8 does exactly that.
The broader lesson applies to every chapter in this guide: what guests value and what they type are two different lists. Keywords decide who sees the ad. The words in the ad decide who books.
Next: A Hand-Set Bid Protects a New Hotel Account Until the Bookings Arrive
Isolation and Exploration need different bidding. Chapter 7 covers both: manual bids and the numbers to watch while the account learns, then the switch to bidding on booking value once a one-night stay and a week in a suite can be told apart.
Earlier chapters set up booking tracking, the order of searches, what a click is worth, ad groups that match and the negative list. The hotel guide's home page has the full series.
When we run a hotel's Google Ads, Isolation goes live on the needs the hotel can actually meet, and Exploration waits for the bookings to prove them. Running it yourself? List the three things your guests mention most in reviews, then check whether any of your ad groups is built around them.
