A couple from Atlanta is bringing their beagle to town for a long weekend. One of them types "pet friendly hotels new orleans" into Google. In the half second before the results appear, Google runs an auction among every hotel and booking site that wants that search, and decides which ads show and in what order.
The hotel that bid the most doesn't automatically win it. Google is trying to show the ad most likely to answer that couple's actual question, which is not "is there a hotel in New Orleans?" but "will they take our dog, and what will it cost?" The hotel whose ad says so, and whose page proves it, has an edge no amount of money fully replaces. Chapter 4 is about building that edge on purpose.
The Highest Bid Doesn't Win the Top Spot on Its Own. A Better Ad and Page Can Beat It.
Google calls the score that settles each auction Ad Rank, and its help page names what feeds it. Read through the list with the beagle owners in mind:
- Your bid. The ceiling you'll pay for their click, not necessarily what you're charged.
- Ad and page quality, measured against this exact search. An ad that says "dogs welcome" and a page with the pet policy score better on "pet friendly hotels" than a general ad pointing at the home page.
- A quality floor. Google sets a bar each ad has to clear before it's allowed to show, whatever the bid.
- How tight the race is. When two hotels' scores land close together, they trade positions; a wide gap gives the stronger ad the edge.
- The traveler's circumstances. What they typed, where they're standing, whether they're on a phone, the hour.
- The extras the ad can carry, such as a call button, links to your pets or parking page, and short lines like "No pet weight limit."
The bid is one line on that list. In Google's own telling, a stronger ad usually means a cheaper click as well as a better position. There is no published equation that turns these six into a number. Older videos and blog posts taught a bid-times-score formula. Google doesn't publish one, so this guide doesn't teach one.
Quality Score Is a Report Card on Your Ads. It Never Sets the Price.
Every keyword in the account wears a 1-to-10 badge labeled Quality Score. It looks like the grade Google uses in every auction. It isn't. Google presents it as a rear-view mirror on how your ads have compared with other advertisers', and states that the auction doesn't use it.
Read it anyway, because the number splits into three readings and each one sends you to a different fix:
- Expected click-through rate. Would travelers who type this keyword pick your ad? Google estimates that as though every ad sat in the same spot with the same extras, so climbing the page by bidding more leaves this reading untouched. A headline the dog owner actually wants to tap is what moves it.
- Ad relevance. Does the ad speak to what the keyword means? "Pet friendly hotels" in a group full of generic hotel ads scores poorly here.
- Landing page experience. Once the traveler lands, does the page deliver? A pets page scores; a home page that never mentions dogs doesn't.
Low expected CTR means the ad's message is off. Low ad relevance means the keyword is in the wrong ad group. Low landing page experience means the page doesn't answer the search. A hotel with "below average" on all three for a pet search doesn't have a bidding problem. It has a dog problem.
One Ad Group per Neighborhood and Amenity Is the Cheapest Relevance a Hotel Can Buy
Ad relevance is the reading a hotel can move fastest, and it moves with how the account is organized. One theme per ad group: the Superdome in one, pets in another, balconies in a third. Five or six keywords apiece, each a different wording of that theme, and ads that say the theme back to the traveler. When someone searches "hotels near superdome," the ad they see should say Superdome.
Hotels are unusually well suited to this, because travelers search by place and by need. Here's what that looked like in our example market, New Orleans, with US monthly searches from Keyword Planner:
- By neighborhood or landmark: "garden district hotels" (9,900), "hotels near bourbon street" (6,600), "hotels near superdome" (3,600), "hotels near convention center new orleans" (2,900).
- By need: "pet friendly hotels new orleans" (1,900), "hotel suites new orleans" (1,300), "hotels with pool new orleans" (1,000), "hotels with balcony french quarter" (880), "new orleans hotels with parking" (320).
Your city's list will look different; the method is the same anywhere. And the most important rule is the one that's easy to skip: build ad groups only for what your hotel actually is. A hotel two miles from the convention center shouldn't have a convention center ad group, however good the search volume looks, and a hotel without a pool shouldn't bid on pool searches. The convention center search had the steepest top-of-page bid range on the list, up to $5.30, which is exactly why it's tempting and exactly why it punishes a weak match.
