Revolutionise Your Hotel Advertising with Tripmax

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, staying ahead of the competition is imperative, especially in the hotel industry. Google Ads has long been a powerful tool for advertisers, but there’s a game-changer on the horizon – Tripmax. In this article, we will provide an exploration of this innovative Google Ads product to help you understand how Tripmax can revolutionise hotel advertising campaigns; and we will conclude by mentioning some tips and best practices that Making Science has implemented with one of our clients.

Simplifying Hotel Advertising

Tripmax is part of the Performance Max for travel goals campaigns, tailor-made for hotel performance advertisers. It offers a streamlined approach to reaching your target audience across all Google properties, simplifying the process and driving more direct bookings. With a single, user-friendly setup, Tripmax empowers advertisers to create property-specific asset groups, enhancing the overall performance of their Google Ads campaigns.

Getting Started with Tripmax

Before you embark on your journey, there are essential prerequisites to consider. Let’s explore the steps to set the stage for a successful Tripmax campaign:

1. Link to Hotel Center or Google Ads: To initiate the campaign, you must first link your account to either Hotel Center or Google Ads. This link serves as the foundation for your campaign setup, streamlining the process and enhancing efficiency. The choice between Hotel Center and Google Ads largely depends on the number of properties you have. If your account has no more than 100 hotels, linking to Hotel Center is the ideal choice. For those with over 100 properties, creating a hotel properties feed is the recommended path.
2. Creating a Hotel Properties Feed: To maximise the benefits of Tripmax, it’s crucial to establish a hotel properties feed within your Google Ads account. You can achieve this in two ways: using the hotel picker or Google Maps URLs. Each method simplifies the creation of property lists and the management of assets, contributing to a more efficient campaign setup.
3. Creating the campaign & asset groups: Once you have completed these tasks, you can create your Tripmax campaign by creating a new campaign as you would normally do. With “Sales” as the objective, choose “Hotels” under “What are you advertising?” and select your Hotel Property feed source. All other steps are the usual: specify budget, bidding, target, assets, etc; and publish! You can then create Asset Groups and link them to specific hotels. Google will automatically suggest headlines, descriptions, images and other assets, simplifying the process of setting them up – but they are 100% customisable.
4.  Let the ads run! Once everything is ready, it is possible to activate the asset groups and start reaching your potential clients through Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Display, Video & Discover.

Best practices & Other tips

• Tripmax campaigns were originally designed to cover the Upper Funnel, increasing brand awareness. The more images (max 20) and videos (max 5) we include in the asset groups, the more options Google will have to show our ads in different networks. This is the reason why the recommended practice is to exclude the brand (through the creation of a brand list), preventing our ads from showing in searches that include the name of our brand. Apart from this, in settings of the campaign, you should select “Only bid for new customers”.
  • However! Since this is a tool that covers so many placements (even Search!), at Making Science we have started an experiment with one of our clients. For locations where the budget is limited and having different campaigns is not optimal, we have tried leaving only a Tripmax campaign, without excluding the brand. This way, we can cover all levels of the funnel while reducing costs – and it is working great. Even though this is not the ideal option, it is a very good solution for when resources are scarce. 
• The best practice for promotions is to create a new asset group that is not linked to any hotel, and that will work as a normal PMAX asset group. In it, we will include all the headlines, descriptions and creativities of the promotion, and we will activate it only during this period of time (until the next promo!). Given that we cannot decide how the budget is distributed among asset groups, to make sure that the message is reaching our potential customers, with our client we add a couple promo titles and descriptions -as well as images and videos- to the Hotel Asset Groups, to maximise the possibility of Google showing the discount to users.
• Adding audience signals to Asset Groups is recommended, because the platform will learn from these users and look for others that behave similarly. If you have a list of clients for each specific hotel, this will work even better!
• We understand that sometimes, our ads reach users that we never wanted to impress, and it is inconvenient. If you see this happening to your campaign, there is a solution. Even though it is not possible to exclude certain terms or topics from Tripmax, you can always ask Google to create a “negative list” for you, where you include all terms that should be avoided by your ads.

All in all, Tripmax is a great tool for the Hotel industry, especially for investing in the upper funnel level. Google will recognise when users are interested in hotels that are similar to yours, and will impact them with your property – increasing your brand awareness and helping your business grow.