Here is what one of those groups looks like in practice. A Superdome ad group would hold "hotels near superdome," "closest hotel to the superdome," "best hotels near superdome" and "caesars superdome hotels nearby," all of which turned up in Keyword Planner for the example market. Its ads would name the stadium and the walking time. Its page would show the walk on a map, game-day parking and the late check-out policy. The same search for Superdome hotels also brought back "holiday inn downtown superdome" (880 a month) and several searches for a Hilton near the stadium. Those are other hotels' names, and they don't belong in the group at all. Chapter 5 deals with them.
None of these groups carries your hotel's name; that search gets its own campaign, per Chapter 2. These ad groups live in Isolation, our name for the first non-brand campaign: exact match only, with bids you set by hand. These groups are also the seed for what comes next. Exploration, the second non-brand campaign in this guide, runs on broad match, takes the themes Isolation has proven, and goes hunting for the ways travelers phrase them that never made your keyword list. The groups you build now are the templates it will learn from.
A Pet-Friendly Search Belongs on Your Pet Policy, Not Your Home Page
An ad group gets you a relevant ad. The landing page is where relevance has to hold up. Google judges whether the page answers the search, and so does the traveler, usually faster.
Some of the example hotels do this well. The Windsor Court has a page devoted to traveling with pets, stating that "all well-behaved pets are welcome" and how its pet charge works. The Higgins Hotel runs ads for its WWII Museum package, and its deals page lists those same museum packages, so the promise and the site agree. Bourbon Orleans runs a weddings ad whose wording, "Old World Romance, the Grandeur of Early New Orleans," comes straight from its own weddings page. In each case a searcher who clicks finds the thing the ad said was there.
The common gap is the answer hiding in the wrong place. In our example market, 9 of the 12 hotels we profiled answered the parking question in an FAQ, not on a page someone searching for parking would land on. A hotel bidding on parking searches and sending the click to the home page is asking the traveler to hunt. The booking engine's date picker is no better a destination for a themed search: it's a calendar, not an answer.
For each ad group, the page should answer the search in its first screen on a phone: the policy, the price, the distance, the photo. If you don't have that page, build it before you build the ad group. One more check while you're there: run the page through Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool. A page that takes ages to appear on a phone undoes the work of a good ad. Speed is part of landing page experience, though, not the whole of it. A fast page that doesn't mention dogs still loses the dog owner.
A Tight Ad Group Can Outrank a Bigger Bid for the Top of the Page
Position matters, because the ads at the top of the page get most of the attention. The question is how you get there. You can raise bids until you're on top, and pay for it on every click. Or you can raise the quality of the match, which Google rewards with better positions and, often, lower prices. Usually you need some of both. The second is the part most accounts underinvest in.
In practice, after Isolation has run for a few weeks:
- Check the three Quality Score readings for each ad group, not just by keyword, and look at the three parts.
- Fix the weakest part first. Low ad relevance usually means a keyword has wandered into the wrong group; move it. Low expected CTR means the ad needs a sharper headline for that theme. Low landing page experience means the page needs the answer moved to the top, or a page of its own.
- Raise bids last, on ad groups that already match well and still sit below the top. That's the money that buys position rather than covering for a poor match.
A small hotel can't outspend the booking sites on every search. On "pet friendly hotels new orleans," a property that genuinely welcomes dogs, says so in the ad and shows the policy on arrival can beat a much bigger advertiser that treats the search as one more keyword in a list of thousands.
Next: Keyword Planner Hands a Hotel Its Competitors' Names
A tight group is only as good as the keywords inside it. Chapter 5 is keyword research for hotels: seeding Google's Keyword Planner with competitors' websites, why so much of what comes back is other hotels' names, and which of those become negatives on day one.
The earlier chapters set up the booking tracking this all depends on, the order of searches to buy, and the math on what a click is worth. The hotel guide's home page lists every chapter.
When we build a hotel's Google Ads account, the ad groups come from the hotel itself: what it is, where it is and what its guests ask for. Running it yourself? Pick the one amenity your guests mention most, search for it with your city's name, and see whether any page on your own site answers that search in its first screen.
